The Thirty-Five Blocks That Burned

On the morning of May thirty-first, nineteen twenty-one, a nineteen-year-old Black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland stepped into an elevator at the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa. The elevator operator was a white woman named Sarah Page. Something happened in that elevator, a stumble, possibly an accidental touch, possibly less than that. By the time a white police officer arrived the next morning to question Rowland, the rumor had already traveled far enough to appear in the Tulsa Tribune under the word "assault."

What happened next happened fast. Armed white men gathered outside the courthouse where Rowland was being held. Armed Black men from the Greenwood District arrived to prevent a lynching. Shots were fired. Within hours, white mobs, some of them deputized on the spot by local law enforcement, crossed the railroad tracks that divided Tulsa and entered Greenwood.

The Greenwood District was, in nineteen twenty-one, the wealthiest Black neighborhood in America. Its residents called it Black Wall Street. It had its own hospital, law offices, hotels, two newspapers, and a thriving professional class built over two decades by Black Tulsans who had migrated to Oklahoma during and after Reconstruction. Between the night of May thirty-first and the morning of June first, most of it was destroyed.

Thirty-five city blocks burned. Between one hundred and three hundred Black Tulsa residents were killed, a range that remains imprecise because official records were suppressed and mass graves went uninvestigated for decades. Six thousand people were detained in internment camps set up at the local fairgrounds. Eight hundred more were hospitalized. Nearly ten thousand lost their homes.

The record includes one detail that distinguishes this massacre from every other racial massacre in American history: airplanes flew over the Greenwood District during the attack. The Oklahoma Historical Society and the Greenwood Rising History Center both document what witnesses described as the first use of aircraft against civilians on American soil, though historians continue to debate exactly what role the planes played.

Among the few contemporaneous narratives by a survivor is a book published in nineteen twenty-one by Mary Parrish, a Black journalist who witnessed the destruction and titled her account "Events of the Tulsa Disaster." For decades, that account was nearly impossible to find. Oklahoma did not officially acknowledge the massacre until nineteen ninety-seven. The Greenwood Rising History Center, which opened on the hundredth anniversary of the massacre on May thirty-first, twenty twenty-one, is the first permanent institution dedicated to its documentation.

The Greenwood you are passing through now is not the Greenwood of nineteen twenty-one. It is not the Greenwood that rebuilt itself after nineteen twenty-one, either. That story comes later.