Tulsa Race Massacre: Remembering one of the darkest chapters in Oklahoma history 103 years later (2024)

TULSA, Okla. —

It's been 103 years since one of the darkest days in Oklahoma's history – when a white mob burned down Tulsa's Greenwood District.

The area was a predominantly Black neighborhood that was a thriving economic hub known as Black Wall Street. The Greenwood District would be reduced to rubble following an 18-hour stretch of murder and terror starting on May 31, 1921, spanning into June 1, 1921, that has since become known as the Tulsa Race Massacre.

What Happened

On May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, who was believed to be 19 years old at the time, was in an elevator in a downtown building with 17-year-old Sarah Page.

"He's going into the one place, that Drexel building, where he can, he can go to the restroom," Dr. Dewayne Dickens told KOCO 5 in 2021. "He opens it, he gets in, seems to have stumbled on the walkway and grabs her hand. She screams, maybe, maybe hit him in response to, ‘You’re on me’ or whatever. And someone hears this in the Renberg building, so they hear this, and this is reported as an attack. And so this creates the narrative going through the community that a Black man has attacked a white woman."

The Tulsa Tribune ran an article claiming Rowland had assaulted the 17-year-old white elevator girl. Page refused to press charges, but the newspaper article read like a call to action with a headline saying, "Nab negro for attacking girl in an elevator."

Many survivors remember a second article the Tulsa Tribune ran that day, but no copies of it exist anymore. All microfilmed copies of the Tribune from that day have been purged.

But no matter what the headline said, it enflamed a large presence at the courthouse where Rowland was after he was arrested on May 31, 1921.

"The white community comes in big numbers when he's arrested because of this, and the Black community comes, and basically, there's a back and forth between the communities of ‘Go home, we'll take care of this,’ there's concern that maybe this will not be taken care of in the right way," Dickens said. "And there were lynchings that had occurred, not just for Black people, but for white people as well. So the Black community is concerned and they wanted to watch out for Dick Rowland, not necessarily because they loved Dick Rowland, but because they did not want to see another Black person who was lynched for something that he did not do. And those who did know him say this was not some kind of character he would have."

Two groups met in mayhem, shooting at one another, with newspapers claiming only Black people were armed. But the only person at the time to be wounded by gunfire was a Black man. He was shot in the abdomen and writhed in pain while a white mob blocked medics from taking him to a hospital.

Onlookers would watch as the man died in the street, and things went from bad to worse within a few minutes. Experts said someone was using a machine gun on Standpipe Hill to fire down on men, women and children.

Even the Black churches weren't spared. Rumors swirled about ammunition being stored at Mount Zion Baptist Church. The church, dedicated just a month before, was gutted.

The entire Tulsa Police Department was called out, and officers were stationed in a line between Black and white Tulsa. Their orders were pretty simple — keep Black people from coming back into white Tulsa.

Meanwhile, the Oklahoma National Guard was put on standby. Shortly after midnight, a telegram was sent to the military authorities in Oklahoma City, reading, "A race riot developed here. Several killed. Unable to handle the situation. Request that National Guard forces be sent by special train. Situation serious."

As the National Guard made its way to Tulsa by train from Oklahoma City, a fierce gun battle was raging in Greenwood.

With hands held high, Black men, women and children were corralled like animals into the convention hall. All this happened while planes were being used as weapons against them.

Many refute the claims that planes were used, but historians are certain something was being dropped from the sky. By midday on June 1, Black Wall Street had been destroyed.

The bodies of loved ones were never recovered. Those who thought they were part of the American dream lived real-life nightmares.

It's estimated as many as 300 Black people were killed, and nearly 200 Black-owned businesses were destroyed. The Tulsa Race Massacre stands as one of the worst cases of racial violence in the nation's history.

How Black Wall Street Thrived Before The Massacre

The story of the massacre starts with another shameful moment in our history – the Trail of Tears.

In 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. It forced thousands of Native Americans off their lands in the southeast United States. Men, women and children were forced to walk hundreds of miles in harsh conditions to settle in so-called "Indian territory," what is now known as Oklahoma. Historians estimate that more than 15,000 died of exposure, starvation and exhaustion.

Mixed in with the tens of thousands of people removed from their land were thousands of Black people, owned as slaves by the tribes. Following the Civil War, the tribes freed their slaves and integrated them into their communities and treated them as equals. By 1890, Oklahoma was being touted as a "promised land" for Black people.

By 1900, the Black population grew to more than 50,000 in the region. The oil boom in Glenpool, a town about 14 miles south of Tulsa, created a population explosion. Black entrepreneur O.W. Gurley saw an opportunity in this new boomtown in 1906. He moved to Tulsa with the idea of starting a new town and setting one stipulation.

