In May of 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma was home to a thriving business and residential neighborhood known colloquially as “Black Wall Street,” more properly called the Greenwood District. The Black-owned businesses in Greenwood included doctors, lawyers, dentists, nightclubs, churches, grocers, two newspapers, and two movie theaters, as well as numerous homes. All that ended in fire and violence beginning on May 30, 1921.
The fuse is lit
Oklahoma had only recently become a state in 1907, and among the first laws passed by the state legislature were segregationist Jim Crow laws. By 1921, as many as 3,200 of Tulsa’s roughly 72,000 residents were members of the Ku Klux Klan, and at least 31 people had been lynched in Oklahoma since the state’s inception just a few years before, at least 26 of them Black.
Into this cauldron of racial animosity came an encounter between Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old black shoeshiner, and Sarah Page, a 21-year-old white elevator operator. Page was operating the only elevator in the Drexel Building, where Rowland had gone to use the “colored” restroom on the top floor. No one knows for sure what happened between the two, but Rowland was shortly arrested and charged with “attempting to assault” Page.
The year before, Roy Belton, a white murder suspect, had been lynched in Tulsa, and members of Greenwood’s Black community had ample reason to be concerned that Rowland was likely to suffer the same fate.
As a crowd of more than 1,000 angry white citizens gathered outside the Tulsa County Courthouse, demanding that Rowland be turned over to them, the residents of Greenwood were organizing, and by 9:30 on the night of May 31, 50 or 60 armed Black men arrived at the courthouse to lend their assistance to the sheriff in guarding Rowland from the growing lynch mob.
This was the tinderbox that existed in Tulsa on the evening of May 31. Only a single spark was needed to cause a conflagration.
“These are not myths…”
Greenwood district after the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot/Massacre.
Photo Credit: Tulsa Historical Society & MuseumIn 1996, the Oklahoma state legislature authorized a commission to investigate the events of that fatal period in 1921. The commission delivered its final report on February 21, 2001, 80 years after the events of that night and day. Though much about the massacre remains impossible to know, there are several elements that the members of the commission determined to be undeniable. “These are not myths,” the report reads, “not rumors, not speculations, not questioned. They are the historical record.”
As the tensions around the courthouse grew, approximately 75 additional armed Black men offered their aid to the sheriff in protecting Rowland. When they were turned away, according to the commission report, “a white man attempted to disarm a tall, African American World War I veteran. A struggle ensued, and a shot rang out.” After that, in the words of the sheriff, “all hell broke loose.”
There was an exchange of gunfire that ended with 12 people dead—10 of them white and two of them Black. However, the terror was only beginning. “At the eruption of violence,” the commission report reads, “civil officials selected many men, all of them white and some of them participants in that violence, and made those men their agents as deputies. In that capacity, deputies did not stem the violence but added to it, often through overt acts that were themselves illegal.”
Following the gunfire at the courthouse, white residents began to pour into Greenwood, and the mass violence began.
“Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air”
On the morning of June 1, as flames spread throughout Greenwood, the National Guard arrived in Tulsa and declared martial law. Approximately 24 hours after it had begun, the violence came to an end, but the price paid by the city’s “Black Wall Street” was incredibly high.
Gunfire was reported throughout the day and night. “People, some of them agents of government, also deliberately burned or otherwise destroyed homes credibly estimated to have numbered 1,256, along with virtually every other structure – including churches, schools, businesses, even a hospital and library – in the Greenwood district,” according to the commission report.
The number of people killed during the massacre was at least 39, though the commission estimated that the number may have been as high as 300. The Red Cross reported that some 10,000 Black residents were left homeless by the violence, which included private planes flying overhead and dropping firebombs on buildings in Greenwood, completely obliterating more than 35 square blocks of the once-prosperous neighborhood.
“Where oh where is our splendid fire department with its half dozen stations?” wondered attorney Buck Colbert Franklin, in a letter detailing his eyewitness account of the events, now held by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. “Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?”
According to the findings of the Race Massacre Commission, it probably was…
The fate of Black Wall Street
Victims combing the ruins for their possessions.
Photo Credit: Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph CollectionDuring the course of the attacks, more than 6,000 Black residents of Tulsa were rounded up and arrested, detained in makeshift local facilities including Convention Hall, the Tulsa County Fairgrounds, and the baseball stadium at McNulty Park. Even after the violence had come to an end, many of them were not released immediately, often being held for several more days. It perhaps goes without saying that no similar fate was in store for the many white terrorists who were attacking Greenwood.
The massacre has been called one of the worst incidents of white supremacist violence in American history, but it wasn’t always addressed as such. “Not one of these criminal acts was then or ever has been prosecuted or punished by government at any level: municipal, county, state, or federal,” reads the commission report.
When it came time to rebuild, the city’s now-homeless Black population were left largely to their own devices, though aided by the Red Cross and individual white residents. According to the commission, neither the city nor the county “contributed substantially to Greenwood’s rebuilding” and, in fact, “municipal authorities acted initially to impede rebuilding.”
The commission report laid out numerous suggestions for restitution for the massacre and the years of injustice that followed. Among these were direct reparations to survivors and descendants, as well as scholarship funds, economic development enterprise zones, and memorials for the remains of the victims.
Though some of these actions were eventually undertaken, no reparations have ever been paid for the Tulsa Race Massacre. And while the memory of Black Wall Street lives on in the Historical Greenwood District of Tulsa, investigations are still underway to try to find unmarked graves where additional victims of the massacre may have been interred.
