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How to Research the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

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aerial view of Greenwood District burned to rubble
Tulsa’s Greenwood District after the massacre. Photo: American Red Cross. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Wanda Whitney, Head of History & Genealogy, Researcher and Reference Services.  

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, in which a mob of whites invaded and burned to ashes the thriving African American district of Greenwood, also known as Black Wall Street.

It was, then and now, among the bloodiest outbreaks of racist violence in U.S. history. The official tally of the dead has varied from 36 to nearly 300. White fatalities are documented at 13. Some 35 square blocks of Black-owned homes, businesses, and churches were torched; thousands of Black Tulsans were left homeless – and yet no local, state or federal agency ever pursued prosecutions. The event was so quickly dismissed by local officials that today, a century later, several local organizations are still investigating reports of mass graves.

I became interested in what happened in Tulsa when I watched the 2019 HBO series, “Watchmen,” which opens with a depiction of the massacre. I had heard about the Greenwood massacre before but didn’t know much about its history. Then late last year, a patron contacted our Ask a Librarian service with a question about racial massacres. That spurred me to investigate the Library’s collections to see what I could find out about the Tulsa massacre and similar events that occurred in the United States in the post-World War I era.

The Researcher and Reference Services Division put together a guide to conducting your own research. But first, let’s establish some context and basic facts, as the massacre occurred against the broader canvas of post-World War I racial unrest that bubbled up across the nation.

In 1919, Black soldiers, returning from the battlefields of Europe, expected that their sacrifices and service to the nation would be recognized by whites, that Jim Crow segregation and state-sponsored racism would be eased. That was not so. By and large, white society sought to enforce the segregated status quo that had existed before the war. A series of racist attacks and deadly fights ensued. It was so bloody that it became known as the “Red Summer.”  You can research this era in our research guide, Racial Massacres and the Red Summer of 1919.

In Tulsa, two years later, the situation was much the same on the morning of May 30, Memorial Day, when Dick Rowland, who worked as a shoe shiner, got on an elevator in the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa. The elevator operator was a white teenager, Sarah Page.

It has never been clear what transpired, but Page said Rowland “attempted to assault” her. Police arrested Rowland the next day, as the Tulsa Tribune ran a short story with the headline: “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator.”

By early evening, an angry group of several hundred white Tulsans assembled outside the county courthouse where Rowland was being held. Some were intent on lynching him and tried to break in. Groups of black men, from 25 to 75 strong, many of them veterans carrying their service revolvers, came to help defend Rowland, but were ordered to leave by police.

Then, around 10 p.m., shots were fired in the crowd. Chaos and mass violence broke out, spreading far from the courthouse. The Black groups were quickly outnumbered and outgunned, in part because local officials provided weapons to white men whom they “deputized.” Black residents retreated into their Greenwood neighborhood, but it was no protection. Thousands of white people rushed into the neighborhood at dawn the next morning, looting, burning and killing. Mount Zion Baptist Church billowed smoke and flames. The Dreamland Theater was destroyed. The neighborhood was reduced to rubble.

It was over by noon.

Black refugees huddled around entrance to fairgrounds
Black citizens being held at the local fairgrounds. Photo: American Red Cross. Prints and Photographs Division. 

Thousands of the Black survivors were forced into the city’s fairgrounds, released in the coming days only if a white person vouched for them.

Despite this shocking violence, no city, state, or federal criminal prosecution was ever mounted. The narrative was minimized or scarcely mentioned in public discourse and history books for nearly 50 years. As a commission appointed by the Oklahoma legislature reported nearly eight decades later: “There had been a pattern of deliberate distortion of facts regarding the riot and even the destruction of vital documents and a subsequent coverup.”

This was a sobering record to confront. I suspected that finding information about the Tulsa massacre might not be an easy task. While there were differing newspaper reports and oral histories published at the time of the event, there still remained a dearth of official primary sources or official records to bear witness to what happened. And although we now refer to the event as a “racial massacre,” it was called a “race riot” for many years.

The Library has already begun retitling this event as a “massacre” in our catalog descriptions. Please note, however, that we do not change descriptions of any events in our collection items themselves, such as newspaper accounts or other records contemporaneous with the massacre.

