Photographing the Tulsa Massacre of 1921

Photographing the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 During the early twentieth century, the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was known as the “Negro Wall Street of America” because of its prosperous Black business community. In 1921, Greenwood was home to nearly eleven thousand Black people — one-tenth of Tulsa’s overall population — and spanned a thirty-five-block area. The district boasted close to two hundred businesses, including thirty-one restaurants, more than two dozen grocery stores, five hotels, four drugstores, and two theaters. There were a dozen churches, as well as two schools, two hospitals, two newspapers, and a public library.1 Most of the businesses and residential properties were owned by Black Tulsans.2 The Black professional class comprised not only clergy and teachers but also three lawyers, including the pioneering Buck Colbert Franklin; fifteen doctors, one of whom was a nationally acclaimed surgeon, Dr. A. C. Jackson; and enterprising businessmen such as Greenwood’s founder, O. W. Gurley.3 Remarkably, the neighborhood’s affluence occurred at a time when most Black southerners lived in rural areas and toiled as sharecroppers on white-owned plantations. For all these reasons, the Greenwood District was not just a wealthy Black community in the age of segregation; it was, and remains, a potent symbol of Black excellence. The eruption of white mob violence in downtown Tulsa on May 31, 1921, interrupted Greenwood’s historic ascendancy.

A group of physicians, dentists, and pharmacists outside of the Dreamland Theatre during a medical conference, photographed by A. S. Newkirk in 1920, one year before the massacre — Source.

People stood amongst ruins in Tulsa, photographed by Francis Albert Schmidt on June 1, 1921. While some sources state these ruins to be those of the Dreamland Theatre, this is unlikely to be the case as the Dreamland’s outer walls were left mostly standing. Possibly the Midway Hotel — Source.

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What has come to be known as the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was instigated by speculation that nineteen-year-old Dick Rowland, who was Black, had attacked Sarah Page, a seventeen-year-old white elevator operator. While it is unclear precisely what occurred during the brief interaction between the two in an elevator in Tulsa’s downtown business district on May

30, we know that Page screamed and Rowland fled the elevator in a panic. There is no record of what Page told bystanders or the police who interviewed her following the incident, but police authorities were left with the impression that Rowland had attacked her.4

The following afternoon, on May 31, the Tulsa Tribune published an incendiary article,“Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator”, which asserted that Rowland had indeed assaulted Page.5 As was common for the era, the Tribune insinuated that he had attempted to rape her.6 Word began to spread about the alleged attack, and by evening a large number of whites had begun to gather in front of the Tulsa County Courthouse, where Rowland was being held in the county jail. It quickly became clear that some among the crowd intended to lynch him.7