If you have tried to clean a fireplace or, worse, had to scatter the cremated remains of a loved one, you probably held your breath. You didn’t want to inhale any of the grayish particles that surrounded you. But ash is strong stuff. It adheres to your skin, finds its way into your nasal passages and clings to your clothes as stubbornly as cheap Christmas tree tinsel. Ash — whether on a hearth or in an urn — beckons you to remember what once was and taunts you because it will never be again.

In his absorbing new book, “Built From the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street,” Victor Luckerson combs through layers of soot and ash, the physical and psychological residue of the Tulsa race massacre, which continues to haunt the city’s Black community more than a century after it occurred.

Over the course of two days in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s Greenwood district was destroyed and hundreds of its residents were killed. Heralded as a model of Black entrepreneurial success and self-determination in the Jim Crow era, Greenwood became a target of violence when a rumor spread that Dick Rowland, a Black teenager, had sexually assaulted a white woman in an elevator. A show of force by Greenwood men to prevent Rowland from being lynched escalated into an all-out attack on Black Tulsans by white vigilantes, who in some cases had been handed arms by the police. As Luckerson recounts, “More than 1,200 houses were leveled, nearly every business was burned to the ground and an unknown number of people — estimates reach as high as 300 — were killed.”

Luckerson, a journalist based in Tulsa, adeptly takes us through Greenwood’s history, resisting the impulse to glorify its founders or endorse the idea that more Black-owned businesses can repair the ravages of racial capitalism. Instead, he introduces a bevy of figures who, seeking escape from the post-Reconstruction South, went to Tulsa in the early 1900s and helped establish Greenwood as the “Eden of the West.”

The seemingly unfettered opportunity in the new state of Oklahoma drew unabashed capitalists, confidence men, industrious wives and loyal mothers to what had formerly been known as Indian Territory,inhabited by a confluence of Indigenous peoples native to the region and tribes forcibly dispatched there. The goal was to create “a haven for the burgeoning Black middle class … where land could still be claimed, wealth still built, political power still secured, even as the nation turned its back on the bloody freedoms brokered during the Civil War.”

Among the early Black settlers was Alexander George Washington Sango, who “claimed to be a descendant of African royalty” and eventually ruled the Black section of Muskogee, not far from Tulsa. He leveraged his membership in the Creek Nation — his mother had arrived in the area with the Creeks in the 1830s — to acquire valuable parcels of land. Sango was so rich that he chartered “private Pullman cars,” which exempted him from the indignities of a “colored only” train seat. Sango’s “specialized cars featured dark walnut walls and plush upholstery, along with chandeliers that cast a warm glow on every inch of brass metalwork,” Luckerson writes.

We also get to know J.B. Stradford, a hotelier and “Tulsa city father” whose business portfolio allegedly included “a dice game” that operated out of his pool hall, and who was branded a “professional gambler and booze dispenser” by a white newspaper. Stradford countered that he was a respectable philanthropist and real estate investor, yet Luckerson reveals that underground economies also helped fill Greenwood’s coffers.

Most of the district was owned and operated by men, but Luckerson includes Loula Williams, a savvy businesswoman who ran a confectionary and later built one of the finest movie houses in the country, the 850-seat Dreamland Theater. Yet the bulk of Luckerson’s book focuses on descendants of two of Greenwood’s most prominent residents: J.H. and Carlie Goodwin, who “sought success with a patient vigor” after migrating to Greenwood from Water Valley, Miss.

In Water Valley, J.H., a former railroad brakeman, had leveraged his position with the railroad (rare for a Black man at the time) and an ability to broker connections into a series of commercial ventures in the white part of town. For people already established in business, moving to Tulsa promised fewer negotiations with white authorities and a degree of insulation from the humiliation that nearly all interracial contact entailed. J.H.’s grandson Jim Goodwin, a lawyer, still publishes The Oklahoma Eagle, the weekly that his father, Edward, purchased in 1937.

Luckerson is vigilant about the class stratification and government neglect that enveloped this Black Wall Street: Beyond a “pocket of affluence,” he writes, “Greenwood was a sea of frame buildings, shacks, tents and rickety outhouses, stitched together by a braid of dirt roads largely traversed by foot or squeaky horse-drawn wagon.” His most significant contribution, however, is his account of the district in the century after the massacre. In the immediate aftermath,Black leaders tried to rebuild, but ongoing discrimination — in the form of rejected insurance claims, property theft and an ordinance banning new wooden structures — guaranteed that Greenwood would never be fully restored.

For every period he describes, Luckerson illuminates the effects of white supremacy on the neighborhood. After the 1954 Supreme Court decision ending the “separate but equal” doctrine in public education, he writes, a columnist for The Eagle, noting that segregation continued, evoked the memory of the 1921 massacre, lingering “like ashes in the mouths of Negroes.” This acrid history surfaced again with the arrival in Tulsa in 1967 of the federal highway system, which placed the Crosstown Expressway through the heart of Greenwood’s business district, shuttering shops and demolishing homes.

“Built From the Fire” ends in the recent past. Luckerson poignantly recreates the summer of 2020, when the murder of George Floyd animated racial justice protests, and President Donald Trump came to Tulsa for a campaign rally, igniting fear that his supporters might re-enact some of the racial violence of 1921. The nation’s brief — and ultimately unsatisfying — moment of racial reflection that summer, and the centenary of the massacre the following year, led to greater awareness of Greenwood nationally; celebrities and politicians, including President Biden, visited the Greenwood Cultural Center and toured the neighborhood’s streets.

Greenwood’s future is uncertain. The neighborhood’s supporters, including Regina Goodwin, a state representative and descendant of J.H. and Carlie, are concerned about police brutality and accountability, as well as gentrification, especially since a baseball stadium opened in the neighborhood in 2010. Goodwin, who protested the stadium’s construction and has fought for criminal justice reform, now worries that a new Oklahoma law restricting classroom discussions of race, sex and gender may limit what students are taught about the state’s history.

Like Luckerson and the many other people committed to making sure Greenwood’s story gets told, Goodwin remains undeterred. When she announced a bid for the State Senate in 2015, she declared, “Some women get lost in the fire and some … are built from the fire.” By the end of Luckerson’s outstanding book, the idea of building something new from the ashes of what has been destroyed becomes comprehensible, even hopeful.