Tulsa Race Massacre

Greenwood was thirty-five blocks of Black Tulsa: two newspapers, dozens of grocers, doctors, lawyers, hotels, cinemas, a bus line. On 31 May 1921, after a nineteen-year-old Black shoeshiner named Dick Rowland was arrested over an encounter with a white lift operator, an armed white crowd gathered at the courthouse. Black veterans came to prevent a lynching. Shots were fired.

Through the night and into the morning of 1 June, white Tulsans - many of them sworn in and armed by city officials - crossed the Frisco tracks into Greenwood. They looted and burned house by house, shooting residents who fled. Aeroplanes flew over the district; witnesses described shooting and incendiary devices dropped from the air. By midday roughly 1,250 homes, every church, every school and the hospital in the district had been destroyed. Survivors were held in internment camps at the fairgrounds and the convention hall and released only to employers who vouched for them.

The official death toll was 36. The state commission that re-examined the massacre in 2001 concluded the true number was likely between 100 and 300, with mass graves still unaccounted for; searches of Oaklawn Cemetery have since recovered remains. Insurance claims were denied under riot exclusions. No white Tulsan was convicted of anything, and the city rezoned the burned district to obstruct rebuilding. Decades later the Interstate 244 ramp was driven through what had been rebuilt.