THE TULSA RACE MASSACRE By Jemima As the whole world knows, in May 2020, George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, by Derek Chauvin, a serving US police officer. The killing shocked the world and galvanised the Black Lives Matter movement. But 99 years earlier, the single worst incident of racial violence in US history took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Greenwood district of the city was completely destroyed, and hundreds of African Americans were killed. So, why has it taken 100 years for us to find out about it? The late 1910s and early 1920s were a very dark time for race relations in America. Segregation was increasing and in 1915 there was a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, the largest and most powerful terrorist group in US history. Race riots and lynchings were commonplace.
On the afternoon of May 31st, 1921, the Tulsa Tribune, one of the city’s white daily newspapers, published an inflammatory frontpage story claiming that a 19-yearold African American shoe-shiner named Dick Rowland had sexually assaulted a 17-year-old white female lift operator in an office building. The story was entitled “To Lynch Negro Tonight,” and within half an hour of the newspaper hitting the streets, a white lynch mob began to gather outside the courthouse where Dick Rowland was being held in a cell. When the town of Greenwood found out later that evening that the white mob was planning to storm the courthouse, 75 African American World War 1 veterans went peacefully to the courthouse and offered their services to the sheriff to help protect the prisoner. But as a white man attempted to disarm one of the veterans, a shot was fired and the massacre had begun. The Tulsa police then arrived, and instead of stopping the violence, they provided
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members of the lynch mob with arms, inciting them to attack the peaceful African Americans. For the next few hours, crowds of white people murdered innocent African Americans throughout Greenwood, taking part in drive-by shootings in residential streets, firing into parlours and children’s bedrooms, setting fire to houses and looting businesses owned by African Americans, killing any who resisted and imprisoning those who did
not. Not only did the police and local National Guard units fail to stop the white lynch mobs, they also fired on African American citizens using machine guns, even dropping sticks of dynamite from private aeroplanes. Before the violence finally ended the following afternoon, more than 1,000 African American homes were destroyed and over 10,000 were made homeless, their homes reduced to ash and rubble.
