America’s Worst Race Crime
Origins and repercussions of the Tulsa Race Massacre
On the night of 31 May, 1921, a prosperous Black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was attacked by an armed white mob bent on murder and destruction. The ensuing massacre claimed over 300 lives and is among the most horrific events in U.S. history – so why has it remained buried for 100 years?
It came to be known as ‘Black Wall Street’ – a 35-block district called Greenwood neatly segmented from the neighbouring areas of Tulsa by a rail line – and it was a beacon of African American entrepreneurship and culture. In the era of Jim Crow laws and segregation, Greenwood had thrived. It had its own schools, hospital, stores (that served Black customers, unlike the ones across the tracks), two newspapers and two movie theatres. Of the 10,000 or so African Americans who lived in Tulsa (out of a population of around 100,000), about 80 per cent of them lived in Greenwood.
But by early morning on 1 June 1921 Greenwood had been razed to the ground. Over 1,400 homes had been destroyed, businesses had been looted and as many as 300 people had been killed. Thousands of white invaders had stormed the district, armed with machine guns and even using a plane to firebomb the town. While at the time it was referred to as a riot, the word massacre seems far more appropriate and is more commonly used today. It was a horrific crime, yet not a single person was convicted. How did it happen? And why?
First, we need to understand a little more about Greenwood, the wider experience of African Americans in this era and
why Black Wall Street was so important. “The community began in about 1906,” Hannibal B Johnson, attorney and author of Black Wall Street 100, explains. “Established by wealthy Black businessman OW Gurley, a migrant from Arkansas, the area blossomed into the most enterprising and successful Black business community in the nation in the early 20th century, a period marked by legal segregation of the races in virtually all aspects of life.” But while it was successful, it was not immune to those forces. “The Greenwood district was unique only in terms of the development and sophistication of its business community. Black Tulsans felt the sting of racial oppression in a segregated society like their brothers and sisters in many other parts of the country. The size and strength of the Black Wall Street economic engine provided some buffer and solace against the systemic racism of the day.”
Tulsa and Oklahoma more broadly had drawn masses of newly liberated enslaved people to its lands in the years since the end of the Civil War. “Even though Oklahoma was a slave territory, after the Civil War ended it was opened up in two different chunks to freed slaves and white settlers, and it was very, very cheap,” explains Bethany Rains, who is currently living in Oklahoma and researching the Tulsa Massacre for her thesis. “Their goal was to have reliable income, to have land, to have everything, so that their freedom couldn’t be taken away.” There was, however, a ceiling to success for Black communities in segregated states. While money could be focused on their own community since it couldn’t be spent elsewhere, new technology and training was being kept out of reach.
Acute racial tensions remained in many regions of America. Sixty-one lynchings and 25 race riots were recorded in America in 1919, 61 lynchings in 1920, and 57 in 1921. A bill had been proposed in 1918 to make lynching a federal crime, and while it passed the House of Representatives it died in the Senate after three failed attempts to get enough support. Meanwhile, white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan had returned in a new form in 1915, starting in Georgia. By 1921 it had around 2,500 members in Oklahoma, with doctors, lawyers, judges, sheriffs, ministers, bankers, city employees and more among its members.
In Tulsa vigilantism had also been on the rise as various corruption scandals and political issues had seen the police force weakened. One group calling itself the Knights of Liberty attacked unionists such as the Industrial Workers of the World (or Wobblies), with one incident involving members being whipped, tarred and feathered. Only a few months before the massacre of 31 May, a white 18-year-old named Roy Belton was lynched in Tulsa after he was accused of killing a taxi driver named Homer Nida. While the mob hanged him, the police were said to have directed traffic around the spectacle.
All of this was the backdrop to the events that unfolded in
Tulsa in 1921, and tensions were further increased by local animosities towards the growing influence of the Greenwood community and jealousy over its success. “Tulsa was a tinderbox – a powder keg – in 1921,” says Johnson. “It took only a single spark – an igniter, a catalyst – to set the town alight. That trigger was an elevator incident in downtown Tulsa on 30 May 1921 involving two teenagers – a Black boy and a white girl. In this America,
Black male/white female relationships were presumptively suspect, and in many places taboo. The boy apparently bumped into the girl. She overreacted, the police were called, and the Tulsa Tribune reported the incident the next day as an attempted rape.”
The exact details of what happened became fuzzier and more exaggerated as the day passed, but testimonies and police records paint a clearer picture. Dick Rowland, a teenage shoe shine, had entered the Drexler building to use the restroom (in the segregated Tulsa, his employer had negotiated permission for
Black employees to use it). Rowland entered the elevator operated by white teenager Sarah Page, and when the elevator lurched Rowland fell into her. It seems he stepped on her foot, at which point Page slapped him. He grabbed her arm to stop her from doing so again, and she screamed. A clerk working at the nearby Renberg’s store ran to her aid and Rowland fled, fearing the potentially catastrophic repercussions for a Black man grabbing the arm of a white woman.
Not only did the Tulsa Tribune claim Rowland had assaulted Page in its afternoon edition the next day, it also included an editorial titled ‘To Lynch Negro Tonight’, suggesting Rowland would be attacked in retaliation. A few hundred copies of this edition were already distributed before some of the paper’s editors convinced publisher Richard Lloyd Jones to retract the piece. As it happens, no copies with this editorial have been found, as the only known surviving copy has the offending article torn out.
But the surviving report on the incident itself paints Rowland as having premeditated his assault and even scratching Page and tearing her clothes, neither of which appear to be true. As it happens, Rowland was picked up by police and booked into custody at the County Courthouse not long after the Tribune hit the streets. Anticipating trouble, the police barricaded the floor where the cells were located. As 31 May progressed, a lynch mob of a few hundred men, women and children gathered in front of the courthouse.
