EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is adapted from an editorial that originally ran June 16, 2020. May 31/June 1, 2021, marks the 100 year anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre.
In the early 1900s, the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa was a thriving Black community, often called Black Wall Street. Greenwood had restaurants, luxury shops like jewelry stores and furriers, hotels, a library, pool halls, nightclubs and offices for lawyers, doctors and dentists. It even had its own school, post office, bank and hospital.
Cut off from the rest of Tulsa by train tracks, Greenwood became a haven for Black people — and a source of ire for whites.
The spark that ignited the 1921 massacre started on May 30, 1921, when a 19-year-old Black male got on to an elevator operated by a 17-year-old white female. There are a number of variations of what supposedly happened, but the male, Dick Rowland, was arrested for assault. A mob of white men surrounded the jailhouse and demanded Rowland be surrendered to them to be lynched. The sheriff refused. Twenty-five armed Black men, many of them WWI veterans, arrived to guard the jailhouse. According to History.com, more and more people arrived until there were 75 Black men facing off against 1,500 white men.
When violence broke out, the Black men retreated to Greenwood, but the mob followed close behind — many of them now deputized and attacking with the city’s blessing.
By the end of the night May 31/wee hours of the morning June 1, Black Wall Street had been decimated. A manuscript from an eyewitness, lawyer Buck Colbert Franklin, describes private planes circling the neighborhood, dropping burning turpentine balls. Buildings burned from the top down. White looters ransacked businesses and homes. Franklin’s grandson told Smithsonian Magazine, “For years, Black women would see white women walking down the street in their jewelry and snatch it off.”
Up to 300 Black people were killed— gunned down by the mob as they fled or stood their ground. The National Guard, which had been deployed at the order of the governor, had arrested and detained 6,000 of Greenwood’s residents, some held for as long as eight days. Nearly all of the 10,000 people who had lived in the thriving community found themselves homeless. And after all that, no one was charged for the destruction, and the community had to rebuild itself, without help from the city, state or country.
What happened in Tulsa that night is often given the misnomer “race riot,” if it ever gets mentioned at all. But the decimation of Greenwood was no less than a massacre for which justice was never delivered.
