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Hidden History: The 1921 Tulsa Race Riots [1]

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Date: 2023-10-03  

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the worst attacks on African-Americans in history.

Reconciliation Tower, in Tulsa

"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.

In 1905, an oil explorer found the Glenn Pool Field, near Tulsa OK, and began a mad rush. The once-sleepy little frontier cowtown now became one of the largest and richest cities in the west, as people flooded in from all over the US to take advantage of the sudden new wealth. By 1921 Tulsa had a population of over 100,000.

And many of these new arrivals were African-Americans. Slavery had ended only 50 years before, and now many of the South's formerly enslaved people saw an opportunity in Tulsa. Some 10,000 African-Americans settled into the Greenwood neighborhood, roughly 40 square blocks in the northeast part of the city, where they formed their own businesses and became almost a town within the town. There were Black-owned hotels, dance clubs, restaurants and theaters, around a dozen doctors, a local library, a photography studio, and the Tulsa Star newspaper. In the midst of the still-heavily racist South, Greenwood became a thriving African-American community, and the area became so wealthy from the local oil economy that the well-known African-American activist Booker T Washington famously referred to it as "the Negro Wall Street of America".

But not everything was going well. Oklahoma, which had just become a State in 1907, had been originally established as an "Indian territory" where Native American tribes could be forcibly relocated from the East. Much of the oil had been found on land belonging to local Native Americans, and they were descended upon by White fraudsters who cheated them out of their land and their oil money. For a time, Oklahoma had one of the highest murder rates in the country as Native American owners of oil-rich fields were found mysteriously dead, having conveniently signed their will over to White land speculators. White resentment rose against the African-Americans, as well, as indeed it had all over the South. African-Americans had been drafted to serve with the US Army in France during the First World War, and when they returned to the US in 1918, they began agitating for democracy and civil rights at home, such as they had enjoyed in Europe. America responded with an era of lynching, when White mobs, often led by the now-powerful Ku Klux Klan and often with the tacit support of the local authorities, would routinely arrest young Black men on trumped-up charges and then summarily hang them from a tree or lamppost in what amounted to a public circus. There had been at least 25 lynchings in the past few years, and the latest of them had been just the previous summer, when a young man who had been arrested for murder was dragged from his jail cell by a vigilante mob and lynched.

On May 30, 1921, during Memorial Day weekend, a 19 year old African-American shoe-shiner named Dick Rowland got on an elevator in the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa, which was being operated by a 17-year old White girl named Sarah Page. Nobody is sure what happened next, but some people heard Page apparently screaming and saw Rowland leaving the building. Stories and rumors flew: some declared that Rowland had tried to kiss her, others concluded that he had tried to rape her, and still others spread the story that the two teens were lovers and had some kind of spat in the elevator. That night, though, the police arrested Rowland and confined him in a cell in the County Courthouse. Page, meanwhile, had told the police that Rowland had merely grabbed her arm and had not assaulted her, and no charges were ever filed against the teen.

When the story ran in the Tulsa Tribune, however, the headline declared "Nab Negro For Attacking Girl In An Elevator", implying that Rowland had attempted to rape the young woman, and reportedly an editorial accompanied the story suggesting that a lynching was in the works (but no such editorial has ever been found in the published newspaper archives). By early that evening a crowd of White vigilantes had gathered in front of the Courthouse, demanding that the prisoner be turned over to them, but the newly-elected local Sheriff, Willard M. McCullough, refused, and he and his deputies barricaded the door to prevent the mob from entering.

Meanwhile, the news of the potential lynching had reached the Greenwood neighborhood, and around 75 African-American men, some of them World War One veterans, now armed themselves with clubs and pistols and went to the Courthouse to protect Rowland. McCullough told them that he had the situation under control and convinced them to return to their homes. As the Black men were leaving, however, they were confronted by the White vigilantes. Tempers flared, shots rang out, and the two groups now engaged in a gunfight that spilled into the streets. In the ensuing fracas, about a dozen people were killed from both sides.

The violence quickly spread. The White vigilantes tried unsuccessfully to break into the National Guard Armory to obtain guns, then went to the Tulsa Police station, where many of them were deputized and given pistols. Soon gangs of armed thugs were roaming the streets, beating up or shooting any African-Americans they happened to come across. At sunrise the next morning, the White mobs entered the Greenwood neighborhood and began setting buildings on fire and shooting Blacks who tried to flee the flames. Armed groups of African-Americans, who were desperately trying to defend themselves, shot back. Some witnesses reported that they had even seen aircraft dropping firebombs onto the neighborhood: there is no certain evidence for this, though the police confirmed that they had commandeered several private airplanes and used them for "reconnaissance".

The destruction and arson continued until the National Guard arrived at about 9am on June 1, declared martial law, and forcibly cleared the streets. In all, some 35 blocks of the Greenwood neighborhood had been reduced to charred ruins, and the "Black Wall Street" had been almost completely gutted. The official death toll was around 40, but there were reports that many of the African-Americans who had been killed were secretly buried in hastily-dug mass graves. The true number of dead may have been as high as 300. The police arrested several dozen people for acts of violence during the massacre--all of them Black. No Whites were ever arrested or charged with anything. In addition, the White-owned insurance companies refused to compensate any of the Black property-owners for any of the damages.

The local Red Cross organized an effort to provide food and shelter for the thousands of people, nearly all of them African-American, who were now homeless, and the dozens of eyewitness reports which they gathered at the time remain our best source of information as to what had happened. The homeless refugees were crowded into temporary tent cities. The police and National Guard, meanwhile, rounded up several thousand of Greenwood's African-American residents and held them inside "temporary detention centers" for several days before releasing them.

In 1997, the State of Oklahoma appointed a Commission to study the 1921 massacre, which released its report in 2001. The Commission recommended that compensation be given to the survivors or to their descendants, and also recommended that more resources should be devoted to community development in Greenwood. In 2010, Reconciliation Park was opened in the Greenwood neighborhood to commemorate the massacre and its victims. The park contains a history center, a memorial fountain, and Reconciliation Tower.

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