The Tulsa Race Massacre, May 31–June 1, 1921: The Destruction of Greenwood

On the afternoon of May 30, 1921, a nineteen-year-old Black shoeshiner named Dick Rowland stepped into the elevator of the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. The operator was a seventeen-year-old white woman named Sarah Page. Something happened — Page screamed, Rowland fled, and a clerk called the police. The most credible later reconstructions, including the 2025 United States Department of Justice review, conclude that Rowland probably stumbled on the elevator floor and grabbed Page’s arm to steady himself. By the next afternoon, the local Tulsa Tribune had run a front-page story headlined “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl In An Elevator” and an inflammatory editorial that historians believe carried the headline “To Lynch Negro Tonight.” Within thirty-six hours, between 100 and 300 Black Tulsans were dead, 35 blocks of the prosperous Greenwood District were burned to the ground, and roughly 10,000 people had been left homeless.

The Tulsa Race Massacre is the single deadliest documented act of racial violence in American history outside of war. It was, until recently, also one of the most successfully suppressed. This is what the documentary record now establishes.

Greenwood Before the Massacre

Greenwood, the Black district of Tulsa, occupied roughly 35 blocks north of the railway tracks that divided the city racially. By 1921, it was one of the wealthiest Black neighbourhoods in the United States. Booker T. Washington had reportedly visited and called it “the Negro Wall Street of America” — the name “Black Wall Street” came later. Greenwood Avenue, the main commercial street, was lined with Black-owned grocers, hotels, theatres (including the 750-seat Dreamland Theatre), restaurants, a hospital (the Frissell Memorial Hospital), two newspapers (the Tulsa Star and the Oklahoma Sun), and the offices of Black lawyers and doctors.

The community’s success existed inside Oklahoma’s Jim Crow system, which had been written into the state constitution at statehood in 1907. Greenwood’s prosperity, in other words, was earned in a state designed to prevent it. Resentment from poorer white Tulsans, the local Ku Klux Klan (then in a national resurgence), and a 1920 lynching of a white prisoner named Roy Belton at the same county jail that would later hold Dick Rowland — all of this provided the context in which a routine elevator incident could end in mass killing.

The Night of May 31, 1921: The Courthouse

After his arrest on the morning of May 31, Rowland was transferred to the top floor of the Tulsa County Courthouse, then home of Sheriff William McCullough. By 4 p.m., the Tulsa Tribune had hit the streets with the inflammatory front-page story; by 7 p.m., a white crowd of 500 to 600 had gathered outside the courthouse. Sheriff McCullough later estimated that at least 100 of them were openly discussing a lynching.

Black veterans of the First World War — many in uniform, armed, and aware that the courthouse had failed to protect Roy Belton a year earlier — went to the courthouse around 9 p.m. to offer their services to the sheriff. He turned them away. They returned around 10 p.m., a larger group of about 75 men. As they argued with white onlookers, a white man tried to disarm a Black veteran. A shot was fired. In the words of the 2025 DOJ report, “all hell broke loose.”

The initial gun battle at the courthouse killed several people on both sides. The outnumbered Black men retreated north across the railway tracks into Greenwood. White Tulsans pursued. Local police began deputising the white mob — a fact established by the 1921 Oklahoma National Guard reports, the 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission Report, and the 2025 DOJ review — and issuing them weapons and badges. Many of the men deputised had been openly calling for a lynching only hours earlier. Many were drunk.

June 1, 1921: The Destruction of Greenwood

By 5 a.m. on June 1, organised groups of armed white men — police officers, special deputies, and members of the American Legion and National Guard companies — moved into Greenwood in a coordinated assault. Witnesses described a whistle blast as the signal to advance. Over the next several hours, they shot residents in the street, looted homes, and then systematically set Greenwood on fire, block by block.

Multiple eyewitness accounts, several given to investigators at the time and corroborated by photographs taken from the ground, described private aircraft flying low over Greenwood and dropping incendiary materials — turpentine balls, dynamite, or kerosene-soaked rags — onto Black homes and businesses. The 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission Report concluded that aircraft were used both for reconnaissance and to drop incendiaries. This was the first known use of aerial bombardment against an American civilian population.

The Greenwood fire department was prevented from responding. The few Black residents who tried to defend their homes with rifles were shot. By early afternoon on June 1, when Oklahoma Governor James Robertson’s National Guard troops finally arrived from Oklahoma City, Greenwood was a smoking ruin. The Guard then did not arrest the white perpetrators. Instead, they rounded up several thousand Black survivors — including women and children — and detained them under armed guard at the Convention Hall, the McNulty Baseball Park, and the local fairgrounds. Some were held for more than a week. Black Tulsans could only be released into the custody of a white “sponsor,” who vouched for them.

