‘We lived like we were Wall Street’
Before the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Greenwood was one of the wealthiest black communities in the country. Before it was destroyed in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Greenwood was one of the most affluent black communities in the country. It was known as “Black Wall Street” because of its concentrated wealth.
“We lived like we were Wall Street,” remembered Otis Granville Clark, then a 105-year-old survivor of the massacre, in “Before They Die!,” a 2008 documentary. “A lot of folks would come in from New York and Chicago. We had a big time here on Greenwood. This was oil country.”
Greenwood’s past is back in the news after Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum (R) announced last week that the city would reopen its investigation into whether victims of the century-old race massacre were buried in mass graves.

Before the massacre, Greenwood had a population of more than 100,000 black people, according to the Greenwood Cultural Center’s history of the community. It was home to luxury shops, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores, a hospital, a savings and loan, a post office, three hotels, jewelry and clothing stores, two movie theaters, a library, pool halls, a bus and cab service, a nationally recognized school system, six private airplanes and two black newspapers.
Jim Crow kept that wealth in the community. “Not only did black Americans want to contribute to the success of their own shops,” the cultural center explains, “but there were also racial segregation laws that prevented them from shopping anywhere other than Greenwood.Elegant homes where doctors, lawyers and business owners lived lined Detroit Avenue.

Olivia Hooker, who was 6 at the time of the massacre, recalled that her father, Samuel D. Hooker, owned a department store, selling clothing and other goods.
“I was a child who didn’t know about bias and prejudice because the only white people we saw came to sell things to my father,” Hooker, now 103, said in an interview with The Washington Post. “They were very nice. It was quite a trauma to find out people hated you for your color.”
Her mother hid her and her siblings under a dining room table as their home was being ransacked.

“They took everything they thought was valuable. They smashed everything they couldn’t take. My mother had [opera singer Enrico] Caruso records she loved. They smashed the Caruso records.“At the time of the riot, there were fifteen well-known black American physicians, one of whom, Dr. A.C. Jackson, was considered the ‘most able Negro surgeon in America’ by the Mayo brothers,” founders of the Mayo Clinic, according to the Greenwood Cultural Center. Jackson was fatally shot during the massacre when he emerged from his house with his hands raised in surrender to the mob. Walter F. White, then assistant secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in an interview that appeared in a June 18, 1921, Salt Lake City newspaper: 

“Having been sworn in as a deputy sheriff and having been on patrol as such during the Tulsa riot, I am able to state that the Tulsa riot in sheer brutality and wilful [sic] destruction of life and property stands without a parallel in America.”
White, a black man whose skin color was such that he was able to slip into white communities to gather information, traveled the country in the early part of the century investigating lynchings and mass murders of black people.
The massacre began on May 31, 1921, when white mobs descended on Greenwood, burning houses and shooting black people. Some people were burned alive, and 40 square blocks of business and residential property — valued then at more than $1 million — were destroyed.

During the Tulsa Race Massacre (also known as the Tulsa Race Riot), which occurred over 18 hours on May 31-June 1, 1921, a white mob attacked residents, homes and businesses in the predominantly black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The event remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history, and one of the least-known: News reports were largely squelched, despite the fact that hundreds of people were killed and thousands left homeless.
Black Wall Street
In much of the country, the years following World War I saw a spike in racial tensions, including the resurgence of the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan, numerous lynchings and other acts of racially motivated violence, as well as efforts by African Americans to prevent such attacks on their communities.

By 1921, fueled by oil money, Tulsa was a growing, prosperous city with a population of more than 100,000 people. But crime rates were high, and vigilante justice wasn’t uncommon: In August 1920, a white mob took a white teenager accused of murdering a taxi driver from his jail cell at the courthouse and lynched him; newspaper reports claimed the police did little to prevent the lynching.
Tulsa was also a highly segregated city: Most of the city’s 10,000 black residents lived in a neighborhood called Greenwood, which included a thriving business district sometimes referred to as the Black W

What Caused the Tulsa Race Massacre?
On May 30, 1921, a young black teenager named Dick Rowland entered an elevator at the Drexel Building, an office building on South Main Street. At some point after that, the young white elevator operator, Sarah Page, screamed; Rowland fled the scene. The police were called, and the next morning they arrested Rowland.
By that time, rumors of what supposedly happened on that elevator had circulated through the city’s white community. A front-page story in the Tulsa Tribune that afternoon reported that police had arrested Rowland for sexually assaulting Page.
As evening fell, an angry white mob was gathering outside the courthouse, demanding the sheriff hand over Rowland. Sheriff Willard McCullough refused, and his men barricaded the top floor to protect the black teenager.
Around 9 p.m., a group of about 25 armed black men—including many World War I veterans—went to the courthouse to offer help guarding Rowland. After the sheriff turned them away, some of the white mob tried unsuccessfully to break into the National Guard armory nearby.
With rumors still flying of a possible lynching, a group of around 75 armed blacks returned to the courthouse shortly after 10 pm, where they were met by some 1,500 whites, some of whom also carried weapons.
Greenwood Burns
After shots were fired and chaos broke out, the outnumbered group of blacks retreated to Greenwood.
Over the next several hours, groups of white Tulsans—some of whom were deputized and given weapons by city officials—committed numerous acts of violence against blacks, including shooting an unarmed man in a movie theater.

