Panorama of the damage soon after the massacre.
The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is Black advancement.
The Tulsa race massacre remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in the modern history of the USA, one of its deadliest terrorist attacks. [1]
It took place on 31st May and 1st June 1921 in the Greenwood District (“Black Wall Street”) of Tulsa, Oklahoma—then one of the wealthiest Black communities in the USA. Following the arrest of a young Black shoeshiner, Black citizens gathered to prevent him being lynched. As martial law was declared, mobs of white residents—some of whom had been deputised and given weapons by city officials—attacked Black residents and destroyed homes, businesses, churches, and schools, including aerial bombardments by incendiary devices.
More than 800 people were admitted to hospital, and as many as 6,000 Black residents of Tulsa were interned, many of them for several days. At least 39 people were killed, with some estimates as high as 300. Around 10,000 Black people were left homeless; over a thousand homes were destroyed.
In the years to come, as Black Tulsans worked to rebuild their ruined homes and businesses, segregation in the city only increased, and Oklahoma’s newly established branch of the KKK grew in strength.
Black and white residents kept silent about the massacre for decades; it was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories. There were no public ceremonies or commemorations; instead, the events were deliberately covered up.
The silence began to be broken from the 1970s. The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, founded in 1996, delivered its report in 2001 (the name was changed to the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission in 2018). Only since 2002 have schools in Oklahoma been required to teach students about the massacre, and in 2020 it officially became a part of the school curriculum there.
Several documentaries are available, such as from OETA, CBS and Vox.
[1] Some sources:
https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/
https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/tulsa-race-massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/31/tulsa-race-massacre-at-100-act-of-terrorism
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/01/tulsa-race-massacre-a-century-later
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/may/28/tulsa-race-massacre-documentary-the-fire-and-the-forgotten
See also Scott Ellsworth’s book The ground breaking (LRB review);
and for the context of racial terrorism in the States from 1917 to 1921, click here.
Stephen Jones: a blog 