In the spring of 1921, the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, stood as the most powerful demonstration of Black economic self-determination in the United States. More than ten thousand people lived within its thirty-five blocks, bounded by Pine Street to the north, the Frisco railroad tracks to the south, Cincinnati Avenue to the west, and Lansing Street to the east. Inside those lines stood nearly two hundred registered businesses, with some accounts placing the number above three hundred when informal and home-based enterprises were counted. The district had its own hospitals, schools, newspapers, theaters, and dozens of churches.
Its nickname had been coined by Booker T. Washington himself: the Negro Wall Street. The man who had made it all possible was O. W.
Gurley. Born in 1868 to parents who had been enslaved in Alabama, Gurley had worked for the federal postal service and participated in the Oklahoma land rush of 1889. When he arrived in Tulsa in 1906, he understood something few white city leaders had considered. Segregation was a wall, and a wall has two sides.
Because Tulsa’s white establishments refused to serve Black customers, every dollar earned by Black workers had nowhere to go except Black-owned businesses. Gurley did not create that situation, but he built the neighborhood that captured its energy. He subdivided land and sold it exclusively to Black buyers at a time when almost no one in America was doing so. His first project was a small lodge on a dirt road crossing the Frisco tracks, a road that would soon be called Greenwood Avenue.
By 1913, the area contained a law office, a medical clinic, two schools, and a growing cluster of restaurants, theaters, groceries, pharmacies, and shops. Gurley built the three-story Gurley Hotel at 112 North Greenwood and founded what became the Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church. By 1914, his personal wealth was estimated at $150,000, roughly three million dollars in modern terms. His partner in building the district was John B.
Stradford, who arrived in Tulsa in 1899. Born in Kentucky in 1861, Stradford became one of the first Black attorneys in Oklahoma Territory and held a conviction that shaped everything he did: Black Americans had a far better chance of economic progress if they pooled their money and spent it among themselves. He built a portfolio of rental properties that generated steady income, and by 1921 his assets were said to be nearly double Gurley’s. In 1918, he completed his masterpiece at 301 North Greenwood.
The Stradford Hotel was four stories tall with fifty-four rooms, an elevator, a banquet hall, a dining room, a barbershop, a billiard hall, and a gambling room. It was the largest Black-owned hotel in the United States, worth roughly $75,000, and Stradford built it deliberately to match the finest white hotels in Tulsa because Black visitors on oil business were not allowed to sleep in any of them. The district’s most celebrated moment came on Sunday, April 10, 1921, when the congregation of Mount Zion Baptist Church walked into a new brick building on North Elgin Avenue for the first time. The church had been founded in 1909 and had spent years without a permanent home.
Its six hundred members had raised the $92,000 construction cost themselves, dollar by dollar, from wages earned as servants, porters, cooks, and laborers. It was, by most accounts, the most impressive architectural achievement in the neighborhood. Fifty-one days later, the building would be reduced to nothing but its basement. The disaster that consumed Greenwood did not begin in Greenwood.
It began in an elevator in downtown Tulsa on the morning of Monday, May 30, 1921. Dick Rowland, a nineteen-year-old shoeshiner, entered the elevator of the Drexel Building. The operator was Sarah Page, a seventeen-year-old white woman. The building held the only restroom in the area that Black workers were permitted to use, which is why Rowland was in that elevator.
What happened inside during the few seconds the elevator was moving has never been established. The most common explanation offered by historians is that Rowland stumbled or lost his balance and grabbed Page’s arm, causing her to scream. No charges were filed by Page, but by evening, versions of the story were circulating among white Tulsans, growing more exaggerated with each retelling. The police arrested Rowland the next morning and placed him in the jail on the upper floor of the county courthouse.
Sheriff Willard McCullough took precautions because he knew exactly what a Tulsa mob had done to a prisoner the previous year. In 1920, a white man named Roy Belton had been dragged from the county jail and murdered by a mob while police did nothing to stop them. Black Tulsans had noticed. The editor of the Tulsa Star, A.
J. Smitherman, had spent years telling his readers about their legal rights and what happened in courtrooms when Black defendants had no one to defend them. His newspaper argued that the Black community should not stand idly by while a man was pulled from a jail cell. On the night of May 31, groups of armed Black men, many of them World War I veterans, went to the courthouse to offer their services to the sheriff in protecting the prisoner.
McCullough assured them Rowland was safe and persuaded them to go home. But a white mob had been gathering outside the courthouse, growing to nearly two thousand people. Men went home to get weapons. Some tried to break into a National Guard armory and were driven off at gunpoint.
What transformed the crowd into a mob was a newspaper. The Tulsa Tribune ran a front-page story about the arrest on the evening of May 31. The report was inflammatory and is generally regarded as the direct cause of the escalation. The exact wording is not known because the story was later physically cut from the newspaper’s archives, removed from its bound volumes and from its microfilm.
Police records and militia archives concerning the events also disappeared. That was no rumor. It is one reason the massacre remained largely absent from history books and public discussion for more than a century. Around 10 p.
m. , a second and larger group of Black men, perhaps seventy-five of them, returned to the courthouse. The sheriff again told them the prisoner was safe and asked them to leave. As they prepared to go, a white man approached an elderly Black veteran and demanded his pistol.
