Black Wall Street: The Tulsa Massacre, 1921

The Greenwood District was the creation of deliberate Black entrepreneurship under conditions designed to prevent it. Its founding came from a single purchase: in 1906, O.W. Gurley — a teacher turned businessman who had come to Oklahoma from Arkansas — bought land on a street he named Greenwood Avenue and sold lots exclusively to Black buyers. The legal segregation that barred Black Tulsans from white commercial districts had an unintended consequence: it concentrated Black consumer spending inside Greenwood. Every dollar spent in Greenwood circulated among Black businesses before it left the community. Estimates held that a single dollar changed hands as many as 36 to 100 times within the district before flowing out.

By 1921, Greenwood contained an estimated 600 Black-owned businesses within 35 city blocks — a concentration of Black enterprise unmatched anywhere in the United States at the time. Among those businesses and institutions:

The community had its own professional class — doctors, lawyers, dentists, teachers — and its own social infrastructure of churches, fraternal organizations, and newspapers. Booker T. Washington, visiting around 1905 before the district reached its peak, coined the phrase "Black Wall Street." It was not hyperbole. It was an accurate description of what Black Americans had built in fifteen years, with no access to white capital markets, no government support, and in the face of the legal apartheid of Jim Crow Oklahoma.

The prosperity of Greenwood was both an achievement and a provocation. It disproved the foundational lie of segregation — that Black Americans could not organize, build, or sustain complex economic institutions. That disproof was not tolerated.

On May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland — a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner — used the elevator in the Drexel Building, as he did regularly to reach the only restroom in downtown Tulsa available to Black people. Sarah Page, the white elevator operator, cried out. The exact nature of the incident has never been established. Rowland may have stumbled and grabbed her arm. Page herself did not press charges. The next day, the Tulsa Tribune ran the headline: "Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator." A white mob began gathering at the courthouse where Rowland was being held.

A group of Black veterans — many of them World War I veterans who had fought in Europe and returned to Jim Crow America — arrived at the courthouse armed, offering to help defend Rowland. They were vastly outnumbered. A scuffle broke out. Shots were fired. The Black veterans retreated to Greenwood. The mob — which grew to an estimated 10,000 people — followed. The Tulsa Police Department joined the attacking mob and began deputizing civilians. Dick Rowland was never charged.

Beginning in the early morning hours of June 1, the coordinated assault on Greenwood began. Private aircraft — some owned by law enforcement, some by civilians — flew over the district. Survivors testified to shooting from the planes and the dropping of incendiary materials. The Oklahoma Commission on the Tulsa Race Riot (2001) found "credible evidence" of aerial attack. This was the first time aircraft were used against civilians on American soil.

The Oklahoma National Guard was deployed — not to protect Greenwood from the mob, but to intern its residents. Black residents fleeing their burning homes were arrested and taken to the Convention Center and fairgrounds, where approximately 6,000 Black Tulsans were held. Police and members of the mob moved through Greenwood systematically, looting homes and businesses before burning them. By the morning of June 1, 35 blocks had been burned to the ground. The estimated death toll was 100–300. The Red Cross reported 10,000 people homeless.

In the immediate aftermath, a Tulsa grand jury indicted Dick Rowland — the man the mob had gathered to lynch — and blamed "agitation among the colored population" for the massacre. No member of the mob was indicted. No police officer was charged. No city official faced consequences. The Tulsa Police Department received commendations for its role in "restoring order."

Black residents filed insurance claims for their destroyed property. Every claim was denied — insurers cited "riot exclusion" clauses. The city of Tulsa proposed a rebuilding plan that would have converted Greenwood into an industrial zone — using the massacre to accomplish through zoning what had just been accomplished through fire. Black residents, led by attorney B.C. Franklin (father of historian John Hope Franklin), went to court and blocked the rezoning. They rebuilt anyway — within a year, most of the district had been reconstructed — but without insurance compensation and without any accountability for its destruction.

For 75 years, the Tulsa Massacre was effectively erased from Oklahoma's public record. It was not taught in public schools. The Tulsa Tribune destroyed copies of its own coverage. City records were lost. Survivors were warned not to speak of it — many complied, fearing retaliation and recognizing that the same institutional power that had organized the massacre was still intact. The event was described, when mentioned at all, as a "race riot" — language that implied mutual combat rather than organized assault.

The massacre began to re-enter public awareness through the work of Black historians and journalists beginning in the 1970s. Tulsa journalist Don Ross wrote about it in the Black newspaper the Oklahoma Eagle. Historians Scott Ellsworth and John Hope Franklin pushed for official recognition. The story reached broader public consciousness through Randy Krehbiel's Tulsa World coverage and eventually through the HBO series Watchmen (2019), which opened with a dramatization of the massacre and introduced it to millions of viewers who had never heard of it.

In 1997, the Oklahoma legislature created the Tulsa Race Riot Commission to investigate the massacre. Its final report, issued in 2001, was a model of documented historical accountability: it confirmed the death toll, the use of aircraft, the city's role in the attack, the systematic erasure, and the ongoing economic harm to Greenwood descendants. The commission explicitly recommended reparations — direct payments to survivors and their descendants, economic development funds for Greenwood, a memorial, and an educational endowment.

The Oklahoma legislature accepted the memorial and the educational components. It rejected the direct reparations payments. Governor Frank Keating called the recommendations "excessive." The legislature passed a bill establishing a scholarship fund — the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Scholarship — with no appropriation attached to it. The commission's most substantive recommendation, the one that addressed the economic harm directly, was declined.

In 2020, three of the last surviving witnesses to the Tulsa Massacre — Lessie Benningfield Randle (107), Viola Fletcher (107), and Hughes Van Ellis — filed a lawsuit seeking reparations from the city of Tulsa. Viola Fletcher testified before Congress: "I am 107 years old. I have never seen justice. I pray that one day I will." The lawsuit sought damages under a public nuisance theory — arguing that the conditions created by the massacre constituted an ongoing public nuisance that the city was obligated to remedy.

In November 2023, Tulsa District Court Judge Caroline Wall dismissed the lawsuit, finding that the plaintiffs had not established sufficient harm to pursue a public nuisance claim. The same month, Lessie Benningfield Randle died at age 109 — the last known living survivor of the massacre. She had waited 102 years for a legal accounting. It did not come.

In 2021, on the centennial of the massacre, a memorial was dedicated in the Greenwood District. President Biden visited Tulsa and acknowledged the massacre in full — the first sitting US president to do so. The centennial brought international media coverage and public reckoning. It also coincided with rapid gentrification of the Greenwood area, as the rising property values brought by recognition and new development displaced many of the Black residents and businesses that had survived. The neighborhood is now home to the ONEOK Field baseball stadium and various mixed-use developments. The Black-owned businesses that remain operate in a neighborhood that no longer looks like what was destroyed.

The pattern established by the Tulsa Massacre — destroy Black economic power, erase the record, acknowledge the harm when forced to, decline to repair it — is the pattern this archive documents across 400 years. The massacre was not exceptional. It was the system operating as designed: Black prosperity identified, Black prosperity destroyed, accountability denied. What distinguishes Tulsa is only that it happened in 35 blocks in two days, making it impossible — eventually — to ignore.