The Story of the Massacre That Destroyed Tulsa's 'Black Wall Street'

In 1921, the city of Tulsa erupted in a spasm of hate and fire that destroyed its prosperous Black district. A century later, excavators are uncovering a “crime scene.”

TULSA, Okla. — Incited by a salacious and largely fabricated news story about a young Black man assaulting a white girl, a lynch mob showed up at the Tulsa city jail, where he was being held. A group of African-Americans, many of them soldiers who had returned from fighting the First World War, rushed over to help guard the young man. Fighting broke out, then shooting.

The episode touched off a racist rampage. White rioters descended on the city’s Greenwood District, a Black community considered so affluent that Booker T. Washington, the author and orator, had called it “Black Wall Street.” Soon they were aided by a local National Guard unit with a water-cooled Browning machine gun. According to eyewitness accounts from 1921, planes circled overhead, shooting people as they fled and dropping incendiary devices.

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