So, to begin your research in our collections, use the keywords, “Tulsa race riot” in the search field on our homepage. For photos, you can filter your initial results to the Photos, Prints, Drawings category. Most of the images come from the NAACP records or the American National Red Cross photograph collection.

You can get a block-by-block look at Tulsa and the Greenwood district in that era with our Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of the city in 1915.

Overview map of the Greenwood District, in a 1915 map
The Greenwood Business District was bordered by Archer Street at bottom, Detroit Avenue at left and railroad tracks at right. Greenwood Avenue is in the middle of the map, going north to south. Almost all of this area was burned. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map. Geography and Maps Division.

Various newspapers, both local and national, reported the event. You can search our Chronicling America collection for articles about the massacre. For helpful search tips, check out our research guide, Tulsa Race Massacre: Topics in Chronicling America.

front page of Tulsa World with headline Dead Estimated at 100: city quiet
The Tulsa World, Thursday, June 2, 1921. Chronicling America. 

The public’s renewed interest in the massacre began with publications about it in the 1970s and 1980s and culminated in the 1997 establishment of The Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, mentioned above. This legislative Commission put out a national call for survivors who could give interviews for oral histories. It also worked with historians who gathered information about what happened. Their report, published in 2001, became part of the official history. The Library has a print copy of the report. For additional books in our collection, take a look at the print bibliography in the Racial Massacres research guide. There are many books devoted to the massacre, including “Tulsa 1921,” “The Burning,” and “Death in a Promised Land.”

For eyewitness accounts, the Library has oral histories of 3 survivors of the massacre interviewed by Camille O. Cosby for the National Visionary Leadership Project. Other accounts appear in the HistoryMakers database, a subscription database available onsite at the Library. They are fascinating to watch. If you can’t come to the Library, see what your local public library may have on the Tulsa massacre. Other sources of oral interviews, documents, and photos include the Oklahoma Historical Society, Tulsa Historical Society & Museum, and the electronic library, Oklahoma Digital Prairie, among others.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, created in 2015, continues the work of the Oklahoma Commission to tell the history of Greenwood. Look for events in May and June that coincide with the 100th anniversary of the event.

Finally, one note of irony. Rowland, the original target of the violence, was neither harmed nor charged with any wrongdoing. He left town and the rest of his life could not be traced, the Tulsa World reported last year. “Dick Rowland,” the name he gave to police, may not have even been his real one, the newspaper reported. Page, the teenaged elevator operator, had only recently arrived in the city and left soon thereafter, the paper said, and could not be tracked down, either.

I wish you success with your research into this troubling episode in our history. If you have a more specific research request, or need assistance searching for resources, please use our Ask a Librarian service.

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Comments (14)

  1. Thank you for having these valuable resources on the Tulsa Massacre. I also became more interested in this topic through watching an episode of “Watchman”. I wonder how much more of the true history of African Americans has been buried and mislabeled…

  2. Thank you for sharing this information. This is an incident that was unfortunately not made a part of my many years of education so I have to believe this fact was certainly intentional. The WWI Black soldiers were relegated to the arduous task of burying our war dead overseas as well as readying bodies for transport back to the States…such difficult and ugly but necessary service work and then for themselves to come home to such racial aggression is so disheartening. I am a white man in my 60’s raised in the mid-Atlantic region of the US and can only hope that publishing information like this helps teach us all the realities of racism.

