Analysis: On the Tulsa Race Massacre
The Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred on June 1, 1921, was a violent attack by white rioters on the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous Black community often referred to as "Black Wall Street." Sparked by a reported incident involving a Black teenager, Dick Rowland, and a white woman, the conflict escalated rapidly, resulting in the deaths of an estimated three hundred Black residents and the destruction of more than 1,200 homes and businesses in just eighteen hours. The event was marked by significant racial tension in the post-World War I era, exacerbated by economic competition and a history of racial violence in the region, including lynchings and segregationist policies.
Despite the scale of the violence, the official narrative at the time downplayed the culpability of the white mob, framing the riot as a consequence of a crime-ridden Black neighborhood rather than an act of racial aggression. The aftermath of the massacre left thousands homeless and led to a long-term struggle for recognition and compensation for the survivors and their descendants. In the years that followed, efforts have been made to preserve the memory of the events and educate the public, as well as to seek justice for the victims and their families. The massacre remains a significant chapter in the history of racial violence in the United States, highlighting ongoing issues related to race, justice, and communal memory.
Analysis: On the Tulsa Race Massacre
Date: July 2, 1921
Author: Amy Comstock
Genre: article; editorial
Summary Overview
On June 1, 1921, beginning shortly after midnight, White rioters attacked the Greenwood Avenue district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Around ten thousand Black Americans lived in the Greenwood area, the second-largest Black American community in the state and one of the wealthiest in the nation. Eighteen hours later, Greenwood lay in smoldering ruins, with over 1,200 homes and numerous businesses destroyed and, experts believe, nearly three hundred people dead. (The official count of thirty-six dead has since been discredited.) More than six thousand Black Americans were detained, many for their own protection, and ten thousand people were left homeless.
In this article, which was published in the June 2, 1921, issue of Survey magazine, Amy Comstock, then a personal assistant to the editor of the Tulsa Tribune and, later, an associate editor at the same paper, explains the riot as the result of a crime-riddled Black American neighborhood exploding from within, not the actions of a White mob. She argues that with better law enforcement and the elimination of the brothels and bars that she claims fostered the criminal element, Tulsa would be improved in the wake of the riot.
Defining Moment
In 1921, racial tensions were extremely high. At the end of World War I, returning veterans found themselves competing in a sluggish labor market, and Black American veterans struggled to find employment and to have their service recognized in the form of increased civil rights. During the so-called Red Summer of 1919, race riots broke out in industrial cities across the United States. In some cities, Black Americans, many of them veterans, fought back, prompting fierce retaliation. Membership in the Ku Klux Klan grew rapidly, especially in urban areas. In Oklahoma, twenty-six Black men were lynched between 1907 and 1921.
When the Tulsa riot began, Oklahoma had only been a state for thirteen years. It had been settled by many former enslavers from the southern states, and one of its first acts as a new state was to legislate and enforce racial segregation and establish discriminatory practices, such as literacy tests, intended to strip Black Americans of their voting rights. In Tulsa, due to segregation laws, Black Americans settled mainly in the Greenwood Avenue neighborhood, where they built a vibrant, successful community, complete with newspapers, theaters, banks, and a hospital.
On Monday, May 30, 1921, which happened to be Memorial Day, a nineteen-year-old Black American shoe shiner named Dick Rowland was riding in an elevator operated by a seventeen-year-old White woman named Sarah Page. While accounts differ, most agree that Rowland probably stumbled while entering the elevator and grabbed Page’s arm, causing her to scream. A White clerk working in the building saw Rowland leave the elevator, assumed that Page had been assaulted, and called the police. Word of the incident spread throughout Tulsa, and Rowland was arrested the following day and taken to the Tulsa County Courthouse.
The Tulsa Tribune, where Amy Comstock worked as a personal assistant to editor Richard Lloyd Jones, was the first of Tulsa’s two daily newspapers to report the incident, as the Tulsa World was printed in the morning, prior to Rowland’s arrest, while the Tribune came out in the afternoon. Accordingly, on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 31, a front-page article in the Tribune described the previous day’s encounter as a full-blown attack, claiming that Rowland scratched Page’s hands and face and tore her clothing. The same edition also contained an editorial stating that Rowland would be lynched that evening. No complete physical copies of the May 31, 1921, edition of the Tulsa Tribune remain, and both the front-page article and the editorial were excised from the edition before it was preserved on microfilm. Some copies of the front-page article have survived despite this, but no extant copies of the editorial, generally attributed to Jones, have been found. Nevertheless, numerous reports from Tulsa residents at the time have attested to the editorial’s contents.
As an angry mob gathered at the courthouse, a determined group of Black American men armed themselves and went to defend Rowland from the promised lynching. Although the sheriff assured these men that Rowland was being protected and convinced them to return home, the White crowd, estimated at a thousand people, was not so easily dispersed. They decided to arm themselves as well, and some even attempted to break into the National Guard Armory, without success. As the courthouse mob continued to increase in number, reaching an estimated two thousand people by 10:00 p.m., news of the attack on the armory began to circulate. Around seventy-five armed Black men returned to the courthouse in their cars, followed by others on foot. In the ensuing altercation, one of the men fired what appeared to be either a warning shot or an accidental discharge, resulting in an exchange of gunfire that left several people dead. The Black men fled to Greenwood, and the mob followed. At daybreak on June 1, 1921, despite armed resistance, the mob attacked and burned the district, looted homes and businesses, and killed men, women, and children as they fled. The attacks continued throughout the morning, until the Oklahoma National Guard was able to suppress most of the violence. By noon, most of Tulsa’s Black American population was in custody, and more than one thousand homes and businesses had been destroyed.
