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Today marks the anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre.
From SPLC:
May 31 marks the 90th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Riot. You can be excused if you’ve never heard of it. Despite being the bloodiest attack on African-American citizens in U.S. history, the riot was almost completely ignored by most history books for about 75 years. Only recently has the event received the attention it deserves.
In 1921, the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Okla., was one of the most prosperous black neighborhoods in the country. Greenwood’s nickname was “the Negro Wall Street.” The discovery of oil in Tulsa in 1901 turned the city into a boomtown. In the 1910s, Tulsa’s economic good times coincided with an exodus of African Americans from the Deep South called the Great Migration. Oklahoma was a Jim Crow state. But blacks wanted to cash in on the state’s oil wealth like everyone else.
here was one problem: The speedy arrival of so many blacks—as well as immigrants from overseas — provoked fear among many of Oklahoma’s whites. A great number of them had come from the South or the conservative Midwest. The 1910s witnessed a resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan nationally, and Oklahoma joined the trend enthusiastically. Soon after the riot, Tulsa would report more than 2,000 people had signed up with the Klan.
The riot started on May 31, 1921, in the way many racial disturbances did at the time — with an accusation that a black man assaulted a white woman. Whites gathered to lynch the 19-year-old being accused. But they were surprised when local African Americans, some of them veterans of World War I, moved to defend him with guns. One white man tried to disarm a black man. They struggled. A shot was fired. The riot was on.
Numerous accounts described airplanes carrying white assailants firing rifles and dropping firebombs on buildings, homes, and fleeing families. The planes, six biplane two-seater trainers left over from World War I, were dispatched from the nearby Curtiss-Southwest Field (now defunct) outside of Tulsa. White law enforcement officials later claimed the sole purpose of the planes was to provide reconnaissance and protect whites against what they described as a “Negro uprising.” However, eyewitness accounts and testimony from the survivors confirmed that on the morning of June 1, the planes dropped incendiary bombs and fired rifles at black Tulsans on the ground. Even one white newspaper in Tulsa reported that airplanes circled over Greenwood during the riot.
In her “Author’s Note”, Jewell Parker Rhodes cites a 1983 Parade magazine headline article entitled “The Only U.S. City Bombed from the Air” as the initial inspiration for her 1997 novel Magic City.
Several groups of blacks attempted to organize a defense, but were ultimately overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of whites and weapons. Many blacks, conceding defeat, surrendered. Still others returned fire, ultimately losing their lives.
As the fires spread northward through Greenwood, countless black families continued to flee. Many died when trapped by the flames.
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