In 1996, 75 years after the massacre, a bipartisan group in the state legislature authorized the formation of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. The massacre was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories. Many survivors left Tulsa, while residents who chose to stay in the city, regardless of race, largely kept silent about the terror, violence, and resulting losses for decades. By the end of 1922, most of the residents' homes had been rebuilt, but the city and real estate companies refused to compensate them. Around noon on June 1, the Oklahoma National Guard imposed martial law, ending the massacre.Ībout 10,000 black people were left homeless, and the cost of the property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (equivalent to $36.92 million in 2022). White rioters invaded Greenwood that night and the next morning, killing men and burning and looting stores and homes. As news of the violence spread throughout the city, mob violence exploded. It is possible that the eyewitness did not recognize the fact that this incident was occurring as a part of a rolling gunfight which was already underway. Alternatively, another eyewitness account was that the shooting began "down the street from the Courthouse" when black business owners came to the defense of a lone black man being attacked by a group of around six white men. Subsequently, the group reportedly fled back into Greenwood, shooting as they went. A gunshot went off, and then, according to the sheriff's reports, "all hell broke loose." At the end of the exchange of gunfire, 12 people were dead, 10 white and 2 black. ![]() Mann refused, and the old man attempted to disarm him. Mann, a black man, and demanded that he hand over his pistol. The most widely reported and corroborated inciting incident occurred as the group of black men left, when an elderly white man approached O. The sheriff persuaded the group to leave the jail, assuring them that he had the situation under control. Upon hearing reports that a mob of hundreds of white men had gathered around the jail where Rowland was being held, a group of 75 black men, some armed, arrived at the jail to protect Rowland. He was arrested and rumors that he was to be lynched were spread throughout the city, where a white man named Roy Belton had been lynched the previous year. The massacre began during Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white 17-year-old elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building. ![]() The commission gave several estimates ranging from 75 to 300 dead. The 2001 Tulsa Reparations Coalition examination of events identified 39 dead, 26 black and 13 white, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates, and other records. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead. More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 black residents of Tulsa were interned in large facilities, many of them for several days. The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood-at the time one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, colloquially known as "Black Wall Street." The event is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history. The Tulsa race massacre, also known as the Tulsa race riot or the Black Wall Street massacre, was a two-day-long white supremacist terrorist massacre that took place between May 31 – June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been appointed as deputies and armed by city government officials, attacked black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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