The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Was Hidden From History for Decades

On the night of May 31, 1921, a white mob of several thousand people, some deputized by the Tulsa police, attacked the Greenwood District — a prosperous Black neighborhood known as 'Black Wall Street' because of its concentration of Black-owned banks, hotels, law offices, and grocery stores. By dawn on June 1, thirty-five city blocks had been leveled. Estimates of the dead range from 100 to 300; over 10,000 Black residents were left homeless.

The official response was to suppress it. Newspapers that covered the attack stopped running follow-up stories within days. The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, convened in 1997 (the name was changed to 'massacre' by the commission itself), found that city and county officials had played an active role in the destruction — not just by failing to stop it, but by arresting Black residents rather than their attackers and interning them at the Tulsa Fairgrounds.

For three generations, the event was largely absent from Oklahoma's public school curriculum. A 1996 survey found that most Tulsa residents under 40 had never heard of it. The state legislature did not mandate teaching the massacre until 2000 — 79 years after it happened.

The 2001 commission report confirmed that reparations were owed but left the amount and mechanism to the legislature, which has never acted on them. In 2021, on the 100th anniversary, three survivors — all over 100 years old — testified before a federal court. The youngest was 107.