The Gruesome Racial Jealousy that led to the Tulsa Massacre in 1921
A white mob drove by racial superiority destroyed the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was flourished by Black people for the Black people.
After the Civil War, the Black Americans settled largely in the Greenwood District of Tulsa. They developed it, modernized it, and considered it a heaven for the Blacks. However, they didn’t know that it will become their mass grave one day. Owing to its checkered history of violence, discrimination, and segregation based on color, race, and gender, the USA hid this heinous Tulsa massacre that happened from May 31 to June 1921 for decades when a white mob orchestrated a rampage that ran amok through the predominantly Greenwood Blacks. They killed Blacks mercilessly, burned their homes and business buildings, and looted their wealth. Despite the magnanimity of the incident, the News reports, media persons, and the government didn’t let the matter come to the fore until recently.
Black Wall Street Was the primary target of the white mob
The Blacks flocked together to the Greenwood District between 1865 to 1920. Thousands of African Americans settled there and build their fortunes in a self-contained business hub known as Black Wall Street that was thriving day in and day out. Since the Civil War, the region was safe for the Blacks from the cruelties of the resurrection of Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow Laws that deliberately target the Blacks to keep them socially, economically, and educationally backward. Thus, the Greenwood district was a heaven for them to realize their dreams of progress. It was a place “built for Black people, by Black people”. The gruesome racial violence in Tulsa emanating from racial jealousy burned and decimated 35 blocks of what had been the business hub of blacks in the Greenwood District.
The development of the Greenwood District was the dream of their collective efforts
Amid Jim Crow law discrimination, the Black entrepreneurs pooled their wealth to develop a self-contained successful business in the Greenwood District. O.W. Gurley was the early known entrepreneur who bought 40 acres of land in Tulsa and started his business. He helped other blacks to start their own businesses by giving them loans. J.B. Stradford was another wealthy black businessperson who established an expensive and luxury hotel in Tulsa that housed 50 guest rooms, a saloon, a dining room, and a pool hall. Meanwhile, A.J. Smitherman catered to the intellectual level of the blacks by founding a Black newspaper in Greenwood known as the Tulsa Star newspaper.
The reason behind the destruction of the Greenwood success
The Blacks were thriving economically, socially, and the Greenwood District became a symbol of their wealth, success, and pride. However, their success was pricking in many eyes. The racially jealous were already trying to find means to destroy their successful city within a city and to end their rise. However, among other reasons, the primary reason they cite was that a 19-year-old Black boy offended a 17-year-old white female elevator attendant. The local newspapers presented the story in a much-hyped way and drummed it up for days that stirred the rage in the whites. When the law was an option and dealing with one man could have solved the problem, the whites were hellbent on the destruction of the Greenwood to uproot their success forever. The attack on the Blacks began on May 31, 1921, and was carried on for 18 hours of brutal killing, raping, destruction, and burning the valuable buildings across Black Wall Street that resulted in enormous loss of human and wealth. The massacre left an indelible mark on the minds of the Blacks whose near ones were killed and left homeless.
When the girl was investigated about the case, she told the police that the boy only held her hand and nothing more happened and that she didn’t want to sue him for that. But white conspirators were all in waiting for a chance to launch an attack and they found it.
It was not just a ground attack, but airplanes also played their part
People would have considered it a justice-driven mob had they only punished the man who insulted the white woman, but they targeted and destroyed businesses, and that’s why it was a fit of racial jealousy smoldering under their skin that erupted with an error of one man and led to the destruction of thousands of innocents. The attack was not only on the ground but they also employed airplanes to target the business blocks of Black Wall Street. According to sources, the local airfield had only 15 airplanes stored and some of them were used in the attack. However, it remains a mystery still who owned those airplanes and who mobilized them.
Some historians even doubt the use of airplanes and try to conceal the facts. But according to Mary E. Jones Parrish, who was a teacher and journalist in the Greenwood District and witnessed the event herself, recounts the gruesome experience in her book Events of the Tulsa Disaster (First published in 1922 and then in 2021 with more sensitive details):
“fast-approaching airplanes and that more than a dozen airplanes went up and began to drop turpentine balls upon the Negro residences.”
She even quoted other anonymous eyewitnesses who had seen low-flying airplanes that “left the entire block a mass of flame” as they flew over the block. Further pieces of evidence are being provided by the 2001 Commission report, the Black newspapers were “full of stories of turpentine or nitroglycerin bombs being dropped and men shooting from planes.”
Walter White, a reporter of The Nation, also wrote that:
“eight airplanes were employed to spy on the movements of the Negroes and according to some were used in bombing the colored section.”
A culture of silence prevailed
After this devastating, heart-wrenching, and magnanimous event in the history of the USA, it was shrouded and covered up successfully till 1998. The media, the local newspaper, the people who witnessed it, and those who survived it never spoke of it. Those who were born right after the event heard nothing of it and the subsequent generations were kept in the dark. They didn’t know that such an orchestrated massacre happened. The event was even omitted from the national, state, and local histories. There was no mention of it anywhere. All the records were silent.
“The Tulsa race riot of 1921 was rarely mentioned in history books, classrooms, or even in private. Black and White people alike grew into middle age, unaware of what had taken place.” — Sulzberger
The Tulsa massacre’s conspiracy was unearthed almost 79 years later when in 1996, the state legislature formed the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. The commission published its reports in 2001 that confirmed that the city had conspired to use a white mob against the Black citizens of the Greenwood District.
On the hundred anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, President Joe Biden visited the Greenwood District and said in his speech these remarkable words in the event's remembrance:
“Some injustices are so heinous, so horrific, so grievous, they cannot be buried, no matter how hard people try.”
