THIS IS ALL TRUE:
In 1921, about 11,000 Black residents lived in the neighborhood of Greenwood, north of the Frisco railroad tracks in Tulsa. It was self-contained and self-sufficient: Black-owned grocery stores, banks, libraries, hotels, movie theatres, and more lined the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, Greenwood Avenue.
It was a thriving commercial district. And as much as it could be, it was also a safe space.
This is true as well:
In the period from 1911 to 1921, 23 Black Oklahomans were lynched by White mobs. As part of the Jim Crow South, Tulsa was highly segregated, its Black voters suppressed and Black residents scapegoated. A sense of frontier lawlessness lingered across the state: In Tulsa, a vigilante group calling themselves the Knights of Liberty had for years been ambushing and forcibly exiling anyone they considered a radical. In 1920, a mob of hundreds of White Tulsans stormed the county courthouse to take a White prisoner into their own hands; they lynched him that night, facing almost no interference from the police.
In the following days, Tulsa’s police chief called the lynching “of real benefit to Tulsa and the vicinity.”
Greenwood residents knew this to be true:
If the Tulsa police were not going to protect White residents, no one was going to protect Black Tulsans.
The events depicted below, to the knowledge of historians and survivors, are all true. They comprise one of the worst instances of mass racial violence in American history. Keep reading after the graphics to learn more about what happened next.
The Watchmen series on HBO opens with a scene set in 20th-century Tulsa. It’s based on real history—and we’ve depicted it in more detail below. Dialogue is based on primary accounts of the events.
In 1921, Tulsa was on a knife’s edge.
Most of the city’s 10,000 black residents lived and worked in the prosperous, beautiful district of Greenwood. Some people called it Black Wall Street.
It was self-contained and self-sustaining. Black residents owned the houses, banks, stores, restaurants, and theaters. It was a thriving neighborhood — an American success story. But not everyone in Tulsa felt that way.
The KKK was putting down roots throughout the city. Mob justice was on the rise. Lynchings were common. And the police were often nowhere to be found.
On the morning of May 30th, a few seconds in a building in downtown Tulsa brought all of those tensions to a head. Two teenagers — a black shoeshiner named Dick Rowland, and a White elevator operator named Sarah Page — crossed paths in an elevator.
The most common explanation is that Rowland just stepped on Page’s foot after the doors closed.
Page cried out, and it brought a nearby clerk running.
And Rowland — a black man alone with a white woman — knew what white Tulsans would think.
No one knows what Page told the police. But whatever she said…the police didn’t think it was worth investigating until the next day.
May 31st. The day everything went up in flames.
The police — one black officer and one white — went to Rowland’s house to bring him in.
The afternoon edition of the Tulsa Tribune, featuring an inflammatory headline, was released at 3 p.m.
We are going to lynch that negro, that black devil who assaulted that girl.
An hour later, the death threats started.
When the calls began, the sheriff and his deputies barricaded Rowland in a cell in the County Courthouse.
But the narrative of the Tulsa massacre was going to have very little to do with that cell.
Word had spread throughout Tulsa that Rowland was in danger. Black Tulsans gathered at the Dreamland Theatre, the pride and joy of Greenwood. 24 hours later, it would be rubble.
We’re not going to let this happen… We’re going to go downtown and stop this lynching!
The police hadn’t stopped lynchings before. Black Greenwood residents figured that the only solution was to take matters into their own hands.
Black Tulsans went to the courthouse to offer help to the deputies protecting Rowland. And the mob was not pleased.
A White Tulsan reached for a Black Tulsan’s gun, and started a struggle. The shot that resulted might have been an accident, but the hundreds that followed it over the next 24 hours were not.
To the whites at the courthouse, that errant shot was permission to unleash the rage that had been building for hours.
But really, this was a rage that had been burning as long as wealthy, thriving Greenwood had been in Tulsa.
That night, the white mob burned Black Wall Street to the ground.
White Tulsans who were deputized en masse just hours earlier arrested 6,000 black residents that night, holding them in makeshift confinement camps for weeks.
By noon on June 1, white rioters had burned down 35 city blocks in Greenwood: dozens of black-owned businesses that had anchored the neighborhood, hundreds of homes, and half a dozen churches. Ten thousand Greenwood residents were left homeless.
Fifteen years of black wealth and self-sufficiency were razed in one night. In the aftermath, the Tulsa City Commission passed fire ordinances that blocked the rebuilding of Greenwood. So many of Tulsa’s black residents had no choice but to just…leave.
Most of the victims of the massacre were piled into unmarked graves and buried. And for decades after, what happened that night was buried, too.
100 - 300 Greenwood residents killed
9,000 Greenwood residents left homeless
1,200 Greenwood buildings destroyed
$50-100 million in property damage
