Tulsa 1921

On Memorial Day 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a booming oil city of over 70,000 people proud of its patriotism and rapid growth. It was also a city riven by racial tension, vigilante violence, and institutional corruption. Randy Krehbiel, a longtime reporter for the Tulsa World, reconstructs the events surrounding one of the most devastating outbreaks of white mob violence against a Black community in American history.

Krehbiel traces Tulsa's origins through the Creek Nation and the Perryman family, whose mixed Creek, Caucasian, and possibly African ancestry hints at the racial complexity the city would violently suppress. The discovery of oilfields after 1901 transformed the small railroad town into a financial hub, but explosive growth brought severe problems: rampant vice, slum conditions on both sides of the color line, and entrenched vigilantism. During World War I, local vigilantes tarred and flogged members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a radical labor union, while wartime surveillance organizations normalized extralegal authority. Postwar recession compounded racial tensions; race riots erupted in more than three dozen locations during the "Red Summer" of 1919.

The Greenwood District, Tulsa's Black neighborhood stretching north of the Frisco railroad tracks, had developed into a thriving commercial center sometimes called "Black Wall Street." By 1921 it contained 12 churches, 15 physicians, a hospital, two theaters, and Booker T. Washington High School. Yet the district lacked paved streets, sanitary sewers, and running water, and the city had rebuffed petitions for basic services. Black Tulsans remained politically active despite Oklahoma's efforts to disenfranchise them, and a growing assertiveness among Black World War I veterans alarmed many whites. A. J. Smitherman, editor of the weekly Tulsa Star, openly urged armed resistance to lynching.

The catastrophe began on May 30 when a young Black man known as Dick Rowland encountered a white teenage elevator operator named Sarah Page in a downtown office building. Page screamed, Rowland fled, and police arrested him the next morning. That afternoon, the Tulsa Tribune published a front-page story headlined "Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator," using racially charged language that essentially accused Rowland of attempted rape. A longstanding claim holds that the Tribune also published an editorial calling for Rowland's lynching, but no copy has ever been found, and none of the newspaper's critics at the time ever cited such a piece.

Police Commissioner Adkison received an anonymous phone call threatening Rowland's life and transferred him to the more secure county jail atop the courthouse. Sheriff W. M. McCullough refused to move Rowland out of town. Word of a possible lynching reached Greenwood, and groups of armed Black men drove to the courthouse in successive waves. White crowds grew as well, eventually numbering perhaps 2,000. McCullough and Deputy Barney Cleaver, a respected Black lawman, convinced some to leave, but each arriving group was larger and better armed. Around 10:00 P.M., a white former county investigator named E. S. MacQueen tried to forcibly disarm a Black man. The gun discharged, and chaos erupted.

Whites broke into sporting goods stores and armed themselves. Adkison began deputizing civilian volunteers, ultimately commissioning roughly 400 men with little vetting. Street fighting raged for hours as Black defenders retreated toward Greenwood, making a stand at the Frisco tracks. Buildings on the edge of the district were set ablaze, and white rioters drove off firefighters at gunpoint. The local National Guard, numbering fewer than 50 men, lacked the manpower to contain the violence.

Around 5:00 A.M. on June 1, a loud whistle sounded. Multiple witnesses described it as a signal for organized assault. Intense gunfire erupted, and airplanes began circling overhead. Officials maintained the planes were used only for observation, but many Black residents reported bombs and gunfire from the air. A coordinated invasion of Greenwood followed: National Guard rifle companies, police, special deputies, and armed white civilians swept through the district, taking Black residents into custody and marching them to Convention Hall and a minor league ballpark.

Multiple witnesses later testified that men wearing police uniforms or badges led squads that systematically looted and burned homes and businesses. White bricklayer Laurel Buck testified that a sergeant at the police station told him to "get a gun and get a nigger." The most notorious killing was the murder of Dr. A. C. Jackson, a prominent Black surgeon shot dead in front of his home while surrendering with his hands raised. Jackson's white neighbor John Oliphant identified the killers, including a man known as "Cowboy" Long.

By noon, more than 1,200 buildings had been destroyed. Adjutant General Barrett arrived from Oklahoma City with two infantry companies and a machine gun company and advised Governor Robertson that martial law was necessary. Robertson authorized it at approximately 11:15 A.M. An estimated 5,000 or more Black men, women, and children were detained. The confirmed death toll reached 36, but officials acknowledged that the true number was likely much higher. Rumors of mass graves and secret burials persisted for decades. Mary E. Jones Parrish, a young Black woman who ran a typing school in Greenwood, returned to find the district reduced to "piles of bricks, ashes and twisted iron."

The political response was swift and self-serving. Former mayor L. J. Martin chaired a Public Welfare Board that assumed control of recovery and refused all outside financial contributions, even as local donations proved "distressingly small." Red Cross director Maurice Willows organized relief operations but faced constant obstruction from city officials. The Real Estate Exchange, Tulsa's real-estate trade association, proposed buying out the burned district and converting it to industrial use, relocating Black residents farther from white neighborhoods. The city commission extended the fire code to the burned area, making affordable wood-frame rebuilding impossible. The Tribune celebrated with the headline "Negro Section Abolished by City's Order."

White clergy delivered sermons overwhelmingly blaming Black Tulsans. A grand jury issued 88 indictments, mostly against Black men, and concluded that armed Black men and "agitation among the negroes of social equality" were the riot's direct and indirect causes. Police Chief John Gustafson's ouster trial in July became the first public airing of the massacre's most damning details, with witnesses describing police passivity, complicity in arson, and the deputizing of hundreds of unvetted civilians. Gustafson was convicted and removed from office, yet no white person was ever prosecuted for violence committed during the massacre.

Black property owners defied the building restrictions, erecting houses at night. Attorneys B. C. Franklin, P. A. Chappelle, and Ike Spears filed suit challenging the fire code extension. After the city re-passed the ordinance following an initial ruling against it, a second lawsuit brought by 12 property owners with white attorney Mather Eakes as counsel succeeded. On September 1, 1921, a three-judge panel ruled the extension unconstitutional, clearing the way for Greenwood's rebuilding.

Charges against Dick Rowland were dropped that same month at Sarah Page's request. None of the criminal cases against Black defendants ever went to trial. The Ku Klux Klan swept Tulsa's 1922 city elections. Dozens of civil lawsuits filed before the statute of limitations expired in 1923 all failed, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court's 1926 ruling in Redfearn v. American Central Insurance ended the last hope of financial recovery for Greenwood property owners.

For decades, a "conspiracy of silence" settled over the massacre. In 1997, the Oklahoma legislature authorized a commission to investigate. Its 2001 report documented more than 100 surviving witnesses and recommended reparations, a memorial, and scholarships. The state legislature provided limited funding and no direct payments. A 2003 federal lawsuit, Alexander et al. v. Oklahoma, was dismissed on statute of limitations grounds. John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park, named for the nationally renowned historian and son of riot-era attorney B. C. Franklin, opened in Tulsa in 2010.

Krehbiel closes by examining recent cases, including the 2016 police shooting of unarmed Black motorist Terence Crutcher, as evidence that Tulsa's racial divisions persist. U.S. Senator James Lankford frames the approaching centennial as a test: "In five years the entire country will pause and will look at Oklahoma and will ask a very good question: What's changed in 100 years?"