More than 10,000 white men from across the state of Florida descended on Rosewood. Black men, women, and children hid in the swamps around the town.
“Before the week was out,” Colburn wrote, “the mob returned to plunder and burn down the town of Rosewood and drive all the black residents from it forever.”
It is still unknown how many people were killed in Rosewood. In 1994, the Florida state legislature voted to pay $1.5 million in reparations to be divided among at least 11 survivors of the massacre to compensate them for loss of property. The Rosewood Massacre was dramatized in a 1997 film by director John Singleton.
Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921
Three-hundred-thirty-five miles from Elaine, the Tulsa Race Massacre erupted in what historians call one of the worst episodes of racial violence committed against Black people in the country’s history.
The Tulsa Race Massacre began on May 31, 1921, after the arrest of Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old shoe-shiner. Earlier that day, Rowland walked to the Drexel Building, which had the only bathroom available to Black people in downtown Tulsa. He stepped into an elevator on the first floor. When the elevator reached the third floor, Sarah Page, a white elevator operator, screamed. “The most common explanation is that Rowland stepped on Page’s foot as he entered the elevator, causing her to scream,” the Oklahoma Historical Society said in a report.
A mob of white men gathered outside the Tulsa courthouse, where Rowland was taken after his arrest for assaulting the elevator operator. Black World War I veterans confronted the mob, determined to protect Rowland.
A struggle ensued and a white man was shot, sparking the murderous rage that would follow. Hundreds of white people marched on the Black neighborhood of Greenwood. Whites killed more than 300 Black people—dumping their bodies into the Arkansas River or burying them in mass graves. More than a hundred businesses were destroyed, as well as a school, a hospital, a library, and dozens of churches. More than 1,200 Black-owned houses burned. The economic losses in the Black community amounted to more than $1 million.
Walter White, who later became executive secretary of the NAACP, said in a NAACP report: “One story was told to me by an eyewitness of five colored men trapped in a burning house. Four were burned to death. A fifth attempted to flee, was shot to death as he emerged from the burning structure, and his body was thrown back into the flames.”
There were reports that white men flew airplanes above Greenwood, dropping kerosene bombs. “Tulsa was likely the first city” in the U.S. “to be bombed from the air,” according to a report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.
B.C. Franklin, a lawyer in Greenwood and the father of famed historian John Hope Franklin, witnessed the massacre. “The sidewalk was literally covered with burning turpentine balls,” Franklin wrote in a manuscript later donated to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. “For fully forty-eight hours, the fires raged and burned everything in its path and it left nothing but ashes and burned safes and trunks and the like that were stored in beautiful houses and businesses.”
“Many black residents fought back, but they were greatly outnumbered and outgunned,” according to Human Rights Watch, which in May of this year released a 66-page report entitled “The Case for Reparations in Tulsa, Oklahoma: A Human Rights Argument.”
“At best, Tulsa Police took no action to prevent the massacre,” according to the document. “Reports indicate that some police actively participated in the violence and looting.”
Two weeks after the massacre, the Tulsa City Commission issued a report blaming the destruction on the Black people who lived there, not the white mob that pillaged, plundered, and destroyed Greenwood. “Let the blame for this Negro uprising lie right where it belongs—on those armed Negroes and their followers who started this trouble and who instigated it and any persons who seek to put half the blame on the white people are wrong,” according to the commission.
In 2018, Tulsa’s mayor, G.T. Bynum, announced the city would reopen an investigation to search for mass graves of massacre victims. In April of this year, the city planned to dig for evidence in Oaklawn Cemetery, but the “limited excavation” was postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The destruction in Tulsa left an economic and emotional toll on generations of survivors and their descendants. No white person was ever arrested in connection with the Tulsa Massacre.
