Photo: Win McNamee / Getty Images
From the night of 31 May 1921, thousands of white citizens in Tulsa, Oklahoma, swarmed into the city’s predominantly black Greenwood district , where burned houses and businesses to the ground and killed hundreds of people.
This moment in history was long miscategorized as a race riot, rather than mass murder.
The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the worst incidents of racial violence in the United States history.
In the years after World War I, segregation was the law of the land, and the Ku Klux Klan was gaining ground across North America. In the midst of that charged environment, Tulsa’s African-American community was nationally recognized for its wealth.
The Greenwood district, known as “Black Wall Street” , had more than 300 Black-owned businesses, including two movie theaters, medical offices and pharmacies.
The 30 May 1921, a young black man named Dick Rowland entered an elevator in an office building in downtown Tulsa. At one point, Rowland was alone in the elevator with his white attendant, Sarah Page . It’s unclear what happened next (one common version is that Rowland stepped on Page’s foot), but Page screamed and Rowland fled the scene. The next day, the police arrested him.
Rumors of the incident spread quickly among Tulsa’s white community, some of whom certainly resented the prosperity of the Greenwood district. After a story published in a local newspaper on the afternoon of 31 May claimed that Rowland had attempted to rape Page, an angry white mob gathered outside the courthouse and demanded that Rowland be handed over .
Looking to avoid a lynching, a group of some 75 mens Blacks arrived at the scene that night, some of them WWI veterans carrying guns. After a white man tried to disarm a black veteran and the gun went off, chaos ensued.
During the following 24 hours, thousands of white rioters invaded the Greenwood district, shot unarmed black citizens in the streets and burned an area Of nails 35 city blocks, including more than 1200 Black-owned homes, numerous businesses, a school, a hospital and a dozen churches.
Historians believe that some 300 people died in the riot, though official counts at the time were much lower.
When Governor James Robertson declared martial law and National Guard troops arrived in Tulsa at noon on June 1, the Greenwood district was in shambles. Survivors of the massacre worked to rebuild the neighborhood, but segregation remained in place in Tulsa and racial tensions only increased, even as the massacre and its lingering scars went largely unrecognized by the white community for decades to come.
In 1997, the Oklahoma State Legislature created the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1578, who studied the massacre and recommended that reparations be paid to the remaining black survivors.
City officials continue to investigate the events of the 31 of May as of June 1, 1921 and searching for unmarked graves used to bury the many victims of the massacre.
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