The false belief that a large-scale insurrection among black Tulsans was underway, including reinforcements from nearby towns and cities with large African-American populations, fueled the growing hysteria.
As dawn broke on June 1, thousands of white citizens poured into the Greenwood District, looting and burning homes and businesses over an area of 35 city blocks. Firefighters who arrived to help put out fires later testified that rioters had threatened them with guns and forced them to leave.
According to a later Red Cross estimate, some 1,256 houses were burned; 215 others were looted but not torched. Two newspapers, a school, a library, a hospital, churches, hotels, stores and many other black-owned businesses were among the buildings destroyed or damaged by fire.
By the time the National Guard arrived and declared martial law shortly before noon, the riot had effectively ended. Though guardsmen helped put out fires, they also imprisoned many black Tulsans, and by June 2 some 6,000 people were under armed guard at the local fairgrounds.
Aftermath of the Tulsa Race Massacre
In the hours after the Tulsa Race Massacre, all charges against Dick Rowland were dropped. The police concluded that Rowland had most likely stumbled into Page, or stepped on her foot. Kept safely under guard in the jail during the riot, he left Tulsa the next morning and reportedly never returned.
The “official” tally of deaths in the massacre was 36 people killed, including 10 whites. Even by that estimate—which historians now consider much too low—the Tulsa Race Massacre stood as one of the deadliest riots in U.S. history, behind only the New York Draft Riots of 1863, which killed at least 119 people.
In the years to come, as black Tulsans worked to rebuild their ruined homes and businesses, segregation in the city only increased, and Oklahoma’s newly established branch of the KKK grew in strength.
READ MORE: How ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Revived the Ku Klux Klan
News Blackout
For decades, there were no public ceremonies, memorials for the dead or any efforts to commemorate the events of May 31-June 1, 1921. Instead, there was a deliberate effort to cover them up.
The Tulsa Tribune removed the front-page story of May 31 that sparked the chaos from its bound volumes, and scholars later discovered that police and state militia archives about the riot were missing as well. As a result, until recently the Tulsa Race Massacre was rarely mentioned in history books, taught in schools or even talked about.
Scholars began to delve deeper into the story of the riot in the 1970s, after its 50th anniversary had passed. In 1996, on the riot’s 75th anniversary, a service was held at the Mount Zion Baptist Church, which rioters had burned to the

all Street.

ground, and a memorial was placed in front of Greenwood Cultural Center.
Tulsa Race Riot Commission Established, Renamed
The following year, after an official state government commission was created to investigate the Tulsa Race Riot, scientists and historians began looking into long-ago stories, including numerous victims buried in unmarked graves.
In 2001, the report of the Race Riot Commission concluded that between 100 and 300 people were killed and more than 8,000 people made homeless over those 18 hours in 1921.

A bill in the Oklahoma State Senate requiring that all Oklahoma high schools teach the Tulsa Race Riot failed to pass in 2012, with its opponents claiming schools were already teaching their students about the riot.
According to the State Department of Education, it has required the topic in Oklahoma history classes since 2000 and U.S. history classes since 2004, and the incident has been included in Oklahoma history books since 2009.
In November 2018, the 1921 Race Riot Commission was officially renamed the 1921 Race Massacre Commission.
“Although the dialogue about the reasons and effects of the terms riot vs. massacre are very important and encouraged,” said Oklahoma State Senator Kevin Matthews, “the feelings and interpretation of those who experienced this devastation as well as current area residents and historical scholars have led us to more appropriately change the name to the 1921 Race Massacre Commission.”
Sources
James S. Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).
Scott Ellsworth, “Tulsa Race Riot,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.
1921 Tulsa Race Riot, Tulsa Historical Society & Museum.
Nour Habib, “Teachers talk about how black history is being taught in Oklahoma schools today,” Tulsa World (February 24, 2015).
Sam Howe Verhovek, “75 Years Later, Tulsa Confronts Its Race Riot,” New York Times (May 31, 1996).

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When small businesses flourish, so do their communities. But banks often hinder that prosperity by discriminating against African American and other entrepreneurs of color seeking small business loans. A 2017 study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition actually found that banks were twice as likely to provide business loans to white applicants than Black ones and three times as likely to have follow-up meetings with white applicants than more qualified Black ones.
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