1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

In much of the country, the years following World War I saw a spike in racial tensions. There was a resurgence of the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan as well as numerous lynchings and other acts of racially motivated violence. In response, African Americans tried to prevent such attacks on their communities.

By 1921, fueled by oil money, Tulsa was a growing, prosperous city with a population of more than 100,000 people. But crime rates were high, and vigilante justice of all kinds wasn’t uncommon.

Tulsa was also a highly segregated city: Most of the city’s 10,000 Black residents lived in a neighborhood called Greenwood, which included a thriving business district sometimes referred to as the Black Wall Street.

On May 30, 1921, a young Black teenager named Dick Rowland entered an elevator at the Drexel Building, an office building on South Main Street. At some point after that the young white elevator operator, Sarah Page, screamed; Rowland fled the scene. The police were called, and the next morning, they arrested Rowland.

By that time, rumors of what supposedly happened on that elevator had circulated through the city’s white community. A front-page story in the Tulsa Tribune that afternoon reported that police had arrested Rowland for sexually assaulting Page.

As evening fell, an angry white mob was gathering outside the courthouse, demanding the sheriff hand over Rowland. Sheriff Willard McCullough refused, and his men barricaded the top floor to protect the Black teenager.

Around 9 p.m., a group of about 25 armed Black men—including many World War I veterans—went to the courthouse to offer help guarding Rowland. After the sheriff turned them away, some of the white mob tried unsuccessfully to break into the National Guard armory nearby.

With rumors still flying of a possible lynching, a group of around 75 armed Black men returned to the courthouse shortly after 10 p.m. They were met by some 1,500 white men, some of whom also carried weapons. After shots were fired and chaos broke out, the outnumbered group of Black men retreated to Greenwood.

Over the next several hours, groups of white Tulsans—some of whom were deputized and given weapons by city officials—committed numerous acts of violence against Black people, including shooting an unarmed man in a movie theater.

The false belief that a large-scale insurrection among Black Tulsans was underway fueled the growing hysteria. Baseless rumors that there were incoming reinforcements from nearby towns and cities with large African American populations to aid the uprising swirled.

As dawn broke on June 1, thousands of white citizens poured into the Greenwood District, looting and burning homes and businesses over an area of 35 city blocks. Firefighters who arrived to help put out the blazes later testified that rioters had threatened them with guns and forced them to leave.

According to a later Red Cross estimate, some 1,256 houses were burned; 215 others were looted but not torched. Two newspapers, a school, a library, a hospital, churches, hotels, stores and many other Black-owned businesses were among the buildings destroyed or damaged by fire.

By the time the National Guard arrived and Governor J. B. A. Robertson had declared martial law shortly before noon, the riot had effectively ended. Although guardsmen helped put out fires, they also imprisoned many Black Tulsans, and by June 2, some 6,000 people were under armed guard at the local fairgrounds.

In the hours after the Tulsa Race Massacre, all charges against Dick Rowland were dropped. The police concluded that Rowland had most likely stumbled into Page or stepped on her foot. Kept safely under guard in the jail during the riot, he left Tulsa the next morning and reportedly never returned.

The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead. A 2001 state commission examination of events confirmed that number: 26 Black people and 10 white people had died in the violence. However, historians estimate the death toll might have been as high as 300.

Even by low estimates, the Tulsa Race Massacre stood as one of the deadliest riots in U.S. history, behind only the New York Draft Riots of 1863 that killed at least 119 people.

In the years to come, as Black Tulsans worked to rebuild their ruined homes and businesses, segregation in the city only increased, and Oklahoma’s newly established branch of the KKK grew in strength.

For decades, there were no public ceremonies, memorials for the dead or any efforts to commemorate the events of May 31-June 1, 1921. Instead, there was a deliberate effort to cover them up.

The Tulsa Tribune removed the May 31 front-page story that sparked the chaos from its bound volumes. Scholars later discovered that police and state militia archives about the riot were missing as well. As a result, until recently the Tulsa Race Massacre was rarely mentioned in history books, taught in schools or even talked about.

Scholars began to delve deeper into the story of the riot in the 1970s, after its 50th anniversary had passed. In 1996, on the riot’s 75th anniversary, a service was held at the Mount Zion Baptist Church, which rioters had burned to the ground, and a memorial was placed in front of Greenwood Cultural Center.

The following year, after an official state government commission was created to investigate the Tulsa Race Riot, scientists and historians began looking into long-ago stories, including numerous victims buried in unmarked graves.

In 2001, the report of the Race Riot Commission concluded that between 100 and 300 people were killed and more than 8,000 people made homeless over those 18 hours in 1921.

A bill in the Oklahoma State Senate requiring that all Oklahoma high schools teach the Tulsa Race Riot failed to pass in 2012, with its opponents claiming schools were already teaching their students about the riot. According to the state’s Education Department, it has required the topic in Oklahoma history classes since 2000 and in U.S. history classes since 2004. The incident has been included in Oklahoma history books since 2009.

In November 2018, the 1921 Race Riot Commission was officially renamed the 1921 Race Massacre Commission. “Although the dialogue about the reasons and effects of the terms riot vs. massacre are very important and encouraged,” Oklahoma State Senator Kevin Matthews said, “the feelings and interpretation of those who experienced this devastation as well as current area residents and historical scholars have led us to more appropriately change the name to the 1921 Race Massacre Commission.”

More than a century since the Tulsa Race Massacre, the number of witnesses and survivors is dwindling. The oldest survivor of the attack, Viola Fletcher, died at age 111 on November 24, 2025. She testified in front of a House Judiciary subcommittee in May 2021 about what she saw. “The neighborhood I fell asleep in that night was rich—not just in terms of wealth, but in culture, community, heritage—and my family had a beautiful home,” Fletcher said. “Within a few hours, all that was gone.”

The last known living survivor of the attacks is Lessie Randle, who was 6 years old at the time.