The Long Silence

No white perpetrator was ever charged. A Tulsa County grand jury convened in June 1921 instead indicted Black Tulsans — including the editor of the Tulsa Star, A. J. Smitherman — for inciting the violence by going to the courthouse to defend Rowland. Insurance claims by Greenwood residents were uniformly denied on “riot exclusion” clauses. The city of Tulsa subsequently rezoned much of Greenwood as industrial, making rebuilding nearly impossible. The charges against Dick Rowland himself were quietly dropped on September 30, 1921. He left Oklahoma and disappeared from the historical record.

The massacre then disappeared from American public memory for almost half a century. It was omitted from Oklahoma school textbooks. Tulsa newspaper microfilm for the relevant dates was found, decades later, with the most damning Tulsa Tribune pages cut out. The legal scholar Suzette Malveaux, whose 2022 article A Taxonomy of Silencing the DOJ report cites, has documented how this silencing operated across law, zoning, education, and insurance for a century.

One Greenwood lawyer, Buck Colbert Franklin, refused to forget. In a tent set up amidst the ashes of his destroyed law office, he began representing Greenwood residents in property claims, eventually winning a 1925 Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling that struck down the city’s discriminatory rezoning ordinance. A 10-page handwritten manuscript by Franklin, describing the aerial bombing and the destruction in eyewitness detail, was discovered in 2015 and donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture by Franklin’s grandson, John W. Franklin. Buck Franklin’s son, the historian John Hope Franklin, became one of the most distinguished American historians of the twentieth century.

The 2001 Commission and the Mass-Grave Investigation

In 1997, the Oklahoma legislature created the Tulsa Race Riot Commission — chaired by State Representative Don Ross, with historians Scott Ellsworth and John Hope Franklin among its members — to produce the first official state-level investigation. Its final report, issued February 28, 2001, ran to more than 200 pages and concluded that the violence had been initiated and sustained by white Tulsans with the active cooperation of local government, and that the state of Oklahoma bore responsibility. It recommended direct payments to survivors and descendants, scholarships, an economic development zone for Greenwood, and a memorial. Most of the recommendations were never implemented.

One of the Commission’s key open questions was where the dead were buried. Eyewitness accounts described Black bodies being thrown into the Arkansas River, buried in mass trenches at Oaklawn Cemetery, or dumped at other unmarked sites. In 2018, Mayor G. T. Bynum reopened the search. Beginning in 2020, archaeologists led by State Archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck and forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield of the University of Florida began systematic excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery.

As of October 2025, the City of Tulsa’s 1921 Graves Investigation has identified more than 50 unmarked burials at Oaklawn, exhumed 22 sets of remains for DNA analysis, and confirmed six as massacre victims. The first to be identified by name, in July 2024, was Private C. L. Daniel, a Black World War I veteran from Georgia who had stopped in Tulsa on his way home and was buried in a simple wooden coffin with multiple gunshot wounds. He was joined that year by James Goings, John White, Ella Houston, and James Miller. A fifth excavation, the largest yet, began on October 14, 2025, in the cemetery’s westernmost section and has already uncovered 42 additional previously unknown graves.

The 2025 Justice Department Report

On January 10, 2025, the United States Department of Justice released its 123-page Review and Evaluation of the Tulsa Race Massacre, the first federal accounting of the events ever produced. It was conducted by career investigators of the Civil Rights Division’s Emmett Till Cold Case Unit under the 2008 Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act, and led by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke.

The report’s principal conclusion, in its own words, is that the destruction of Greenwood was “the result not of uncontrolled mob violence, but of a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood.” It documents systematic complicity by local police and law-enforcement officials, the active arming and deputisation of white participants by city authorities, the use of aircraft to drop incendiaries, the post-massacre internment of survivors, and a century of legal silencing that prevented accountability.

The report also acknowledges the obvious: no living perpetrator remains to prosecute, and the relevant federal and state statutes of limitations expired decades ago. “Despite the gravity of the department’s findings,” the DOJ statement read, “it is clear that no avenue of prosecution now exists.” The report is, instead, a permanent federal record. Three known massacre survivors — Viola Fletcher (then 107), Hughes Van Ellis (then 100), and Lessie Benningfield Randle (then 106) — had testified before the US House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties on May 19, 2021, asking for exactly this kind of acknowledgement. Hughes Van Ellis died in October 2023. Lessie Benningfield Randle turned 110 in November 2024.

The Reparations Question

The same three survivors, represented by attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons, filed a public-nuisance lawsuit in Tulsa County District Court in September 2020 seeking court-ordered reparations from the city of Tulsa, the state, and several other defendants. After a series of dismissals and appeals, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled against the survivors on June 12, 2024, holding that the harm of the massacre, however grave, did not constitute an ongoing legal nuisance under Oklahoma law. The case is, in legal terms, closed. The survivors and their descendants have continued to pursue federal legislative remedies and direct municipal support, including the City of Tulsa’s June 2024 “Road to Repair” initiative announced by Mayor Monroe Nichols, which aims to raise $105 million for Greenwood district restoration by June 2026.

