Black Wall Street Massacre - 99 years ago today
On the 31st of May 1921, white mobs began attacking the black neighbourhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, aka Black Wall Street, the climax of a chain of events that began with the false claim that a young black man, Dick Rowland, had assaulted a young white woman in an elevator (he had in fact tripped over and accidentally grabbed her arm to stop himself from falling). At the time, Greenwood was one of the most affluent black neighbourhoods in the U.S.
As local newspapers sensationalised the incident, a crowd of 2,000 white people gathered at the courthouse insisting that Dick Rowland be lynched, leading to protests and riots. The National Guard were subsequently deployed to protect the white areas around Greenwood (sound familiar?). During the night, the white mob began setting black-owned businesses on fire, and at daybreak began looting shops and killing black residents indiscriminately. White pilots in privately-owned planes took to the skies and dropped kerosene bombs on black homes; the combined effect of the bombings and the fires was the destruction of over a thousand houses, as well as nearly 200 businesses, several churches, a school and a hospital.
Upwards of 300 black people were killed during the massacre (the official figures aren't known due to intentional under-recording - the official death toll recorded in 1921 was only 26 black people, which historians thoroughly dispute), and roughly 10,000 were made homeless.
The massacre wasn't included in history books in Oklahoma until 2009.
Nothing much has changed.
https://knpr.org/sites/default/files...?itok=NglexUvn
https://www.history.com/news/black-w...-race-massacre |