  3. May 13th also marks the MOVE bombing anniversary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1985 MOVE, a non-violent, community service oriented, Black liberation group, after already having been the victims of police violence and beatings in 1977, causing them to have to leave their original home after setting up a blockade, using tear gas, and cutting off the water supply. At least four women in the Africa family suffered miscarriages as a result of brutal police beatings. There is a famous picture of Delbert Africa being nearly beaten to death while his hands were up. Debbie Africa, imprisoned as a result, gave birth to her son, Mike Africa Jr., while incarcerated. Later, in 1985, with the supervision and approval from the mayor, police fired 10,000 rounds of ammo into the house, unsuccessful in their attempt to remove the Africa family. They then dropped a bomb on the Africa family’s townhouse, killing 11 including a handful of children and arresting members as they fled from the fire. Officials deliberately let the fire burn for hours, leveling a whole city block of about 65 townhouses. Mayor Goode (a Black man himself) who ordered the bombing, along with law enforcement, arrested multiple members of the Africa family on trumped up charges, including the murder of a police officer. MOVE members vehemently denied this claim, stating that they never fired a shot and the officer died in friendly fire. Nine members of the Africa family were convicted of the murder and given 30-100 year sentences. After 40 years and countless correctional abuses and baseless parole denials, the remaining seven MOVE members (two died while in prison) began being released 1 or 2 at a time over the next several months. Debbie and Mike Sr, who had not seen each other in 40 years due to their incarceration, were finally able to get married and begin to spend life with their son, Mike Africa Jr, who stated that he spent his whole life working on freeing his parents. They, especially Mike Jr, speak at conferences and other engagements about their experiences (I had the pleasure of meeting them at a prison abolition conference). Mike Jr has become the voice of the 2nd generation MOVE members. It was recently and gruesomely discovered that, after the bodies of the MOVE members were recovered from the fire, the bones of at least two of the Africa children who were killed, Tree and Delicia Africa, were given to an anthropologist for the Penn Museum and have been also used at Princeton for an online class titled “Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology” and spoke of a MOVE “case study.”, it was recently discovered. The Africa family and protestors have demanded the return of the remains, which they did not know were taken until it came to their attention by a student at the university who led a demonstration in solidarity. The Museum say it will “look into it” and possibly return them. Here’s a couple sources for more info: onamove.com (their official website) and democracynow,org, whose show archives have the most prolific coverage of MOVE and the Africa family.

  4. Where will I find the American Red Cross report of the 1921 Tulsa Oklahoma massacre?
    The American Red Cross supposedly documented the aftermath of the 1921 Tulsa Black Wall Street, Greenwood District massacre.

    • Hi there,

      Checking this out and will report back as soon as I have an answer.

      Thanks much,
      Neely

    • Here’s your answer, from Wanda Whitney, the author of the article:

      The National Archives holds the records of the American National Red Cross, 1881-2008. You can download a PDF version of the report from its catalog. The Library has photographs that document the massacre in the American National Red Cross collection. Finally, the Tulsa Historical Society & Museum links to the report and news clippings saved by the Red Cross relief staff.

      Hope that helps!

  5. Our great-grandchildren’s ancestors lived through that massacre in 1921 – their residence was (before and after) 910 East Archer, Tulsa, OK. The family surnames: HONEYCUTT; BALDWIN; CLAYTON; JOHNSON; and TUCKER.

    I am researching these families for our g-grandchildren to know of their complete ancestral trials as well as the good things in their lives.

  6. ” I’m trying to locate a recently discovered manuscript by Charles Colbert ‘Buck’ Franklin on the 1921 Tulsa Race Explosion, which may be on file at the LOC, but was initially reported to be in repository at NARA. If you could help in directing me to a resolution, I am appreciative! I have searched NARA without results!

    • Hi there,

      A reference librarian can help you with this! Go to https://ask.loc.gov, send in your question and they’ll look it up for you!

      Best,
      Neely

  7. Darwinism needs to be kicked out of schools and colleges. I am still hearing about his absurd theories on race from students. I am a white person who’s always been around other races, cultures and faiths. I have never understood why humanity is intolerant and closed-minded on so many levels.

  8. My family Surnames is Jennings and We are on the Henderson Roll under the names Huff , Gunter and Kidd as Colored Cherokee My Grandfather and his father were Jennings. My ggg grandmother is on Dawes last name Kidd (Julia) The Cherokee Nation acknowledge me by sending/ paying for my new birth records How do I go about looking for their presence in either Greenwood or Jennings oaklahoma ? as they are less than 40 miles apart.

    • Hi Cheryl Adams,

      Best idea here is to consult our genealogical staff on Ask a Librarian. It puts you in touch with a reference librarian, just as if you walked into the Library itself! Here’s the link: https://ask.loc.gov/genealogy-local-history/

      Good luck,
      Neely

  9. This is the most slanted and inaccurate story ever told. The facts are rarely told in sequence and exaggerated for effects. The only fact accurately displayed is the amount of damage to the Greenwood district.

    • Hi,

      This story reports the source documents related to the incident, prepared by one of the library’s chief genealogists. If you can point out any errors in the reporting, please let us know. If you have any information about the riot itself, please contact the various historical commissions who have been investigating it for many years now.

      Best,
      Neely

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