This is an opinion column.

It wasn’t Black Wall Street. That was in Tulsa, Okla., my hometown. The street’s true name was Greenwood Avenue, the business aorta of the city’s Northside, where the Jim Crow laws of a century ago confined blacks to live, shop and socialize.

A funny thing happened, though, as it did in cities throughout the nation, cities still steeped in prejudice and disdain for black Americans. Forcing them to circulate their dollars among their own proved to be a cultural petri dish that spawned rousing economic communities, replete with retail stores, restaurants, theaters and other services — all owned by blacks.

In Tulsa, the collection of businesses lining Tulsa’s Greenwood Avenue—which included a drug store, Kyle’s Sundry, owned by my father — was so robust it was called “Black Wall Street”, superseded in Black-wealth creation and enterprise only by the Black-tropolis better known as Harlem, New York.

In Birmingham, it was the 4th Avenue Business District, a portion of the 18 square downtown blocks contiguous to the city’s white business—bordered by 18th Street to the east, 14th Street to the West, Second Avenue North and Rev. Abraham Woods Jr. Blvd — where blacks living in Smithfield, Titusville, Collegeville, and other North Birmingham neighborhoods, shopped, ate, and socialized.

Where they enjoyed entertainers performing in four theaters. Where they celebrated Masonic camaraderie.

Where relatives traveling east from Mississippi and other Southern regions stopped because it was one the few places in the South where they could enjoy a four-star meal in a restaurant owned and operated by blacks and rest their weariness in a stellar black-owned hotel.

“Everything east of 18th Street was off limits,” says Elijah E. Davis, strategic growth manager for Urban Impact, the non-profit that is nurturing the 4th Avenue Business District’s revival.

Greenwood Avenue suffered the same demise that afflicted each of these cultural and economic meccas—a self-inflicted demise, frankly.

Seems President Lyndon B. Johnson had barely shaken Martin Luther King’s hand and handed him one of the pens with which he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ending legal segregation in public spaces before blacks began spending their dollars elsewhere, at places they where they were not welcomed just the day before.

Black Wall Street had emerged from the ashes of a race massacre that took place over two days 98 years ago this month; the deadliest race massacre in U.S. history. Greenwood (and most of North Tulsa) was essentially burned to the ground by a mob of gun- and torch-wielding whites who wrongfully believed a black man named Dick Roland had assaulted Sarah Page, a white woman, in an elevator downtown.

As many as 300 blacks were killed over those horrific two days, according to some researchers. Olivia Hooker hid under a dining room table with her mother and three siblings as angry, torch-carrying whites rode on horseback through their neighborhood. She was the last known witness to the massacre; she died last November at the age of 103.

Greenwood Avenue was rebuilt and thrived into the neighborhood I recall as a child, where dad’s store, with a jukebox and soda fountain, was across the street from Betty’s Chat and Chew and down the street from the Rex Theater and Mann’s Grocery, along with barber shops and other businesses.

Roy Johnson, owner of Kyle's Sundry, on Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, OK, an area known as Black Wall Street

But it could not survive the loss of black dollars. Nor could its kindred districts across the nation, including Birmingham’s Fourth Avenue.

A few enterprises held on as their neighbors shuttered and still serve customers. Poole Funeral Chapel on Seventh Avenue North has been in business since 1936. Last year, Green Acres Cafe, a staple in the heart of Fourth Ave, celebrated its 60th anniversary. Nelson Bros. Cafe is 75 years old.

Yet the once-strong pulse of Black Birmingham has long been on life support. Even as the city’s core, still contiguous to the district, sees a seismic explosion of growth, Fourth Avenue — a place where the majestic Pythian Temple was designed by Wallace Rayfield, the second formally-educated black architect in the United States and built by black-owned Windham Construction — barely feels a ripple.

Or so it seems.

Darryl Washington is Urban Impact’s director of operations and programs. His great grandfather helped launch the Masonic Temple, he says, and his father is a 32nd-degree Mason. A graduate of Ramsey High School (and Morehouse College in Atlanta), Darryl got his first high-top fade at a Fourth Avenue barber shop and recalls walking from his Norwood home to the A.G. Gaston Boys & Girls Club downtown “every day in the summer.”

“There’s some activity happening now,” he says. “You just don’t see it.”

About $80 million is currently committed to renovation and redevelopment within the district, he says, with about $150 million expected to be deployed over the next two years.

Renovation of the Carver Theater recently began and mixed-use plans for the majestic Masonic temple across the street — the “anchor” of the district — are still being developed.

Washington cites a three-to-five-year timeframe for those projects to be completed and predicts up to 40 new businesses in the area within the next four years. “You’ll see a marked difference in the district by 2022,” he says.

Executive Director Ivan Holloway was reared in East Thomas and graduated from Parker High.

Holloway joined Urban Impact three years ago, jumpstarting an organization that has existed for almost four decades. He calls the district “a community of my own”.

“We can see something most people can’t,” he says. “Quality of life is a huge theme for us. We want to help expand small businesses, so they become true engines of the economy, hiring more people, which generates more revenue for them to spend at home.

“The more people we have working, the better off our community is.”

The leaders of Urban Impact are being very intentional about their work and ambitious mission: To restore the district’s cultural and economic vibrancy, avoiding displacement and gentrification, and being a beacon amid downtown’s expanding residential, restaurant, bar, and creative scenes.

“Everyone is excited about the tourism aspect of the district,” says Davis. “But tourists come and go. We want to be part of the day-to-day life of residents of the city.”

This week the district was selected by Main Street Alabama for its revitalization program, which provides organizational, design and promotion support, along with access to market analysis regarding innovative business strategies, along with new trends and opportunities.

The district was selected, in large part, because of its deep history. About 70 percent of the buildings in the area are on the National Registry of Historic Places. “If the buildings could talk,” Washington says, “they would tell a lot of stories.”

Honoring the district’s legacy of black ownership, Urban Impact hopes at least 30 percent of the properties and businesses in the area are owned by African Americans.

“There’s nothing wrong with being intentional about preservation,” says Davis.

The Mobile native and graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham calls himself a “black millennial with a post-Trayvon [Martin] consciousness.” His thirst for black history was nurtured by a grandmother who often reminisced about the myriad black-owned shops and theaters that once lined the city’s historic Davis Avenue. During his first weekend at UAB, he walked from campus to the Civil Rights Institute and Kelly Ingram Park downtown.

“I saw Fourth Avenue and became so inspired,” he says.

Urban Impact regularly convenes a diaspora of stakeholders, including property and business owners, and legacies whose ancestors played lead roles in the district’s heyday. It keeps the group apprised of development and property ownership opportunities and acts as a conduit to still-predominantly black neighborhoods throughout the city and others intrigued by the district’s possibilities.

Not long ago, for instance, Urban Impact guided 30 architects on a tour of the district.

“We face so much defeat in our everyday lives; defeat is all around us,” Holloway says. “We see the district as a spark of hope. If the work we do, if any of it pans out, this is gonna be a fantastic place.”

A place that should not be left behind. Cannot be left behind. Not again.

A place, Davis says excitedly, that is “reviving Black Wall Street through mini Main Streets.”

A voice for what’s right and wrong in Birmingham, Alabama (and beyond), Roy’s column appears in The Birmingham News and AL.com, as well as in the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register. Reach him at rjohnson@al.com and follow him at twitter.com/roysj