“The Black community knew the courthouse wasn’t going to be protected,” says Rains. “If it hadn’t been able to hold off a mob trying to kill a white man, there was no way at this point to do so for a Black man.” On two occasions a small group of armed Black men from Greenwood (many of them WWI veterans and still carrying their military-issue firearms) offered to help the sheriff protect Rowland and the courthouse, but they were declined. As darkness fell the mob grew to number a few thousand (by some estimates) and tensions flared, resulting in someone trying to disarm one of the Black men. “At some point, and nobody knows why, there’s gunfire,” says Rains. “And immediately when this shot went off the white mob started shooting.”
A full-blown race riot ensued as around 75 men from Greenwood began to retreat and lynchers began taking out their vengeance on any Black person they saw. Car-loads of armed white men drove around downtown Tulsa, firing at people as they went, and one unarmed man was shot dead in a movie theatre. According to witnesses, the police were deputising members of the white mob, giving them authority to kill African Americans as they saw fit in the name of putting down an ‘uprising’. But this was just the beginning and by midnight fires were started on the outskirts of the Greenwood district, before a quiet finally descended on the city.
The peace didn’t last long, though, and a second, more coordinated phase developed. “A lot of people, when they talk about it, act as if the entire thing was this kind of chaotic mob,” says Rains. “There’s a chase and then they just kind of lost their minds and destroyed Greenwood, but that’s not true. You can almost divide the massacre into two parts: a battle and then a pogrom, just an absolute catastrophe.”
Barney Cleaver was a Black deputy sheriff and had been at the courthouse for most of the day. Returning home to Greenwood, he sent his wife and sister-in-law to safety somewhere further out of town. As he sat in a building near the train tracks on the edge
“TULSA WAS A TINDERBOX – A POWDER KEG – IN 1921”
of Greenwood at around 5am he heard a whistle, followed by relentless gunfire. Thousands of armed white people had surrounded the district and were now invading.
“The white mob that invaded the Greenwood district looted pawn shops and sporting goods shops downtown for weapons,” says Johnson. “Many were deputised by local law enforcement. The mob prevented firefighters from putting out fires and there’s also evidence of some organization and coordination among these criminal elements.”
As the mob went door to door, ransacking homes and businesses, the residents of Greenwood attempted to flee or fight back. The unlucky ones were shot in their homes or in the street, while the more fortunate were arrested by the police and National Guard. Over 6,000 people from Greenwood were held at the Convention Hall and Fairgrounds in the days that followed. Meanwhile on Standpipe Hill a small group attempted to defend their homes and fierce fighting took place, but ultimately the people of Greenwood were outgunned and outnumbered.
“Most historians now assume that it was fully preorganised and preplanned,” says Rains. “But there’s still the question of who did that? Who organised this invasion? Probably city officials were involved, and the police.” However, it does remain unclear. One of the arguments that some greater level of local authority was involved is the use of at least one plane to drop incendiary devices on Greenwood, which would go some way to explain how quickly it was destroyed. Several eye-witnesses claimed planes were involved.
“They dropped some kind of incendiary devices. There are enough sources that refer to it, including [local Greenwood attorney] BC Franklin’s that was discovered in the last five years,” Rains explains. Even the Tulsa Tribune agreed that planes were involved, although it claimed they were doing reconnaissance, finding residents who were shooting at the white crowd.
The final death toll is believed to be around 300, although early estimates originally put it at only 30. On 1 June the Tulsa Tribune claimed 68 African Americans and nine white people had died in the ‘Race War’ overnight. The property damage was easier to quantify. “There were five structures left, and none of them were undamaged,” says Rains.
“MOST HISTORIANS NOW ASSUME THAT IT WAS FULLY PREORGANISED AND PREPLANNED”
While martial law was declared later in the morning of 1 June and the killing finally stopped, the cruelty and injustice hadn’t ended. Those residents detained by the police and National
Guard had to be vouched for by a white employer before they were released. What’s more, the city authorities blocked anyone rebuilding in the Greenwood district unless they could prove the materials being used would not be flammable. Segregation meant that access to such materials was incredibly hard without aid. Meanwhile, donations of money from outside areas were blocked, meaning churches and groups like the NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) couldn’t help. But the people of Greenwood didn’t back down.
“BC Franklin worked from a white tent because everything had been burned to the ground,” says Rains. “He said to fellow Greenwood residents, ‘You rebuild, I will represent you for free if they arrest you.’ He appealed a ruling against one of the people who’d rebuilt their property all the way to the Oklahoma Supreme Court. The Tulsa municipal government’s policy was ruled unconstitutional and Greenwood residents were able to rebuild. But if that hadn’t happened they would have entirely lost their property as well.”
Greenwood was rebuilt, although many families never recovered from their losses. Rowland was exonerated and all charges against him were dropped, and while a grand jury was assembled to investigate the massacre, no convictions were ever made. The Tulsa Tribune headline summarising the judgement read: ‘Grand Jury Blames Negroes for Inciting Race Rioting; Whites Clearly Exonerated’. It wasn’t until 1997 and the Tulsa Race Riot Commission that the state of Oklahoma properly investigated what had happened, even using radar to look for potential mass graves. The commission proposed that the state should pay $33 million in restitution to the 121 victims who were still alive at that time, but no action was taken on that recommendation. Finally, though, 100 years later, the magnitude and horror of the Tulsa Race Massacre seems clear and its victims are getting the recognition they deserve.