By the spring of 1921, the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was widely regarded as the most prosperous Black community in the United States. Covering roughly thirty-five square blocks on the north side of the Frisco railroad tracks, it contained more than two hundred Black-owned businesses: grocery stores, a theater, a hospital, two newspapers, a public library, law offices, a bank, and the Dreamland Theatre. Booker T. Washington, who had visited the district in 1913, gave it the name that would stick: Black Wall Street.
On May 31 and June 1, 1921, Greenwood was destroyed. The trigger was an alleged assault on a white elevator operator by a Black shoe-shiner named Dick Rowland — an allegation for which no credible evidence was ever produced, and which was not pursued in court. A white mob, estimated at ten thousand people and augmented by armed deputies and the Oklahoma National Guard, crossed the tracks, looted the district, and burned it to the ground. Private aircraft dropped incendiaries from the air. At least three hundred Black Tulsans were killed; the true figure is likely higher and may never be known.
In the immediate aftermath, the official response was to blame the victims. Greenwood residents were rounded up into internment camps and held for weeks; insurance claims for property destroyed in the massacre were rejected on the grounds that the damage had been caused by "riot," which most policies excluded. The Tulsa Race Massacre was then systematically erased from public memory for the next three generations. It was not taught in Oklahoma schools. It did not appear in most American history textbooks. It was referred to, when referred to at all, as a "riot" — a framing that placed responsibility for the violence on the community that had been destroyed.
The recovery of the massacre as public history began in the 1990s, driven by a handful of historians, journalists, and descendants. The 2001 Oklahoma Commission Report was the first official state document to describe what had happened and to recommend reparations, which were never paid. In 2021, on the massacre's centennial, President Biden became the first sitting president to visit Greenwood. The district itself, after a century of disinvestment and highway construction that bisected it in the 1960s, is the subject of ongoing restoration efforts led by descendants and community organizations.
