I want to talk to you about a very relevant piece of history that I taught for three years while I was an Oklahoma History teacher. That event is the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.
The ârace riotâ (I say massacre) happened in the Greenwood district of Tulsa in June of â21, and resulted in the deaths of an estimated 300 black people.
To understand this event we need to examine a little bit of Oklahoma History. I want you to picture yourself in the late 1800s. Slavery has been abolished, but life for black people living in the south was horrible. Jim Crow laws dominated their lives as a way to preserve the subjugation of former slaves in what ever way they could.
Up until this point, Indian territory, now known as Oklahoma, was only open to Native Americans. In the late 1800s however, white Americans began invading Oklahoma land, and squatting. The portions of land belonging to Native Americans was whittled away and was opened up to all settlers who wanted to take advantage of the Homestead Act.
This included black people. Youâve probably heard of the land runsâ thatâs the general idea. Oklahoma became a state in 1907, meaning up until that point, there were so few laws that black people were able to own land, run businesses and live wherever they chose. This led to a mass exodus of black people from the south to the Oklahoma Territory. They formed their own communities and thrived in them.
(Additionally, the freed slaves of Native Americans were given the designation of Freedmen in the tribes, and were part of their communities. A large portion of black people living in Indian Territory had come with the Native Americans in the âTrail of Tearsâ, aka Indian Removal (fuck you Andrew Jackson).)
One of these communities was called Greenwood, aka the Black Wallstreet. The oil boom in Oklahoma profited black people and black businesses. Some people considered Greenwood and Tulsa two separate towns, because black Tulsans were able to thrive completely in their own communities.
In 1921, a young man named Dick Rowland worked in the Drexel Building in downtown (white) Tulsa as a shoe shiner, or âbootblackâ. He quit school to do this because it proved lucrative, as the oil businessmen tipped heavily. Now that Oklahoma was a state, Jim Crow laws applied (the first bill passed in Oklahoma was Jim Crow), so Dick could not use the bathroom downstairs. He was allowed to use the bathroom on the top floor, so thatâs what he attempted to do on this particular day.
He entered the elevator, and historians believe that it is most likely that Dick tripped and fell into Sarah Page, the white elevator operator. He was seen coming out of the elevator on the third floor and she was seen screaming. He was accused of assaulting her, and was soon arrested for the âcrimeâ. (There is some speculation that Sarah and Dick had an affair, and this was a loverâs quarrel gone wrong.)
The Tulsa Tribune got word of this event and published an incendiary article calling for the lynching of Rowland. (No copies of this article survive to this day, as it was clipped out of the archives before they were digitized, no doubt to protect the writer) White Tulsans read this article and were livid.
They had been suffering economically, and especially in the vicinity of Greenwood, it was easy to become jealous of the success of black Tulsans. Many Tulsans were members of the KKK, as the organization at the time was being pushed as an answer to the working manâs problems (one historian put it aptly as âa simple solution to a complex problem for simple peopleâ). Well, white Tulsans reached their boiling point and grabbed their guns and headed to the courthouse.
The county police stopped the white mob from entering the courthouse. Black Tulsans got word that one of their own was going to be lynched, and they too stormed down to the courthouse to defend the boy. Lynching was common practice in the south, and they would have seen enough of it to want to put an end to it.
Outside the courthouse, white Tulsans and black Tulsans teed off. It wasnât until one white man asked âwhere you going with that gun n*****?â To which a black man replied âto do what I have to.â The white man replied âno you ainât,â and shots were fired. The gunfight erupted, and white Tulsans began shooting black Tulsans, burning their businesses and their homes. Tulsa city police began deputizing people, tasking them with ârounding upâ black âriotersâ. This was permission for them to kill black people.
This continued the whole night. Some accounts say that planes were used to drop nitroglycerin on the fires to keep them burning. The governor eventually stepped in, and sent in the National Guard, which rounded up black people and put them in detention in the parks and fairgrounds.
Overnight some 300+ people were killed, but the number is in dispute because, in an effort to hide bodies and to downplay the severity, mass graves were dug in Oaklawn Cemetery. The whole affair was quickly hushed up and swept under the rug. Sarah Page refused to testify against Dick Rowland (no doubt because of guilt knowing it was a false accusation), and Dick subsequently was smuggled out of Tulsa, his whereabouts afterwards to this day unclear.
The financial damage adjusted for inflation is somewhere around $30 million. There was a commission to investigate and publish a report on the event many years later (the PDF is available online). Restitution was never made. The city came up with flimsy excuses for not excavating the sites of suspected mass graves.
A cult of silence followed after 1921, and to this day, few Tulsans and even fewer Americans have ever heard of the massacre. Thatâs exactly what it is: the worst massacre of black people in America.
I have been teaching this massacre to my students for 3 years. I plan to teach it to every history class I teach. But I just ask a favor of you. Please share this story with people. If not on Tumblr, then please share it orally, any which way you want. Look it up beyond this (The Night Tulsa Burned and Black Wallstreet are great documentaries on YouTube, and Reconstructing the Dreamland is a good book to start with).
I walk around downtown Tulsa and look at these places where these events happened. Some of Greenwood is still intact, but itâs when I pass Oaklawn that my blood runs cold. I know we can still bring out the truth. I know we can educate people about this. We simply must have the moral fiber to drag our dirty laundry out and say âlook, America! This happened. This is your legacy. And if you donât start paying attention to the messages being spread by black Americans, you are no better than the Tulsa that participated in and silenced this massacre.â
