The Tulsa Race Massacre of African Americans

 The Tulsa Race Massacre of African Americans

During world war 1, the influence of black americans was rising in the wall street. Black neighborhoods such as the famously known Black Wall Street of Greenwood were prospering financially.

White americans were allowing this because they needed Black Americans to fight as a soldier in world war 1 on behalf of them.

On 11th november of 1918 , the world war one officially ended and with this the reason for white americans to allow black americans to gain influence also ended.

Now the white americans were desperate to snatch away the prosperity which the black americans gained.

On May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a young African American shoe shiner, was falsly accused of assaulting a white elevator operator named Sarah Page in the elevator of a building in downtown Tulsa. The next day the Tulsa Tribune printed a story saying that Rowland had tried to rape Page, with an accompanying editorial stating that a lynching was planned for that night. That evening mobs of both African Americans and whites descended on the courthouse where Rowland was being held. When a confrontation between an armed African American man, there to protect Rowland, and a white protester resulted in the death of the latter, the white mob was incensed, and the Tulsa massacre was thus ignited.

Over the next two days, mobs of white people looted and set fire to African American businesses and homes throughout the city of Tulsa in Oklahoma.

When the massacre ended on June 1, the official death toll was recorded at 10 whites and 26 African Americans, though many experts now believe at least 300 people were killed. Shortly after the massacre there was a brief official inquiry, but documents related to the massacre disappeared soon afterward. The event never received widespread attention and was long noticeably absent from the history books used to teach Oklahoma schoolchildren.

n 1997 a Tulsa Race Riot Commission was formed by the state of Oklahoma to investigate the massacre and formally document the incident. Members of the commission gathered accounts of survivors who were still alive, documents from individuals who witnessed the massacre but had since died, and other historical evidence. Scholars used the accounts of witnesses and ground-piercing radar to locate a potential mass grave just outside Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery, suggesting the death toll may be much higher than the original records indicate. In its preliminary recommendations, the commission suggested that the state of Oklahoma pay $33 million in restitution, some of it to the 121 surviving victims who had been located. However, no legislative action was ever taken on the recommendation, and the commission had no power to force legislation. The final report of commission was published on February 28, 2001. In April 2002 a private religious charity, the Tulsa Metropolitan Ministry, paid a total of $28,000 to the survivors, a little more than $200 each, using funds raised from private donations.

In 2010 John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park was opened in the Greenwood District to memorialize the massacre. Named for historian and civil rights advocate John Hope Franklin, whose father survived the massacre, the park features the Tower of Reconciliation, a 25-foot- (7.5-metre-) tall sculpture that commemorates African American struggle. Greenwood Rising, a history center honoring Black Wall Street, memorializing the victims of the massacre, and telling its story, was established in 2021 by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, founded in 2015.