For most of you, what you are about to read will be entirely new to you. And for many of you, you will think it to be so unbelievable that you will question if it is true.
But it is true.
Had what happened in Tulsa on May 30, 1921 been done to American citizens by the Germans, the French or the Japanese there would be a national holiday of remembrance. Every American student would be taught the events of this day, in detail. Hollywood would have produced dozens of films about it and people would still be saying, “never forget”.
But it didn’t happen to us by people outside of America.
This was Americans doing this to other Americans.
The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was a race riot where a group of white people attacked an affluent black community of Greenwood district in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood was not just any affluent black community. At the time, The Greenwood district was home of one of the most successful and wealthiest black communities in the United States. Greenwood was popularly known as America’s “Black Wall Street”. The Greenwood district was home to several prominent black businessmen, many of them multi-millionaires in 1921. The Greenwood community was home to dozens of black lawyers, realtors, doctors etc. In fact, at the time of the riot, Greenwood was home to fifteen nationally known black American doctors, one of whom, Dr. A.C. Jackson, was considered the “most able Negro surgeon in America”.
The success of the Greenwood district, prior to the riot, was in part due to segregation. You see, during segregation blacks could not spend their money in white establishments, so small businesses in the black community had to provide everything that the black community needed. So these black millionaires couldn’t shop anywhere but in Greenwood. So unlike today, how when a black person gets a paycheck and their money immediately leaves the black community and goes to Target, Ford, Wal-Mart, Chili’s or Costco for example, in 1921 most if not all of that paycheck went to a black owned business and those very same dollars were spent in other black owned businesses. That same dollar would be spent over and over in the black community and everyone in that community benefitted. But in just a matter of 16 short hours, more than 800 black Greenwood residents had to be admitted into Tulsa white hospitals, where normally blacks were not allowed admittance, because the white rioters had burned the two black hospitals in Greenwood to the ground.
In fact, white mobs were literally going block to block ordering blacks to leave their homes, killing any that resisted without hesitation and then burning their homes to the ground whether there was someone in the home or not. Dr. A.C. Jackson, the “most able Negro surgeon in America”, was shot to death by white rioters who had ordered Jackson to leave his own home.
What were the police doing at the time? They were arresting blacks and disarming them so that they couldn’t defend their homes and families from the rioters. Over 6,000 blacks were arrested or detained by police. The rioters showed no mercy, killing black men, women and even children. If this had happened in a third world African country we might’ve called this ethnic cleansing.
In the end, 10,000 blacks were left homeless.
The entire Greenwood district, 35 city blocks, had been burned to the ground, and although the official death count was 39, I personally think it would be ill advice to take the word of the people who were doing the murdering to provide us an accurate account on how many people they killed. So I put more weight on the estimates from black scholars who spoke with the families of the victims that place the death toll closer to 300. The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 has another dubious distinction. It remains to this day the only time in American history that American citizens have been bombed from the air on American soil.
Yes, whites in coordination with the Oklahoma National Guard loaded incendiary bombs on old World War I airplanes, flew over the Greenwood district, and dropped bombs from the air on top of their heads. Yes, black Americans had been air bombed by members of their state’s own National guard.
After the riots, the local authorities quickly outlawed funerals so that the black families of the Greenwood victims could not hold funerals for their loved ones.
Wait, go back and read that again.
They outlawed funerals immediately after the riots. Most if not all of the victims of the riots were buried in unmarked mass graves or in coffins which held 2, 3 or sometimes 4 in a box. Every single insurance company refused to honor ANY of the insurance policies of the black residents in the Greenwood area of Tulsa preventing them from rebuilding.
So how did this all start?
Guess.
A 19-year-old black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland, who was employed at a local shine parlor, entered an elevator to go to the bathroom at the black only bathroom. The elevator operator was a white woman named Sarah Page. A clerk at a clothing store located on the first floor of the building said that she heard a scream and saw a black male running from the building. The clerk then went to the elevator and found Sarah looking distraught, assuming that she had been assaulted by the black male she had seen fleeing the building, she called the police. Although the police spoke to Sarah, there has never been any written account of her statement. At the time of the riot there were 3,200 Ku Klux Klan members in Tulsa. Dick Rowland, having reason to be afraid, fled to his mother’s home in the Greenwood district of Tulsa. It was May 30, 1921.
On June 1st, the police arrested the young shoe shiner Dick Rowland at his mother’s home. He was taken to the jail in Tulsa where a group of angry white men, all armed, had already gathered. Shortly after, a group of armed black men then assembled outside of the jail to protect Dick Rowland from the angry crowd. Words were exchanged. One of the white men then tried to take a gun from a black man and, in the tussle, a bullet fired into the sky. Everyone drew their guns. Bullets were fired from both sides, and then it began. Those are the facts of that fateful day. But those facts don’t tell the whole story of why there was a riot in Tulsa in 1921. Just like the Ferguson, Missouri Riots of 2014 were not caused by the killing of Michael Brown by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, the Tulsa Race riot of 1921 was not caused by the alleged assault of a white elevator operator by a shoeshine boy. The Ferguson riot was caused because a community’s frustration had boiled over into anger at what had been years of what they perceived as systemic mistreatment and abuse of power by the Ferguson police department. The killing of Michael Brown was just the spark that ignited it. The same is also true of the riot in Tulsa in 1921.
The Tulsa race riot of 1921 did not just jump off between two peacefully coexisting, God fearing Christian communities. The relationship between the white and black community didn’t suddenly curdle and spoil after a clerk at a clothing store sees a black shoe shiner running from the building and then finds a distraught white female elevator operator. There was long standing tension between whites and blacks in Tulsa. It’s no secret that the surrounding White community deeply resented the success and affluence of the blacks living right next to them. To place the cause of this riot solely on the jealousy of the white community towards an affluent black community seems admittedly ridiculous, outside of the context of white supremacy. But we must remember that the tenants of white supremacy make seeing blacks living better than they are quite unbearable. Because they feel entitled to being able to live better than blacks simply because they are white. Although in the end there were over 300 people killed, not a single person was ever charged for anything, not for the killings, the arson, the looting, nothing.
Not a single resident of the Greenwood district was ever reimbursed for their loss of property. Like I said when I started, for most of you, what you just read was entirely new to you and probably hard to believe.
But it happened.
All of it.
But now you know.
Don’t forget it.