The story was just five paragraphs long, placed at the bottom-right column of the front page.
"Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator," read the attention-grabbing headline in the May 31, 1921, edition of the white-owned Tulsa Tribune.
That was "The Story That Set Tulsa Ablaze," the Black-owned Black Dispatch would later declare.
The deeply flawed story of an alleged assault attempt by a Black man of a white woman in an elevator has been credited by historians as helping to instigate a massacre that in less than 24 hours left an estimated hundreds of Black residents dead and destroyed 35 blocks of a prosperous Black enclave in one of the deadliest episodes of racial violence in American history.
The May 31 story is a stark example of the integral role the media played in both fomenting and portraying what was then known as the "Tulsa Race Riot," as well as squelching efforts to help the Black community rebuild.
Racist headlines and skewed news coverage mixed with openly bigoted editorials followed in its wake, but for some historians what wasn't covered is the most concerning thing about media's role in the tragedy.
"More than what was said, was what was left out," said assistant professor Rosemary Avance, of Oklahoma State University's School of Media and Strategic Communications. "What was consciously not covered, what pages that might’ve been removed from the archives, and how the media documented history as it unfolded are why 100 years later we're still seeking answers."
Avance teaches classes at OSU-Tulsa, including a graduate-level course she taught last fall with adjunct professor and public relations professional Nicole Morgan called “Case Studies in PR: Tulsa Race Massacre."
She said the university is well aware of the importance of recognizing the whole truth about the tragedy. Especially considering where the Tulsa campus sits.
"We're located on Standpipe Hill," she said. "The same hill where a white mob turned machine guns on Black residents."
The course studied the impact of media and discerned careless reporting and social ignorance from the challenge of reporting truth offensive to the collective unconscious of an era. That history resonates today as Oklahoma and America re-examine the role of systemic racism and how it's shaped the country's history.