31/05/2021
100 years ago today, the deadliest racial massacre in U.S. history began in the thriving Greenwood African American community of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
In May of 1921, the imprisonment of Dick Rowland, a black man falsely accused of assaulting a white woman, sparked the Tulsa massacre. A lynch mob gathered to hang Rowland and black Tulsans hurried to the courthouse to protect him. From May 31 to June 1, white mobs ransacked, razed, and burned over 1,000 homes, businesses, and churches in Greenwood, and murdered scores of African Americans.
“For fully forty eight hours, the fires raged and burned everything in its path and it left nothing but ashes and burned safes and trunks and the like where once stood beautiful homes and business houses. And so proud, rick, black Tulsa was destroyed by fire—that is its buildings and property; but its spirit was neither killed nor daunted.”- B. C. Franklin
Dozens of black-owned businesses were rebuilt in Greenwood within a year of the massacre, and hundreds more followed over the next three decades. This rapid rebuilding illustrates the energy and resiliency of the community. But the massacre’s repercussions—and questions of race, memory, and repair—continue to resonate in Tulsa and across the nation.
