Remembering Greenwood

Yesterday marked the 88th anniversary of a tragic day in U.S. History, the total destruction of the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma also known as The Black Wall Street.

What started it?

A 19 year old black guy tripped getting in an elevator and in doing so he either stepped on the foot of a 17 year-old white girl or grabbed her arm.

What followed?

The worse race riot in the history of the U.S. which included the first aerial bombing of civilians. Ten thousand people were left homeless and a reported 300 men, women and children were killed. One of the most prosperous black business districts in the country was left in ashes.

The Wikipedia article is a good account of the events leading up to the riot, the riot itself, and its aftermath...

The riot began because of an alleged assault of a white woman, Sarah Page, by an African American man, Dick Rowland. This incident produced even more hatred between the whites and the blacks even though there was no proof of the assault. The case was simply a white woman’s word against a black man’s word. The Tulsa Tribune got word of the incident and published the story in the paper on May 31, 1921. Shortly after the newspaper article surfaced, there was news that a white lynch mob was going to take matters into its own hands and kill Dick Rowland.

African American men began to arm themselves and join forces in order to protect Dick Rowland; however, this action prompted white men to arm themselves and confront the group of African American men. There was an argument in which a white man tried to take a gun from a black man, and the gun fired a bullet up into the sky. This incident promoted many others to fire their guns, and the violence erupted on the evening of May 31, 1921. Whites flooded into the Greenwood district and destroyed the businesses and homes of African American residents. No one was exempt to the violence of the white mobs; men, women, and even children were killed by the mobs.