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TULSA, Okla. (AP) -- In the early days of Oklahoma's statehood, an angry white mob fanned by rumors of a Black uprising burned a thriving African American community in the oil boomtown of Tulsa. Although the area was quietly rebuilt and enjoyed a renaissance in the years after the 1921 Race Massacre, the struggle among Black people over their place in the city didn't end.
This month, local and state leaders will formally recognize and atone for the massacre, which claimed up to several hundred lives, with a series of ceremonies that includes a keynote address by national voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams. President Joe Biden is also coming to the city, the White House announced. But Black Tulsans say that, amid the kind words, efforts both direct and subtle still aim to curb their influence and withhold their fair share of power.
Oklahoma history
Before statehood in 1907, Oklahoma was home to Native American tribes pushed out of other regions by white expansion. Then the government decided to open up this land, too, and it became attractive to former slaves who were fleeing persecution in the South. It was also home to Black people who had been brought to the territory by slave-holding tribes.
Some African Americans participated in the land runs in the late 1800s. They included E.P. McCabe, the leader of a movement who hoped to make Oklahoma a majority-Black state free from white oppression.
"(McCabe) actually recruited Black people to come to Oklahoma on the theory that Oklahoma was the new promised land for these folks,” said Oklahoma historian Hannibal Johnson, author of several books about Oklahoma's Black history. "Oklahoma didn't really live up to its billing, obviously.”
Instead, white settlers, many from surrounding Confederate states, poured into the territory, bringing with them views of Black people as inferiors who had to be kept in check. After Oklahoma became a state, the first law approved was a Jim Crow statute requiring segregation of rail cars and depots.
"Oklahoma, in many ways although arguably not a Southern state in terms of racial policy, began to mimic the Deep South,” Johnson said.
The Tulsa
Race Massacre
In the 1920s, during the so-called Harlem Renaissance when African Americans were migrating from the South, Tulsa had a Black community of close to 10,000 people on the north side of the Frisco railroad tracks. The city was flush with money from the booming oilfields, and Black residents held jobs as hotel porters, car mechanics, laborers and domestic workers. The Greenwood district, known as Black Wall Street, was the wealthiest Black community in the United States, with its own stores, restaurants and other Black-owned businesses.
On May 31, 1921, carloads of Black residents, some of them armed, rushed to the sheriff’s office downtown to confront white men who were gathering apparently to abduct and lynch a Black prisoner in the jail. Gunfire broke out, and over the next 24 hours, a white mob inflamed by rumors of a Black insurrection stormed the Greenwood district and burned it, destroying all 35 square blocks. Estimates of those killed ranged from 50 to 300.