Gurley established Greenwood on the north side of Tulsa. By 1907, Oklahoma became a state, and the Black people quickly realized they were being treated like second-class citizens. Despite the fact, Black people did not directly benefit from the oil boom. The trickle-down effects saw a lot of work opportunities for them. But shortly after statehood, the Oklahoma state legislature passed oppressive Jim Crow laws, mandating strict segregation.

Greenwood became a mecca for Black people, and white people referred to it as "Little Africa." Black people had a different name for it. But as the city grew, so did tensions and resentment.

The Ku Klux Klan began to resurge in the early 1900s, and then there was the Red Summer. In 1919, a wave of racist, white mob violence terrorized Black people in cities across the United States, including Tulsa.

The new Black American dream was sitting on a powder keg.

Hidden History

Up until recent years, most Americans – and many Oklahomans – didn't know about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Many hadn't heard about the events until the HBO miniseries "Watchmen" opened with a scene depicting the attack on Black Wall Street.

"It was never taught in school," J. Kavin Ross told KOCO 5 in 2021. "I remember in high school, back in the '80s, that it was in the Oklahoma history book only for about a paragraph or two. But the history of the Klan went on for chapter after chapter after chapter."

Ross said both races had their reasons for keeping the massacre hidden.

"White folks didn't want to talk about it because it was a blemish, a stain on a city that was trying to build up its image. So nobody, nobody talked from that community," Ross said. "The Black folks didn't talk about it because of the fact that those people who committed the atrocities were still around, they will threaten another massacre had anybody talked it up again. And so you had these communities, separated, but together they were silent."

Many say the conspiracy of silence started to unravel with another tragedy that happened just 90 miles down the road – the 1995 bombing in downtown Oklahoma City at the Alfred P. Murrah Building.

State Rep. Don Ross – J. Kavin’s father – was speaking to a reporter a year later.

"One of the reporters that was talking to my father and made the statement that is the worst event that happened on American soil, and my father had to stop and say no, the worst one is an hour away in Tulsa," J. Kavin said.

That statement piqued national media interest. Soon, people who had never heard of the massacre started looking for answers.

In 1997, Ross introduced legislation to create the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, saying, "Justice demands closure as it did with Japanese Americans and Holocaust victims of Germany."

The commission issued its report in 2001, which outlined damage, potential reparations and the death toll.

"When the reports come out, the official report saying this is what happened," Dickens said. "This happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and we, we can see the remnants of that. People had to acknowledge, rather than say it's folklore. They had to acknowledge this was real."

Remaining Survivors

There are two known remaining survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. The two are Viola Fletcher and Lessie Benningfield Randle. A third survivor, Hughes Van Ellis, died in October at the age of 102.

The three spoke in front of members of Congress on Capitol Hill in 2021 to describe the horrors of what happened 103 years ago.

"We live with it every day, and the thought of what Greenwood was and what it could have been," Van Ellis said in 2021 before the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Fletcher, who is the oldest living member, said she would never forget what happened.

"I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home," Fletcher said in 2021. "I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street."

Randle likened the 18-hour period to a war.

"White men with guns came and destroyed my community," Randle said in 2021. "We couldn't understand why. What did we do to them?"

In 2022, a philanthropist from New York donated $1 million to the three survivors, saying he felt people were trying to run out the clock on them.

The remaining survivors are involved in a reparations lawsuit against the city of Tulsa, a case the Oklahoma Supreme Court heard in early April.

The lawsuit says the actions of the white mob that killed hundreds of Black residents and destroyed Black Wall Street continue to affect the city today. The suit seeks reparations for descendants of victims, but a monetary amount has not been disclosed.

Finding and Identifying More Victims

Over the past few years, officials have worked toward finding and identifying more victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

The city of Tulsa has conducted several excavation efforts at Oaklawn Cemetery to identify potential victims.

In April of 2023, officials said they have been able to create genetic genealogy profiles for six of 22 bodies exhumed from Oaklawn Cemetery in 2021. Although that's not proof that they were victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, experts said it's a step in the right direction in their search for answers.

The new genetic profiles will allow genealogists to tie them to potential surnames and locations of interest.

So many critical steps still need to happen. Researchers need information – meaning they need people who think they could be descendants of race massacre victims to come forward and take a DNA test with one or two companies.

“I’m so thankful for our experts who have been pouring over the samples and data for the better part of the past year to help move this investigation forward,” Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum said in a May 29, 2024, news release. “Six years ago, we wanted descendants and the community to have more answers and today we are one step closer on the identification side. I feel a great sense of responsibility to follow through on what we promised and I’m eager for the process to continue.”