Tulsa Race Massacre

By 1921 Tulsa was a booming city of more than 100,000 people. Most of its roughly 10,000 Black residents lived in Greenwood, a thriving neighborhood with two newspapers, several churches, a library branch, and scores of Black-owned businesses. It was also a time of intense racial tension, marked by the rapid growth of the second Ku Klux Klan and by Black Americans’ determined resistance to lynching. Tulsa itself had seen a white mob lynch a white teenager taken from the county jail in August 1920 while police did little to stop it.

On May 30, 1921, an encounter in a downtown elevator between Dick Rowland, a young Black shoe shiner, and Sarah Page, a white elevator operator, set events in motion; the most common explanation is that he stepped on her foot and she screamed. The next day the Tulsa Tribune reported that Rowland, who had been arrested, had attempted to assault Page, and eyewitnesses recalled an editorial calling for a lynching.

By evening hundreds of whites had gathered at the county courthouse demanding Rowland. Armed Black men, many of them World War I veterans, twice went to the courthouse to help protect him and were turned away by the sheriff. As the second group was leaving, a white man tried to disarm a Black veteran, a shot was fired, and fighting broke out.

Through the night, armed whites shot into Black neighborhoods and set fires along the edge of Greenwood’s business district. Police deputized members of the mob, while local National Guard units spent the night guarding a white neighborhood against a counterattack that never came. At dawn on June 1, thousands of armed whites invaded Greenwood, looting and burning homes and businesses. Black Tulsans fought to defend their community but were outnumbered and outgunned. By the time additional National Guard troops arrived that morning, most of Greenwood had been burned.

The city was placed under martial law, and thousands of Black Tulsans were held under armed guard. Most of Tulsa’s Black population was left homeless, and thousands spent the following winter in tents. Rowland was exonerated, yet an all-white grand jury blamed Black Tulsans for the violence. Despite white efforts to force the community to relocate, residents began rebuilding Greenwood within days.

For decades the massacre was rarely discussed, especially in Tulsa. In 1997 Oklahoma formed a state commission to investigate; its report recommended reparations to the remaining survivors. Researchers have found evidence supporting long-held accounts that victims were buried in unmarked graves.