FEATURE
TULSA RECKONS WITH THE
By Helen Thompson
O
n May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner, walked into an elevator in downtown Tulsa, Okla. What happened next is unclear, but it sparked the Tulsa race massacre, one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history, with a death toll estimated in the hundreds. A century later, researchers are still trying to find the bodies of the victims. A new excavation has brought renewed hope that these individuals could one day be found and identified. By some accounts, Rowland may have tripped and bumped the arm of a 17-year-old white elevator operator named
Sarah Page. Others said he stepped on her Engineer John Wesley Williams and his wife foot. Some recalled hearing her scream. Loula, a teacher, shown in Others wondered if the two had been 1915 with their son W.D., sweet on each other and had a sort of owned Greenwood’s Dreamland Theater, lovers’ quarrel. Whatever happened, it which was destroyed in was a dangerous time for a young Black the Tulsa massacre. man to be caught in a precarious situation with a young white woman. Tulsa’s population had skyrocketed to over 100,000 people. Most of the city’s African American residents, about 11,000, lived in a section called Greenwood. The neighborhood’s concentration of thriving entrepreneurs earned it the nickname “Black Wall Street” from Booker T. Washington in the early 1910s. Greenwood became an oasis from racial prejudice and violence, says Alicia Odewale, a native Tulsan and archaeologist at the University of Tulsa. “You could buy land, create businesses and raise families.” TULSA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Archaeologists will excavate a mass grave this summer
22 SCIENCE NEWS | June 19, 2021
tulsa.indd 22
6/2/21 11:17 AM
BOTH: CITY OF TULSA
1921 race massacre
