The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
Kept from history books For half a century
Believed to be the single worst incident of racial violence in American history, the bloody 1921 Tulsa race riot has continued to haunt Oklahomans to the present day. During the course of eighteen terrible hours on May 31 and June 1, 1921, more than one thousand homes and businesses were destroyed, while credible estimates of riot deaths range from fifty to three hundred. By the time the violence ended, the city had been placed under martial law, thousands of Tulsans were being held under armed guard, and the state’s second-largest African American community had been burned to the ground.
Armed Blacks try to stop mob
Events in Tulsa were precipitated with the arrest of Dick Rowland, a young Black worker, who was falsely accused of assaulting a 17-year-old white woman. Incited by inflammatory stories in the newspapers about the incident, a white mob began to gather outside of the Tulsa County Courthouse where Rowland was being detained.
Having every belief that Rowland would be lynched, 25 armed African American war veterans “decided to cast their lot not only with an endangered fellow member of the race, but also, literally, upon the side of justice,” and offered their services to the authorities to defend the courthouse, the commission reports.
The appearance of the armed men had an electrifying effect on the white mob, estimated to be more than 1,000 strong. The authorities refused their offer but a second group of 75 Blacks returned to make another offer to defend the city building. By that time the crowd had grown to nearly 2,000 people. It was then, the report describes, that a shot went off after a white man tried to take away a gun from one of the Blacks as they were leaving the courthouse.
Almost immediately the white mob and possibly some law enforcement officers opened fire on the African American men who fired back in self-defense. They began a retreat, fighting their way back to the Greenwood district.
What followed was a pogrom that took place with the complicity of the city authorities and National Guard. In 16 hours of terror, the white mob shot, looted, and torched Black homes and businesses, forcing thousands to flee for refuge into the countryside. Reports by survivors of the attack that they were bombed from the air by Sinclair Oil Company planes are probably accurate, according to the commission.
Many who joined the assault were among the 500 white men deputized and armed after the shooting broke out at the courthouse, including the would-be lynchers who had gathered there that night.
The intervention of the National Guard was not only late and militarily inadequate, but, the report explains, targeted the Black community as well. Instead of disarming the racist mob, the Guard unit concentrated its efforts on disarming and arresting nearly all of Greenwood’s residents, putting them in holding centers. It was the city’s official policy to only release a Black person if a white agreed to take responsibility for the detainee’s subsequent behavior.
Blacks organized to defend themselves and their community. John Hope Franklin in the foreword to the book Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 wrote, “Many more whites were killed during the riot than any whites were willing to admit” in the years that followed.
The report contains a chilling list of how “civil officials” deputized and armed those who perpetrated the violence and “failed to take actions to calm or contain the situation.” People, “some of them agents of the government, also deliberately burned 1,256 homes, along with virtually every other structure” in the Greenwood district. “No government at any level,” the report says, “offered adequate resistance, if any at all,” to the assault, and in the end “the restoration of Greenwood after its systematic destruction was left to the victims of that destruction.”
Although unable to determine the exact role of the Ku Klux Klan in the assault, “Everyone agrees that within months of the riot Tulsa’s Klan chapter had become one of the nation’s largest and most powerful, able to dictate its will with the ballot as well as the whip,” the commission found. “Everyone agrees that many of the city’s most prominent men were klans men in the early 1920s and that some remained klans men throughout the decade.”
The Daily Tribune, according to the report, played a big role in playing up the charges against Rowland, with a May 31, 1921, headline “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.” The paper is also said to have run an editorial, “To Lynch Negro Tonight.” All copies of the pages with these two articles have been destroyed.
American history
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Tulsa OK 1921: US Government Bombs US City
National Guard troops patrolling the streets armed. Thousands of black people held in a convention center. Hundreds of black dead, with bodies piled like wood. That was not New Orleans, that was Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June 1921.On May 30, 1921 a young black man named Dick Rowland, stumbled into a white woman, while entering an elevator. He was accused of assault, and arrested the next day. Newly rich from oil Tulsa, was a Ku Klux Klan town. Rowland was sentenced to be hanged. The Tulsa Tribune called for a “Negro lynching tonight.”The white mob was surprised when they were met by several dozen armed black men, dressed in their World War I uniforms. This led to a racist three day destruction of the black neighborhood of Greenwood. The Red Cross reported 300 mostly dead black people.Greenwood called “Little Africa,” was a relatively wealthy community. White mobs, many deputized, destroyed every house, store, church or school. The mob met resistance from an armed black population. Governor Robertson declared martial law. The National Guard arrived with machine gun mounted trucks, and airplanes hovering over Greenwood. It was the first time an American city was bombed from the air, by the US government.Over 6,000 black people, were round up and held in the convention center and fairgrounds, as long as eight days. The homeless were shuttled into a tent city, where typhoid and malnutrition took over. Blacks were allowed out of the convention center, with a tag, with an employers name. Thosands fled the city.Attempts to turn Greenwood into an industrial zone were unsuccessful. For several years, it was deprived of paved streets, running water, and garbage collection.See: Tulsa Reparations Coalition and thank you to Internationalist Group for presenting this story in your newspaper.
RENEGADE EYE
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I had no idea.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mbdezyOLeN1r6qnz0o1_500.jpg)
