For the past 17 months, a group of WSJ's Black journalists, along with other journalists of color worked on a series of 9 stories examining the economic ramifications of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
I'm extremely proud to share our work. (outside the paywall)

Advise everyone to read it quickly before all the new laws ban teaching it.

I grew up in Oklahoma and didn’t learn about this until college, which infuriated me. I am a teacher now and teach this every year. I will not stop, even if someone tries to stop me.

Tulsa race massacre

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Coordinates: 36°09'34"N 95°59'11"W

"Tulsa riot" redirects here. For the November 1917 mob attack, see Tulsa Outrage.
"Tulsa massacre" redirects here. For the mass shooting that occurred 101 years later, see 2022 Tulsa hospital shooting.


Homes and businesses burned in Greenwood

Location: Greenwood District, Tulsa, Oklahoma, U.S.
Coordinates: 36°09'34"N 95°59'11"W
Dates: May 31 – June 1, 1921
Target: Black residents, their homes, businesses, churches, schools, and municipal buildings over a 40 square block area
Attack type: White supremacist terrorism, pogrom, arson, mass murder
Weapons: Guns, explosives, fire
Deaths: Total dead and displaced unknown:
36 total; 26 black and 10 white dead (1921 records)
150–200 black and 50 white dead (1921 estimate by W. F. White)
39 confirmed dead, 26 black (1 stillborn) and 13 white;[3] 75–100 to 150–300 estimated dead in total (2001 commission)
Injured: 800+
183 serious injuries
Exact number unknown
Perpetrators: White mob

The Tulsa race massacre, also known as the Tulsa race riot or the Black Wall Street massacre, was a two-day-long white supremacist terrorist massacre that took place between May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been appointed as deputies and armed by city government officials, attacked black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The event is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history. The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood—at the time, one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, colloquially known as "Black Wall Street."

More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 black residents of Tulsa were interned in large facilities, many of them for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead. The 2001 Tulsa Reparations Coalition examination of events identified 39 dead, 26 black and 13 white, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates, and other records. The commission gave several estimates ranging from 75 to 300 dead.

The massacre began during Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white 21-year-old elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building. He was arrested and rumors that he was to be lynched were spread throughout the city, where a white man named Roy Belton had been lynched the previous year. Upon hearing reports that a mob of hundreds of white men had gathered around the jail where Rowland was being held, a group of 75 black men, some armed, arrived at the jail to protect Rowland. The sheriff persuaded the group to leave the jail, assuring them that he had the situation under control.

The most widely reported and corroborated inciting incident occurred as the group of black men left when an elderly white man approached O. B. Mann, a black man, and demanded that he hand over his pistol. Mann refused, and the old man attempted to disarm him. A gunshot went off, and then, according to the sheriff's reports, "all hell broke loose." The two groups shot at each other until midnight when the group of black men were greatly outnumbered and forced to retreat to Greenwood. At the end of the exchange of gunfire, 12 people were dead, 10 white and 2 black. Alternatively, another eyewitness account was that the shooting began "down the street from the Courthouse" when black business owners came to the defense of a lone black man being attacked by a group of around six white men. It is possible that the eyewitness did not recognize the fact that this incident was occurring as a part of a rolling gunfight that was already underway. As news of the violence spread throughout the city, mob violence exploded. White rioters invaded Greenwood that night and the next morning, killing men and burning and looting stores and homes. Around noon on June 1, the Oklahoma National Guard imposed martial law, ending the massacre.

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Aftermath

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Three days after the massacre, President Warren G. Harding spoke at the all-black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He declared, "Despite the demagogues, the idea of our oneness as Americans has risen superior to every appeal to mere class and group. And so, I wish it might be in this matter of our national problem of races." Speaking directly about the events in Tulsa, he said, "God grant that, in the soberness, the fairness, and the justice of this country, we never see another spectacle like it."

There were no convictions for any of the charges related to violence. There were decades of silence about the terror, violence, and losses of this event. The riot was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories: "The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms, or even in private. Black and white people alike grew into middle age, unaware of what had taken place." 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 makes no mention of the 1921 massacre.

Several people tried to document the events, gather photographs, and record the names of the dead and injured. Mary E. Jones Parrish, a young black teacher and journalist from Rochester, New York, was hired by the Inter-racial Commission to write an account of the riot. Parrish was a survivor, and she wrote about her experiences, collected other accounts, gathered photographs and compiled "a partial roster of property losses in the African American community". She published these in Events of the Tulsa Disaster, in 1922. It was the first book to be published about the riot. The first academic account was a master's thesis written in 1946 by Loren L. Gill, a veteran of World War II, but the thesis did not circulate beyond the University of Tulsa.

In 1971, a small group of survivors gathered for a memorial service at Mount Zion Baptist Church with black and white people in attendance. That same year, the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce decided to commemorate the riot, but when they read the accounts and saw photos gathered by Ed Wheeler, host of a radio history program, detailing the specifics of the riot, they refused to publish them. He then took his information to the two major newspapers in Tulsa, both of which also refused to run his story. His article, "Profile of a Race Riot" was published in Impact Magazine, a publication aimed at black audiences, but most of Tulsa's white residents never knew about it.

In the early 1970s, along with Henry C. Whitlow, Jr., a history teacher at Booker T. Washington High School, Mozella Franklin Jones helped to desegregate the Tulsa Historical Society by mounting the first major exhibition on the history of African Americans in Tulsa. Jones also created, at the Tulsa Historical Society, the first collection of massacre photographs available to the public. While researching and sharing the history of the riot, Jones collaborated with a white woman named Ruth Sigler Avery, who was also trying to publicize accounts of the riot. The two women, however, encountered pressure, particularly among whites, to keep silent.

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