What Most Accounts Get Wrong

Three persistent misframings appear in popular tellings. The first is that the events were a “riot” — a word used in official accounts for decades that implies symmetric civil disorder. The 2001 Commission report and the 2025 DOJ report both reject that framing. The events were a one-sided attack on a Black community by armed white residents acting in concert with local police.

The second is that the aerial bombing is uncertain or apocryphal. It is not. Both the 2001 Commission and the 2025 DOJ reviewed multiple corroborating eyewitness accounts and contemporary photographs and concluded aircraft were used.

The third is that we still don’t know how many died. We don’t know precisely — official 1921 figures were almost certainly suppressed, and the mass-grave investigation is ongoing — but historians treat the 100–300 range as a defensible estimate, with a meaningful chance the true figure approaches or exceeds the upper bound. The phrase “deadliest single act of racial violence in American history outside of war” is not rhetorical inflation. It is a sober summary of what is known.

Why It Still Matters

The Tulsa Race Massacre is now better documented than at any point since 1921. There is a federal report. There are excavated remains being identified by name. There is a Greenwood Rising museum, which opened on the centenary in June 2021. The 2001 state report and the 2025 federal report are in the public record. None of that existed thirty years ago.

What still does not exist, in any meaningful form, is compensation to survivors or their descendants. The legal question is closed. The historical question is closing. The moral question, the DOJ report’s authors wrote, “continues.” That is roughly where the United States has chosen to leave it, for now.

For more on the broader history of racial violence and Black American history, see our pieces on Black Americans in the Revolutionary War and women in the American founding.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many people died in the Tulsa Race Massacre?

The contemporary official count by the Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics was 36 dead. The 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission Report and the 2025 US Department of Justice report both treat the true figure as significantly higher — most historians and the 2025 DOJ review accept a range of roughly 100 to 300 deaths. Ongoing forensic excavations at Oaklawn Cemetery since 2020 have identified six confirmed massacre victims by name, with DNA analysis on 22 sets of exhumed remains in progress.

What was Black Wall Street?

“Black Wall Street” was a popular name for Tulsa’s Greenwood District, a roughly 35-block Black neighbourhood that by 1921 was one of the wealthiest African-American communities in the United States. It contained Black-owned grocers, hotels, restaurants, banks, the 750-seat Dreamland Theatre, two newspapers, a hospital, schools, and the offices of Black lawyers and doctors. It was destroyed in the massacre and rebuilding was systematically obstructed by city zoning and insurance practices afterwards.

Did aircraft really bomb Greenwood?

Yes. Multiple eyewitness accounts collected at the time and reaffirmed by the 2001 Tulsa Race Riot Commission Report and the 2025 US Department of Justice Review describe private aircraft flying low over Greenwood and dropping incendiary materials. A handwritten 1921 manuscript by Greenwood lawyer Buck Colbert Franklin, donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2015 by his grandson John W. Franklin, contains a detailed contemporary description.

Has anyone been prosecuted?

No. A 1921 Tulsa County grand jury indicted Black Tulsans — including the editor of the Tulsa Star, A. J. Smitherman — for inciting the violence, but no white perpetrator was ever charged. The 2025 US Department of Justice review concluded that the relevant statutes of limitations have all expired and no living perpetrators remain to prosecute.

Are there still survivors today?

As of late 2025, Lessie Benningfield Randle (born November 1914) is the last widely confirmed living survivor of the massacre. Viola Fletcher (born 1914) was also still living in recent reports. Hughes Van Ellis died in October 2023 at age 102. The three of them testified before the US House Judiciary Subcommittee on May 19, 2021.

Were any reparations ever paid?

No direct reparations have ever been paid to survivors or their descendants. The 2001 Oklahoma Commission recommended direct payments and other reparative measures, but most were never enacted. A public-nuisance lawsuit brought by the three surviving plaintiffs was dismissed by the Oklahoma Supreme Court on June 12, 2024. The City of Tulsa announced a “Road to Repair” initiative in June 2024 aiming to raise $105 million for Greenwood district restoration by June 2026.

Sources

1. US Department of Justice — Review and Evaluation of the Tulsa Race Massacre (January 2025, 123 pp.)
2. Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 — Final Report (February 28, 2001)
3. City of Tulsa — 1921 Graves Investigation: Oaklawn Cemetery
4. US Justice Department — official announcement of the 2025 Tulsa Race Massacre review
5. Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture — Buck Colbert Franklin’s eyewitness manuscript
6. Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Louisiana State University Press, 1982)
7. Scott Ellsworth, The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice (Dutton, 2021)
8. Tim Madigan, The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Thomas Dunne Books, 2001)
9. Hannibal B. Johnson, Black Wall Street: From Riot to Renaissance in Tulsa’s Historic Greenwood District (Eakin Press, 1998)
10. Suzette M. Malveaux, “A Taxonomy of Silencing: The Law’s 100-Year Suppression of the Tulsa Race Massacre,” Boston University Law Review, vol. 102, no. 4 (2022)