Category Archives: Tulsa race massacre

Highway to healing: can removing a road restore America’s Black Wall Street?

Posted on by

Decades after a chilling racist massacre, Tulsa’s Greenwood district was bulldozed for I-244 – but a new plan aims to reverse its punishing effects

Twenty-five years before Don Shaw was born in Greenwood, a white mob invaded the Tulsa neighborhood and killed more than 300 people. Much of the tight-knit community was burned to the ground, including his grandfather’s pharmacy.

But when Shaw was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, few people wanted to talk about the massacre – perhaps in part because much of the damage was no longer visible.

Continue reading...

Judge rejects reparations for Tulsa race massacre in ‘sad miscarriage of justice’

Posted on by

Civil rights lawyer laments dismissal of suit which attempted to force city to make recompense for the destruction of Black area

An Oklahoma judge has thrown out a lawsuit seeking reparations for the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, dashing an effort to obtain some measure of legal justice for elderly survivors.

The judge, Caroline Wall, on Friday dismissed with prejudice the lawsuit which attempted to force the city and others to make recompense for the destruction of Greenwood, a once-thriving Black district.

Continue reading...

Outrage as Republican says 1921 Tulsa massacre not motivated by race

Posted on by

Oklahoma superintendent Ryan Walters decried for comments on 1921 massacre in which hundreds were killed by white mobs

The state official in charge of Oklahoma’s schools is facing calls for impeachment, after he said teachers should tell students that the Tulsa race massacre was not racially motivated.

In a public forum on Thursday, Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction, said teachers could cover the 1921 massacre, in which white Tulsans murdered an estimated 300 Black people, but teachers should not “say that the skin color determined it”.

Continue reading...

More coffins discovered with possible link to 1921 Tulsa race massacre

Posted on by

DNA to be collected to identify 21 newly discovered sets of remains believed to be from victims of attack on Black Oklahomans

The search for the remains of victims of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre has turned up 21 additional coffins in unmarked graves in the city’s Oaklawn cemetery, officials said.

Seventeen adult-size graves were located on Friday and Saturday, the Oklahoma state archaeologist, Kary Stackelbeck, said on Monday. The city announced on Tuesday that four more graves – two adult-size and two child-size – had also been found.

Continue reading...

Tulsa race massacre: 14 bodies to be re-exhumed in effort to identify victims

Posted on by

New exhumations will be followed by new search for bodies in Oklahoma cemetery linked to 1921 atrocity

Some of 19 bodies previously exhumed for testing in an effort to identify victims of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and then reburied in an Oklahoma cemetery will be exhumed again starting on Wednesday, to gather more DNA.

None of the remains recovered thus far have been confirmed as victims of the massacre, in which more than 1,000 homes were burned, hundreds were looted and a thriving business district known as Black Wall Street was destroyed.

Continue reading...

How white mobs firebombed homes and decimated a Black community in Illinois – video

Posted on by

This is the final episode of Red Summers, a 360 video series by artist Bayeté Ross Smith covering the untold American history of racial terrorism. 

After the first world war, Black laborers moved to northern towns like East St Louis, Illinois, trying to escape Jim Crow in the south. In 1917, members of the White American Federation of Labor went on strike – and the company responded by hiring Black workers. 

Angry white workers began attacking Black people in the city. Eventually this leads to white mobs firebombing houses with Black families inside, while others outside waited to shoot and kill them. Historians estimate between 39 and 150 Black people were killed in the East St Louis riots.

Just months later, another race riot in Houston broke out after member of the all-white Houston police department arrested a high-ranking soldier in an all-Black army regiment – a group that had recently returned from war. Only the Black soldiers were penalized

Continue reading...

Tulsa race massacre: 19 bodies reinterred as protesters demand criminal investigation

Posted on by
  • Bullet found with one set of remains that showed trauma
  • Anthropologist tells crowd: ‘We are not done’

The bodies of 19 people exhumed from an Oklahoma cemetery during a search for victims of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre were reburied in a closed ceremony on Friday, despite objections from protesters outside the cemetery.

Related: ‘I work with the dead. But this can help the living’: the anthropologist investigating the Tulsa race massacre

Continue reading...

Tom Hanks urges US educators to teach students about Tulsa race massacre

Posted on by

Actor writes in New York Times that he ‘never read a page of any school history book’ about 1921 massacre

In an essay lamenting the long neglect of the Tulsa race massacre, the Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks said “white educators and school administrators” in the US had “omitted the volatile subject for the sake of the status quo, placing white feelings over Black experience – literally Black lives in this case”.

Related: ‘They didn’t talk about it’: how a historian helped Tulsa confront the horror of its past

Continue reading...

‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around’: reverend sings with Tulsa race massacre survivors – video

Posted on by

Rev Dr William J Barber II sang 'Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around' with the three living survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre at the Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on Tuesday, after Joe Biden gave a speech honouring the anniversary. Biden became the first sitting US president to visit the site where hundreds of Black Americans were massacred by a white mob in 1921, as he marked the country's legacy of racial violence

Continue reading...

‘This was a massacre’: Biden honours Tulsa race massacre survivors 100 years on – video

Posted on by

Joe Biden on Tuesday became the first sitting US president to visit the site in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where hundreds of Black Americans were massacred by a white mob in 1921, as he marked the country’s legacy of racial violence. 

Biden oversaw a moment of silence for the victims after meeting with three people who lived in the district during the massacre: Viola Fletcher, Hughes Van Ellis and Lessie Benningfield Randle. 

Now between the ages of 101 and 107, the survivors who met Biden asked Congress for ‘justice’ this year and are parties to a lawsuit against state and local officials seeking several remedies for the massacre, including a victim compensation fund

Continue reading...

1921 Tulsa race massacre remembered – in pictures

Posted on by

One of the darkest chapters in the long and turbulent history of racial violence in America is commemorated in Oklahoma on Monday, the 100th anniversary of a rampage by a white mob that left an estimated 300 Black people dead. Hundreds of Black-owned businesses, churches and homes were burned, leaving about 8,000 homeless and a further 800 injured

Continue reading...