Black Wall Street chamber president, husband found dead

The president of the Black Wall Street Chamber of Commerce and her husband were found dead Wednesday morning in their Bixby, Okla., home in what investigators are calling a “domestic” incident.

Police responded to the home, about 20 miles southeast of Tulsa, around 8:10 a.m. Wednesday and found Sherry Gamble Smith dead and her husband, Martin Everett Smith, in critical condition.

He was rushed to the hospital and pronounced dead.

A cause of death has not been publicly released but police are not looking for a suspect, the Bixby Police Department said in a statement late Wednesday.

A police spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment from the Daily News Thursday.

“My heart is very heavy over the death of Sherry Gamble Smith, visionary leader of the Black Wall Street Chamber in Tulsa,” Ken Levit, executive director of Tulsa’s George Kaiser Family Foundation, tweeted Wednesday.

“She was a warm and wonderful human being full of generosity in spirit and a conviction to do justice and act with decency always.”

The Black Wall Street Chamber of Commerce “serves as an advocate to unify, promote and empower the African American community through entrepreneurship, programming, economic development, education and training in Tulsa,” according to its website.

The organization’s name comes from Tulsa’s Greenwood District, one of the wealthiest Black areas in the country in the 1910s before the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, a multi-day attack during which hundreds of residents were killed and thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed.