“The Tulsa race massacre took place May 31 and June 1, 1921 – 100 years ago. It was one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history. According to some historians, over 1,200 homes and buildings were destroyed by the violence, killing between 100 and 300 people.
“But thanks to white-dominated power structures in the city of Tulsa and state of Oklahoma, news about the massacre was wiped from many official sources for decades.
"Such insistence on erasing Black pain from a community's official history creates, by necessity, a shadow history kept among people of color and passed along, often by word of mouth. White America may have tried to forget Tulsa, but the massacre's details lived in the stories of Black survivors and their descendants, handed down like bitter family heirlooms.
“(Even worse, for a journalist like me, was to realize the role the media played back then — both in whipping up white fears about Black people through horrifically racist films and newspaper stories, while disappearing news of attacks and lynchings once white people took action.)”
(Eric Deggans. “3 Documentaries You Should Watch About The Tulsa Race Massacre.” NPR. May 30, 2021.)
When a large group of Black people showed up in Tulsa to stop the lynching of a young Black man unfairly accused of sexually assaulting a white female elevator operator – white crowds had been incited by incendiary, unfair coverage from The Tulsa Tribune – a white man tried to grab a gun from a Black man. A struggle ensued, the gun went off, and the white mob had their excuse to obliterate Black Wall Street over two days of brutal violence.
The Sequence of Events
The Tulsa Historical Society relates the following sequence of events on May 30 and June 1, 1921 (shown here in italics):
“On the morning of May 30, 1921, a young black man named Dick Rowland was riding in the elevator in the Drexel Building at Third and Main with a white woman named Sarah Page. The details of what followed vary from person to person. Accounts of an incident circulated among the city’s white community during the day and became more exaggerated with each telling.”
Growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 67-year-old historian Scott Ellsworth says, “We think what happened was that as he walked onto the elevator, he tripped,”noting that particulars are still unclear a century later. As Rowland tried to break his fall with his hands, he may have grabbed Sarah Page’s arm. “She was startled so she screamed and he ran out of the elevator and out of the building.”
Ellsworth says that the police were called but “they didn’t seem to be particularly worried” that a crime had been committed, adding it’s doubtful that Rowland attacked Page: The two probably knew each other by sight. Because Rowland and many other Black teenagers worked as shoe shiners or at white-owned and white-patronized businesses, there were no bathroom facilities available to Black employees.
“So the white owner of the shoe shine parlor arranged for his shoe shiners to walk down the block to the Drexel building and to ride the elevator to the top floor where there was a ‘colored’ restroom,” said Ellsworth. “So this was something all of them would probably do once a day.”
Sarah Page “would never press charges against Dick,” further indicating an accident more than anything else, Ellsworth noted.
“There was a white store clerk in the Drexel building who heard the scream and saw Dick running out of the elevator,” he explained. “He then decided that Dick must have tried to assault her.”
(Scott Ellsworth. Death in a Promised Land. 1982.)
“Tulsa police arrested Rowland the following day and began an investigation. An inflammatory report in the May 31 edition of the Tulsa Tribune spurred a confrontation between black and white armed mobs around the courthouse where the sheriff and his men had barricaded the top floor to protect Rowland. Shots were fired and the outnumbered African Americans began retreating to the Greenwood District.”
The Tulsa Tribune, a white-owned newspaper in the city, immediately ran with the idea that a Black man had tried to assault a white girl inside an elevator, even though there was little evidence this had occurred, according to Ellsworth. An inflammatory front page article accused Rowland of identifying himself as ‘Diamond Dick’ to police – it also claimed he had stalked Page, in addition to tearing her clothes and scratching her face.
“There was no question that the article presented it as him trying to rape her,” said Ellsworth. Given no record of the editorial has survived, witnesses have reported that the Tribune’s editorial page was designed to incite readers to violence, featuring a writeup titled “To Lynch Negro Tonight.”
The effect of those words was immediate. “As soon as the Tribune hit the streets, within a half hour, there was lynch talk on the streets of Tulsa,” said Ellsworth. “What happens after that is a lynch mob then gathered and then things start to happen very quickly.”
(Lakshmi Gandhi. “Tulsa Race Massacre: Fact checking myths and misconceptions.” NBC News. May 30, 2021.)
“In the early morning hours of June 1, 1921, Greenwood was looted and burned by white rioters. Governor Robertson declared martial law, and National Guard troops arrived in Tulsa. Guardsmen assisted firemen in putting out fires, took African Americans out of the hands of vigilantes and imprisoned all black Tulsans not already interned. Over 6,000 people were held at the Convention Hall and the Fairgrounds, some for as long as eight days.”
The mere fact that Black veterans returned from World War I as decorated heroes stirred up particular and virulent anger among Tulsa’s white population.
As word of a lynch mob heading to the Tulsa courthouse to murder Rowland spread, a group of 25 Black armed veterans set up to protect his life.
“There's a Black vet that jumps up onto the stage at the Dreamland Theater and says, ‘Shut this place down. We ain't gonna let this happen here. There is not going to be a lynching,’” said Ellsworth, adding it is unlikely that any of the veterans actually knew Rowland. “But they knew that a racial brother was in dire danger, and so they risked their lives and some of them gave their lives to protect him,” he explained.
As the situation began to escalate, a second group of 75 veterans headed to the courthouse. “That enraged the whites,” added Ellsworth. “And that’s when the massacre began.”
The violence that followed was so horrific and traumatizing that many Black survivors never spoke of it to their children. Many Black Tulsans wanted to spare their children the trauma of what had occurred.
(Lakshmi Gandhi. “Tulsa Race Massacre: Fact checking myths and misconceptions.” NBC News. May 30, 2021.)
“Twenty-four hours after the violence erupted, it ceased. In the wake of the violence, 35 city blocks lay in charred ruins, more than 800 people were treated for injuries and contemporary reports of deaths began at 36. Historians now believe as many as 300 people may have died.”
(“1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.” Tulsa Historical Society and Museum. 2021.)
Caleb Gayle, of The New York Times explains the city's reaction at the time to the unspeakable massacre …
“As the fires (in Tulsa) died down and the embers smoldered, Tulsa quickly got busy fixing – or silencing – its reputation, with meetings, statements and gestures that signaled to Tulsans and the world that the worst was over.
“The city’s white ruling class let few cries reach the world; what did get out was the message that Tulsa was still open for business, still eager to grow and enable people to get rich from Oklahoma’s crude oil. The silence meant that investors and would-be recruits among the East Coast elites had nothing to worry about from Black Tulsans.
“And for some, the burning of Black Wall Street was a sign that, in the words of The Tulsa Tribune’s editorial pages, 'Tulsa has resolved that the crime carnival ends here and will be buried with the ashes of the “niggertown” that is gone.'
“The city’s mayor, T.D. Evans, eagerly assented. 'Let us immediately get to the outside fact that everything is quiet in our city, that this menace has been fully conquered and that we are going on in a normal condition,' he told the Tulsa City Commission, the predecessor to the Tulsa City Council.”
(Caleb Gayle. 100 Years After the Tulsa Massacre, What Does Justice Look Like? The New York Times. May 25, 2021.)
The Destruction
According to CNN's film – Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall Street, debuting on CNN and streaming on HBO Max (May 31) – 191 Black-owned business stood in the Greenwood district, known as “Black Wall Street,” before the massacre, including one of the finest hotels in the country.
Tulsa, and Oklahoma more generally, was becoming a destination for Black people who wanted a better life. All over the state around the turn of the 20th century, Black townships were springing up — more than 50 of them by 1920. An article in The Muskogee Comet, a Black newspaper, from June 23, 1904, proclaimed that the Tulsa area “may verily be called the Eden of the West for the colored people.”
Not all was paradise, as Caleb Gayle explains …
“But if Eden was Black Tulsans simply going about life on their own terms, it was not free of evil. Senate Bill 1, the first law passed by the new State of Oklahoma in 1907, was a Jim Crow act that segregated Black Oklahomans from everybody else. It prohibited Black and white passengers from occupying the same railroad cars – and then was extended to ban the sharing of public and private spaces throughout the entire state.
“The deep division between Black and white Tulsa, the very reason for the high concentration of Black people in Greenwood, was in part a response to these governmental measures. But it took extralegal violence to crush the rise of enterprising Black Tulsans.”
(Caleb Gayle. 100 Years After the Tulsa Massacre, What Does Justice Look Like? The New York Times. May 25, 2021.)
Greenwood was home to a thriving community of entrepreneurs, artists and working professionals who lived alongside service and domestic workers. On Black Wall Street – derided by whites as “Little Africa” or “N——-town” – Black workers spent their earnings in a bustling, booming city within a city. Black-owned grocery stores, soda fountains, cafés, barbershops, a movie theater, music venues, cigar and billiard parlors, tailors and dry cleaners, rooming houses and rental properties: Greenwood had it.
The White mob destroyed the district in what experts call the single-most horrific incident of racial terrorism since slavery. Over 18 hours, between May 31 and June 1, whites vastly outnumbering the Black militia carried out a scorched-earth campaign against Greenwood. Some witnesses claimed they saw and heard airplanes overhead firebombing and shooting at businesses, homes and people in the Black district. Roughly 10,000 Black residents were displaced from the neighborhood where they’d lived, learned, played, worked and prospered.
(Aaron Morrison. “100 Years After the Tulsa Massacre, the Damage Remains. Associated Press. May 25, 2021.)
These days, there are fewer than a dozen Black-owned businesses in that same area, now reduced to a block-long main drag with modest establishments like a barbershop, health clinic and coffee shop.
Generations of Black wealth were erased in the massacre. Tulsa's racial segregation and the struggle of its Black community remain. Some Black-owned businesses operate today at Greenwood and Archer avenues. But it’s indeed a shadow of what has been described in books and seen in century-old photographs of Greenwood in its heyday.
No white person has ever been imprisoned for taking part in the massacre, and no Black survivor or descendant has been justly compensated for who and what they lost.
Attempts to force Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma to take some accountability for their role in the massacre suffered a major blow in 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear survivors’ and victim descendants’ appeal of a lower federal court ruling. The courts had tossed out a civil lawsuit because, justices held, the plaintiffs had waited too long after the massacre to file it.
History's broad trends can feed into a singular disaster. As Southern states ratcheted up racialized violence and racially oppressive laws to snatch back Black voting rights, a generation of Black veterans who had served America in World War I were no longer willing to accept the indignities of indiscriminate racial oppression.
Now, a few living massacre survivors —106-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle, 107-year-old Viola Fletcher, and 100-year-old Hughes Van Ellis — along with other victims’ descendants are suing for reparations. The defendants include the local chamber of commerce, the city development authority and the county sheriff’s department.
“What happened in Tulsa wasn’t just unique to Tulsa,” said the Rev. Robert Turner, the pastor of Vernon AME Church. “This happened all over the country. It was just that Tulsa was the largest. It damaged our community. And we haven’t rebounded since. I think it’s past time that justice be done to atone for that.”
(Aaron Morrison. “100 Years After the Tulsa Massacre, the Damage Remains. Associated Press. May 25, 2021.)
“There was no memorial to it in town. Teachers made no mention of it, not even during a half-semester devoted to local history. The white schoolboy Scott Ellsworth of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was left to wonder what the city’s darkest secret could be.
“'As a 10- and 11-year-old, I would occasionally hear older adults, neighbors, talking about what we then called “the riot” and they would always lower their voices or change the subject,' recalls Ellsworth, now 67. 'I started to catch wind of these stories about bodies floating down the Arkansas River, machine guns on the roofs of town, but you couldn’t really find out anything about it.'”
(David Smith. “‘They didn’t talk about it’: how a historian helped Tulsa confront the horror of its past.” The Guardian. May 30, 2021.)
Author Scott Ellsworth started a search for the unmarked mass graves of victims but it stalled in 2000 due to political wrangling. The effort resumed at the request of the city mayor in 2019. With a combination of hard work and luck, 12 fragile pine coffins and remains were found in what had been the city’s most important cemetery at the time of the massacre.
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