Tulsa Race Massacre

By 1921, the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma had become something remarkable: a self-contained, self-sufficient Black economic community in the middle of one of the most racially hostile states in America. Starting around 1906, Black entrepreneurs had built a neighborhood on what had been Indian Territory, and they had built it with intention. O.W. Gurley purchased 40 acres on Tulsa's north side and offered loans to help other Black residents start businesses. J.B. Stradford opened what was considered the largest Black-owned hotel in the country. A.J. Smitherman founded the Tulsa Star newspaper. By the early 1920s, Greenwood had more than 300 Black-owned businesses: two movie theaters, multiple grocery stores, hotels, law offices, physicians' offices, pharmacies, a hospital, a public library, and a post office. Booker T. Washington had visited and reportedly called it "the Negro Wall Street of America." The name stuck, shortened to Black Wall Street. In a country where Black people were systematically denied access to white-owned financial institutions, Greenwood was a demonstration that Black wealth and Black excellence could thrive without white permission.

The pretext for what happened on May 31, 1921 was flimsy even by the standards of the era. A 19-year-old Black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland entered the Drexel Building elevator. At some point, an altercation occurred between Rowland and the 17-year-old white elevator operator, Sarah Page. Page screamed. Rowland fled. The most widely accepted account — supported by contemporaneous evidence — is that Rowland accidentally stepped on her foot. Some accounts say he grabbed her arm to steady himself as the elevator lurched. Charges were never proven and eventually dropped. Page herself declined to press charges. None of this mattered to what came next.

The afternoon edition of the Tulsa Tribune ran a front-page story under the headline "Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator," which was entirely fabricated in its implications. By evening, an armed white mob had gathered outside the courthouse where Rowland was being held. A group of Black World War I veterans, many still carrying their service weapons, arrived to protect Rowland from being lynched. Shots were fired. Rowland survived — he was eventually released and the charges dropped — but the gunfire sparked something the city's white establishment had been working itself toward for some time.

Through the night of May 31 and into June 1, 1921, Tulsa's white residents went to war with Greenwood. The mob was not just a crowd — it was organized and deputized. The city itself participated. Police officers assisted in the attack; the Tulsa Police Department and the National Guard rounded up Black residents and put them in detention at the fairgrounds, where some were held for days, required to have a white employer or citizen vouch for them before being released. Armed men, many of them deputized by local authorities on the spot, looted and burned Greenwood block by block. Historians, eyewitnesses, and subsequent official investigations have confirmed that planes flew low over the district during the attack. What they were doing — surveillance, shooting, dropping incendiaries — remains debated, but they were there. By the time Governor James Robertson declared martial law at noon on June 1 and National Guard troops restored order, 35 square blocks of the Greenwood District had been reduced to ash and rubble. More than 1,200 homes were destroyed. Every Black-owned business was gone. The hospital was gone. The schools were gone. Between 100 and 300 people, mostly Black residents, were dead. Over 10,000 people were left homeless.

The cover-up began almost immediately. The Tulsa Tribune quietly removed the incendiary front-page story from its bound archive volumes. Police and state militia records of the massacre disappeared. Insurance companies denied every claim filed by Black victims — the city's position was essentially that the massacre was the fault of the Black community and therefore not compensable. The event was mischaracterized for decades as a "race riot," language that implies bilateral violence and shared responsibility, rather than what it actually was: a coordinated, government-assisted pogrom against a prosperous Black neighborhood. No white Tulsa resident was ever charged with murder, arson, or looting. For most of the 20th century, the Tulsa Race Massacre was not in textbooks, not commemorated, not mentioned in Oklahoma classrooms. Many survivors never spoke of it to their children or grandchildren — they described a darkness their descendants could sense but not understand.

The silence began to crack in the 1970s, and broke open in the 1990s. In 1997, the Oklahoma legislature created the Tulsa Race Riot Commission (later renamed the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission), which spent years documenting the events and identifying potential mass graves. In October 2020, 12 coffins from the era of the massacre were discovered at Oaklawn Cemetery. The search for all victims continues. Reparations for the few remaining survivors and their descendants have been debated but not paid. A first-person account written by attorney B.C. Franklin, who watched the fires from his office window and practiced law in a Red Cross tent in the days after, was discovered in 2015 and donated to the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture — a document from inside the massacre, found nearly a century later.