Tulsa Race Massacre (1921)

Tue May 31, 1921

Image: A photo showing the aftermath of the Tulsa Race Massacre, showing a city block razed to the ground. From the Universal History Archive [mashable.com]

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On this day in 1921, the Tulsa Race Massacre began when mobs of white people attacked residents and businesses of the Greenwood District, known as “Black Wall Street”, killing hundreds and rendering 10,000 black families homeless.

Historian Scott Ellsworth called it “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history”, with estimates ranging from 75-300 people killed, 800 wounded, and 10,000 black families made homeless from the destruction of property.

The massacre began over Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, the 17-year-old white elevator operator of the nearby Drexel Building. When a lynch mob formed at the jail, an armed group of black men showed up to counter it.

Shots rang out when a white person tried to disarm one of the black men. The initial violence left ten people dead, and a mob of enraged white people stormed black neighborhoods, indiscriminately killing families, setting fires, and destroying property.

As crews from the Tulsa Fire Department arrived to put out fires, they were turned away at gunpoint. One account stated “It would mean a fireman’s life to turn a stream of water on one of those negro buildings. They shot at us all morning when we were trying to do something but none of my men was hit. There is not a chance in the world to get through that mob into the negro district.”

Several eyewitnesses described airplanes carrying white assailants, who fired rifles and dropped firebombs on buildings, homes, and fleeing families. The privately owned aircraft had been dispatched from the nearby Curtiss-Southwest Field outside Tulsa. Law enforcement officials later claimed that the planes were to provide reconnaissance and protect against a “Negro uprising”.

Multiple eyewitness accounts said that on the morning of June 1st, at least a dozen planes circled the neighborhood and dropped “burning turpentine balls” on an office, a hotel, a filling station, and other buildings.

For 75 years (until 1996), the massacre was almost totally omitted from local, state, and national histories. It was not recognized in the Tulsa Tribune feature of “Fifteen Years Ago Today” or “Twenty-Five Years Ago Today”. A 2017 report detailing the history of the Tulsa Fire Department from 1897 until the date of publication made no mention of the 1921 mass arson.

In 2015, a previously unknown written eyewitness account of the Tulsa Race Massacre from attorney Buck Colbert Franklin was discovered. Franklin wrote: “The sidewalks were literally covered with burning turpentine balls. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well why every burning building first caught fire from the top…I paused and waited for an opportune time to escape. ‘Where oh where is our splendid fire department with its half dozen stations?’ I asked myself, ‘Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?’”

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• Date: 1921-05-31
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.smithsonianmag.com.
• Tags: #Massacre.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org