Justice / Drawing

The Massacre of Black Wall Street

In 1921, White rioters destroyed a beacon of Black prosperity and security. This is what happened, and why it still matters today.

by Natalie Chang via The Atlantic on October 20, 2019

...alt=""> A White Tulsan reached for a Black Tulsan’s gun, and started a struggle. The shot that resulted might have been an accident, but the hundreds that followed it over the next 24 hours were not.

To the whites at the courthouse, that errant shot was permission to unleash the rage that had been building for hours.

But really, this was a rage that had been burning as long as wealthy, thriving Greenwood had been in Tulsa.

That night, the white mob burned Black Wall Street to the ground.

White Tulsans who were deputized en masse just hours earlier arrested 6,000 black residents that night, holding them in makeshift confinement camps for weeks.

By noon on June 1, white rioters had burned down 35 city blocks in Greenwood: dozens of black-owned businesses that had anchored the neighborhood, hundreds of homes, and half a dozen churches. Ten thousand Greenwood residents were left homeless.

Fifteen years of black wealth and self-sufficiency were razed in one night. In the aftermath, the Tulsa City Commission passed fire ordinances that blocked the rebuilding of Greenwood. So many of Tulsa’s black residents had no choice but to just…leave.

Most of the victims of the massacre were piled into unmarked graves and buried. And for decades after, what happened that night was buried, too.

100 - 300 Greenwood residents killed

9,000 Greenwood residents left homeless

1,200 Greenwood buildings destroyed

$50-100 million in property damage

“If you bury something long enough, it can become very difficult to unearth.”

Dr. Scott Ellsworth is a professor of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan and author of Death in a Promised Land, the first comprehensive history of the Tulsa massacre. He was also one of the lead scholars for the Tulsa Race Riot Commission and a key player in the battle to secure reparations for survivors. According to him, the lasting trauma of the massacre is also intrinsically tied to the silencing of survivors.

“For 50 years, the story was actively suppressed in Tulsa, and it was deliberately kept out of the White newspapers. The people who brought it up were threatened with their jobs; they were threatened with their lives,” he says. The story of the massacre indicts White America, which is why it was buried for so long. Without the perseverance and openness of the survivors of the riot, he says, there would be no mainstream acknowledgment of what happened in 1921.