The history behind the Tulsa Race Massacre

Jake Sellers Staff Reporter

Last week marked the 102nd year since the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. The attacks occurred between May 31 and June 1 of 1921 and left hundreds of Black residents of Tulsa’s Greenwood district injured or killed.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is a former lecturer in Africana studies at OSU, and a visiting associate professor at the University of Tulsa.

On top of teaching, Lansana is a poet and published author as well. Lansana has been researching the Greenwood district and massacre for almost 30 years. Lansana believes an important part of remembering the tragedy that often gets left out of the story is what Greenwood was before it was destroyed.

“Greenwood at the time was one of the most affluent and important Black communities, not just in the nation, but in the world,” Lansana said.

During the years leading up to the massacre, Greenwood was a thriving community made up of primarily Black-owned businesses, and a majority of residents owned the houses they lived in.

Many factors played into what made Greenwood boom economically. The community invested in itself heavily, largely because of Jim Crow laws preventing them from spending money elsewhere.

Grocery stores, banks and other small businesses filled the area, all Black-owned and operated. It took less than 24 hours for all of this to change.

In the current state of north Tulsa, the majority of

Black residents do not own their homes or the property on which their businesses are run.

“It’s a sweeping difference 102 years later in terms of the landscape (of North Tulsa), and the massacre is at the foundation of that,” Lansana said.

The main cause of the massacre is widely thought to be over an incident between a Black teenager named Dick Rowland and a white teenage girl named Sarah Page. Lansana has learned, however, that this incident was more of an excuse for the riots than a cause.

“The massacre occurred because the city officials and business moguls wanted that land,” Lansana said.

Prior to the massacre, white officials and business leaders attempted to get the residents of Greenwood to sell their land, Lansana said.

Greenwood is located between three major railroads, making it an opportune spot for big business at the time. Neither the city of Tulsa nor the state of Oklahoma have paid any reparations to the descendants of the victims or to the three living survivors of the attacks.

The Stillwater History Museum has an exhibit over the event available until the end of July. The Tulsa Historical Society and museum produced the exhibit a few years ago.

Amelia Chamberlain is the executive director for the Stillwater History Museum at the Sheerar. Chamberlain saw the Tulsa Historical Society and was offering the exhibit to travel; she originally signed up for it to be used at the Sheerar during Black History Month.

“I think it’s important that we keep our Black community’s history alive,” Chamberlain said.

The Stillwater History museum also previously featured a display on Washington School, which was an all-Black school in Stillwater before schools began desegregating in the South.

“If you forget your history, you are doomed to repeat it,” Chamberlain said.

For Chamberlain, both these exhibits serve both to teach the community about its past, and to guide the community in providing justice for the wrongdoings committed during this period of American history.

“People don’t want to admit to the things that were done to fellow human beings,” Chamberlain said. “It’s not something that they are proud of - they don’t want to acknowledge. But by the same token, if you don’t remember that piece of your history, healing can’t start, and you can’t start working toward other solutions.”

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