Tulsa Race Massacre Facts & Worksheets

• People who saw it said that private planes were flying around overhead, some dropping bombs and shooting at people who were trying to get away. The fires destroyed hundreds of homes and dozens of businesses in Greenwood.
• By the middle of the morning, more National Guard troops had come from Oklahoma City. At 11:49 a.m., martial law was put into effect. Thousands of Black people were rounded up and taken to internment centres. 
• When order was restored, Greenwood was in ruins, and its once-bustling “Black Wall Street” was nothing but ashes.

AFTERMATH

• Different newspapers around the country reported very different numbers of deaths. The Tulsa Tribune first said on 1 June 1921 that nine whites and 68 Blacks had died. Later, they changed the number to 176, then back to nine whites and 21 Blacks. Other newspapers said the numbers were between 33 and 175. The Oklahoma Department of Vital Statistics said that 36 people died, 26 of them Black and 10 of them white. Walter Francis White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an American civil rights organisation founded in 1909 to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights for all people, particularly African Americans, looked into it himself and said that 50 whites and 150–200 Blacks were killed.
• He said that there were reports of dozens of Black bodies being buried in unmarked graves without anyone knowing about it. There may have been around 150 of them. Later studies and searches with ground-penetrating radar did not find mass graves, but oral histories said they were there.
• The Red Cross thought there were between 55 and 300 dead, but they did not give an official number because the burials were done too quickly and without any records. They counted 8,624 people who had to leave their homes, 183 who were in the hospital, 531 who needed treatment, eight miscarriages, and 19 deaths later.
• To stop more violence, a group of 250 white men called the Public Safety Committee was formed on 6 June. A National Guardsman shot a white man that same day because he did not stop.
• Governor Robertson told the police to look into it. On 9 June, a grand jury met, heard evidence for 12 days, and decided that Black mobs were to blame. More than 85 people were charged, but no one was found guilty of killing, hurting, or destroying property.
• More than 1,000 white business owners promised to help pay for the rebuilding of Greenwood. Judge Loyal Martin said that Tulsa could only make things right by paying back everything. Even though they promised to give money, most of it never came through.
• The Red Cross gave food, shelter, medical care, and vaccinations to people. They even helped build the first hospital in Oklahoma for Black patients. However, a lot of Black families lived in tents all winter long in 1921–1922. At the same time, city officials tried to stop Black people from rebuilding. They passed a new fire code that effectively changed Greenwood’s zoning to allow for industrial use. Buck Colbert Franklin, a Black lawyer, won a case against the ordinance in the Oklahoma Supreme Court, but the delays left many families stuck. 
• Police Chief John Gustafson was charged with negligence and corruption. He was charged with ignoring laws against gambling, running rackets, and not stopping the riot. He was found guilty of negligence and conspiracy, fired from the police force, and sent to jail.
• Three days later, United States President Warren G. Harding spoke out against the massacre and called for racial justice. However, no one was ever found guilty, and the massacre quickly disappeared from official records. Schools, local newspapers, and even city histories left it out for decades. The first published account came from Mary E. Jones Parrish, a teacher and journalist who lived through the events and wrote about them. 
• Later, historians and survivors struggled to keep the memory alive. In 1971, a small memorial service for people of different races was held. People in the community, like Mozella Franklin Jones, worked to end segregation at the Tulsa Historical Society and keep photos and testimonies.

TULSA RACE COMMISSION

• In 2018, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission was changed to the Tulsa Race Massacre Commission. Its job was to find out what caused the violence, how big it was, and what happened as a result of it by looking at records and hearing from people who were there. The Commission’s last report came out in 2001. It suggested five things: direct payments to survivors, payments to descendants, a scholarship fund for affected students, an economic development zone in Greenwood, and a memorial with burial grounds for victims.
• Starting in the late 1990s, the Commission began archaeological surveys at Newblock Park, Oaklawn Cemetery, and Booker T. Washington Cemetery, which had long been thought to have mass graves. Although the first surveys from 1997 to 2000 found no solid evidence, eyewitnesses continued to claim that mass burials had occurred. Before the centenary, renewed efforts led to important discoveries. 
• Ground-penetrating radar revealed unusual findings at Oaklawn Cemetery and near the Arkansas River between 2019 and 2020. Excavations in 2020 and 2021 found 35 coffins at Oaklawn, and surveys in 2023 and 2024 found 59 graves that had never been found before. The state gave 118 living victims commemorative medals in 2001 to honour them. Governor Frank Keating signed the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Reconciliation Act that same year. 
• The survivors went to court to get justice. They filed Alexander v. Oklahoma in 2003, with the help of Johnnie Cochran and Charles Ogletree, to secure financial compensation. The case was thrown out because the time limit had passed, and the US Supreme Court would not hear an appeal. In 2007, Congress tried to give people more time to file legal claims, but that did not work either. There were new lawsuits from 2020 to 2023, and centenarian survivors Viola Fletcher, Hughes Van Ellis, and Lessie Benningfield Randle gave testimony. These did not work either, and in June 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that the state’s public nuisance law could not be used to punish the massacre.