Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma – Pt. 3
The story of the establishment, destruction, resurrection and final decline of America’s most prosperous Black communities.
Posts tagged: Oklahoma
May 3, 2011 12:43 am | 
The Tulsa Oklahoma massacre of Afrikan People (Black Wallstreet) 5/12
One of the nation’s worst acts of racial violence—the Tulsa Race Riot—occurred there on June 1, 1921, when 35 square blocks of homes and businesses were torched by mobs of whites. The riot began because of an alleged assault of a white woman, Sarah Page, by an Afrikan man, Dick Rowland. This incident produced even more hatred between the whites and the Blacks even though there was no proof of the assault. The case was simply a white woman’s word against a Black man’s word. The Tulsa Tribune got word of the incident and published the story in the paper on May 31, 1921. Shortly after the newspaper article surfaced, there was news that a white lynch mob was going to take matters into its own hands and kill Dick Rowland. Afrikan men began to arm themselves and join forces in order to protect Dick Rowland; however, this action prompted white men to arm themselves and confront the group of African American men. There was an argument in which a white man tried to take a gun from a black man, and the gun fired a bullet up into the sky. This incident promoted many others to fire their guns, and the violence erupted on the evening of May 31, 1921. Whites flooded into the Greenwood district and destroyed the businesses and homes of Afrikan residents. No one was exempt to the violence of the white mobs; men, women, and even children were killed by the mobs. Troops were deployed on the afternoon of June 1st, but by that time there was not much left of the once thriving Greenwood …
