May 31, 1921, 100 years ago: The Tulsa Race Massacre begins, and continues into the next day. Mobs of White residents, some of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The attacks burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood – at the time one of the wealthiest Black communities in the United States, 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 were interned for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead. The actual death toll may have been as high as 300.
The massacre began when 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a Black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, the 17-year-old White elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building. He was taken into custody. After he was arrested, rumors which stated that he was going to be lynched were spread throughout the city.
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 of whom were armed, arrived at the jail in order to ensure that Rowland would not be lynched. The sheriff persuaded the group to leave the jail, assuring them that he had the situation under control.
An old 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. Mann shot him, and then, according to the sheriff's reports, "all hell broke loose." At the end of the exchange of gunfire, 12 people were dead, 10 White and 2 Black. Subsequently the militants fled back into Greenwood shooting as they went. 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.
About 10,000 Black people were left homeless, and property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property, equivalent to $32.7 million today. Many survivors left Tulsa, while Black and White residents who stayed in the city largely kept silent about the terror, violence, and resulting losses for decades.
The massacre was largely omitted from local, state and national histories. Growing up white in a mostly-white suburb in the 1970s and '80s, I didn't learn about it until around 2000 or so. With the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement in the early 21st Century, the event has re-entered the national consciousness, including as a plot point in the 2017 TV miniseries version of Watchmen.
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