Dick Rowland survived the Tulsa riot and never returned to the city. Civic leaders tried to relocate Tulsa’s Black American population to the outskirts of town, but they were unsuccessful. Over the following decades, many argued that the Black survivors of the massacre deserved some form of compensation, particularly as they had not received any from official authorities in the immediate aftermath of the incident. At the same time, others worked into the twenty-first century to preserve and educate the public about the true history of the massacre, including through mainstream outlets such as literature and television. Though the three known remaining survivors of the massacre by 2020 came together to file a lawsuit that year demanding compensation on the basis of the incident's long-term financial and racial effects, a lower court judge ultimately dismissed the case in July 2023. The plaintiffs maintained hope that they could represent their case through a trial, however, when they successfully earned an appeals hearing from the Oklahoma Supreme Court in August.
Author Biography
Amy Comstock was born on November 26, 1886, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1909 and began working for the Wisconsin State Journal as a proofreader in 1911. Comstock was an active suffrage campaigner during World War I and served as the state chair of the Wisconsin Congressional Union for Women’s Suffrage, where she was also in charge of publicity.
Comstock moved to Tulsa in 1919 as the personal assistant of Tulsa Tribune editor Richard Lloyd Jones, having previously worked for him at the Wisconsin State Journal. Comstock later became the associate editor of the Tribune. She was the state president of the American Association of University Women for Wisconsin from 1926 until 1928 and was one of two women in the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Comstock never married and remained at the Tulsa Tribune until her death in 1944. She is buried in Wisconsin.
Document Analysis
Comstock’s article for Survey magazine takes great pains to describe the Greenwood neighborhood in sympathetic, but extremely negative terms. Tulsa has grown so fast, she claims, that the city was not able to develop the proper infrastructure for its citizens, and “that section which was known as ‘Niggertown’ was pretty much neglected.” She describes a dirty and unsanitary area with open latrines, an inadequate water supply, and “improvised shanties”—a far cry from the prosperous suburb that was popularly known as the “Black Wall Street.” Comstock claims that “the conditions under which [Greenwood residents] lived were a constant menace to the health of the city.” Is it any wonder, she asks, that the residents of this dirty and depraved place were unable to be good citizens? Is it any wonder they turned to lives of crime and depravity in such a “thoroughly bad and sordid environment”? The city failed to either improve this neighborhood or “school the Negro how to use and appreciate and better his living conditions,” allowing disrespect for the law to take over.
Comstock does not excuse the rest of Tulsa entirely, however. She acknowledges that there was a general disregard for the law in the city, born of the quick money to be made in the area: “Everybody has been busy, so to speak, with his own pick and pan, and the civic sense of the city has slumbered.” The criminal element that was attracted to Tulsa found its natural home in “the sordid and neglected” Black American section of town. With city officials turning a blind eye to the criminals gathering in Greenwood, Comstock claims that its residents, “the silk-shirted parasites of society,” were arming themselves and preparing to riot, while the rest of Tulsa’s citizens “were all too busy panning gold to care.” Comstock lays no blame on the White rioters who poured into Greenwood and set it on fire. Instead, she holds the government accountable for allowing such a place to exist. The implication of Comstock’s argument is that Black Americans, with their “childlike” minds and “foolish day-dreams” of equality, cannot be expected to maintain adequate living conditions or refrain from criminal activity; rather, it is the responsibility of the government and the White community to teach them and keep them in check, and it is in this respect that she believes the city failed.
Comstock sums up her argument with the assertion that “the cause of the Tulsa race riot was . . . a city too busy building to give thought or care to the spawning pools of crime.” Ultimately, while she lays responsibility at the feet of the city, she blames the actual violence on the supposedly crime-riddled slum that was Greenwood, not on the thousands of White rioters who attacked and killed men, women, and children. Once the city has cleaned up its Black section, she claims, Tulsa will “be as proud of her decency and deportment as in the past she has been of her sky line.”
Bibliography and Additional Reading
Ellsworth, Scott. Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Louisiana State UP, 1982.
Gandhi, Lakshmi. "Tulsa Race Massacre: Fact Checking Myths and Misconceptions." NBC News, 30 May 2021, www.nbcnews.com/select/news/tulsa-race-massacre-fact-check-ncna1269045. Accessed 6 Oct. 2023.
Madigan, Tim. The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. St Martin’s, 2001.
McCarthy, Lauren. "Court Ruling Revives Reparations Claim Filed by Tulsa Massacre Survivors." The New York Times, 16 Aug. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/08/16/us/tulsa-race-massacre-lawsuit-appeal.html. Accessed 6 Oct. 2023.
Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Oklahoma Historical Society, 2001, www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf. Accessed 6 Oct. 2023.