Today is the 100th anniversary of the 1921 attack on Tulsa’s Black Wall Street. As has been reported by many recently, it was not a "race riot," it was a massacre. The historical record documents a sustained and murderous assault on black lives and property. This assault was met by a brave but unsuccessful armed defense of their community by some black World War I veterans and others.
During the night and day of the attack, deputized whites killed nearly 300 African Americans. They looted and burned to the ground 40 square blocks of 1,265 African American homes, including hospitals, schools, and churches, and destroyed 150 businesses. White deputies and members of the National Guard arrested and detained 6,000 black Tulsans who were released only upon being vouched for by a white employer or other white citizen. Over 9,000 African Americans were left homeless and lived in tents well into the winter of 1921. Property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (about $34 million in today's dollars).
It was pure envy, and a vow to put progressive, high-achieving African Americans in their place that would cause the demise of the Black Mecca many white Tulsans called “Little Africa,” and its destruction began the way much terrorism, violence, and dispossession against African Americans did during that era. A young white woman accused a young Black man of attempted sexual assault, which gave local mobs and white men acting as police just cause to invade the unsuspecting community.
Survivors of the massacre described how even policemen had joined the mob; others
said that National Guardsmen fired a machine gun into the Black
community and a plane dropped sticks of dynamite. In an eyewitness
account discovered in 2015, Greenwood attorney Buck Colbert Franklin
described watching a dozen or more private planes drop burning balls of
turpentine on Greenwood's rooftops.
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