The veteran refused. The two men struggled over the weapon, and a shot rang out. That single gunshot was the point at which the Tulsa Race Massacre began. Gunfire erupted immediately in front of the courthouse.
Ten white men and two Black men were killed in the first minutes. The Black men, heavily outnumbered, began a fighting retreat north along Main Street toward the Frisco tracks and Greenwood. The tracks became the front line. Through the night, groups exchanged gunfire across the rails while white Tulsans looted downtown pawnshops and hardware stores for weapons and ammunition.
Police deputized hundreds of white men on the spot, and according to later investigations, in some cases handed them weapons. What entered Greenwood before dawn was not merely a mob. A large portion of it operated under the cover of law, wearing badges issued by the city of Tulsa during the previous few hours. At around 1 a.
m. , the first fires were set at the edges of the district. Fire crews who responded were turned back at gunpoint. At about 5 a.
m. , a siren sounded across the tracks, and thousands of armed white men moved into Greenwood on foot, from multiple directions. Above them, something happened that had never occurred before in an American city. Private planes took off from Tulsa and flew over Greenwood.
Tulsa was an oil town, and oil money meant aircraft. Several surplus planes from World War I were available, along with trained pilots. Survivors consistently and independently described what fell from those planes: burning cloth soaked in turpentine, sticks of dynamite, and gunfire aimed down at the streets. The Oklahoma commission that later studied the massacre concluded that Tulsa was likely the first city in the United States to be bombed from the air.
On the ground, the destruction moved block by block, and it was systematic. Groups stormed homes, ordered families out, took what they wanted, and set the buildings on fire behind them. Dr. A.
C. Jackson, a nationally respected surgeon of forty-two, came out of his house with his hands raised in surrender. According to a white neighbor who witnessed it, two men shot him anyway. The only Black hospital in Tulsa had already been burned, so there was nowhere to take him.
He bled to death. At Mount Zion Baptist Church, men from the neighborhood hid inside to organize a defense. A truck mounted with a machine gun opened fire on the building. When the men inside refused to come out, the church was set on fire.
Only the basement survived. It had been open for fifty-one days. When the destruction ended, all thirty-five blocks were in ruins. More than one thousand homes and businesses had been destroyed.
The Library of Congress records 190 businesses destroyed and ten thousand people displaced. Later estimates put the number of buildings destroyed above twelve hundred. The official death toll recorded at the time was ten whites and twenty-six Blacks. Virtually no historian today accepts that figure.
Reliable estimates range from fifty to three hundred dead. The Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City uses a range of 150 to 300. More than eight hundred people were treated for injuries. There were reports of bodies thrown into the Arkansas River and buried in unmarked graves.
The survivors were not free to bury their dead or sift through their ashes. They were rounded up and arrested. Six thousand Black Tulsans were detained in early June 1921. Early on June 1, Governor James B.
A. Robertson declared martial law, and National Guard troops arrived under General Charles Barrett. The National Guard and local law enforcement moved through Greenwood to disarm, arrest, and transport Black residents to internment camps. In some cases, they pulled people from their homes by force.
According to the later state commission report, the result was a mob left undeterred, outnumbering the remaining Black population twenty to one. The people who had been driven from their homes were treated not as victims of a crime but as its cause. Photographs from June 1 show lines of Black men, women, and children marching through downtown Tulsa with their hands in the air under armed white guard. More than six thousand people were held at the convention hall and the fairgrounds at McNulty Park, some for up to eight days.
Release required a green card signed by a white employer vouching for the detainee. In practice, no Black Tulsan could leave custody unless a white person agreed to take responsibility for them. People who had owned hotels and theaters the previous morning stood in line waiting for a white signature. While they were held, what remained of Greenwood was looted.
Then came a second wave of loss unrelated to fire. The city rushed through a fire ordinance imposing costly building requirements that made rebuilding in Greenwood financially impossible for the owners. The practical effect was to permanently clear the district and open the land, located directly beside downtown and the rail lines, to other buyers. A Black attorney named Buck Colbert Franklin fought back.
In 2015, a ten-page manuscript he wrote shortly after the massacre was discovered. He had watched from the outskirts as the district was consumed by flames. Franklin sued the city and won. The ordinance was struck down, and Greenwood property owners kept the legal right to rebuild on their land.
But rebuilding required money, and the money that should have existed had already been erased by a single word: riot. During the rest of 1921, survivors filed more than fourteen hundred claims and lawsuits seeking over four million dollars. Almost none of them received anything. City leaders had moved quickly to characterize the event as a race riot, not a massacre, not arson, not an attack, a riot.
Virtually every property insurance policy then in effect contained a riot exclusion clause protecting the insurer from losses caused by riots and civil disturbances. Once the event carried that classification, the policies were void. Franklin and two fellow attorneys filed dozens of suits against insurance companies on behalf of Greenwood property owners. Historians believe that among all individual claimants, only one white employer received compensation.
No Black Greenwood property owner received anything. The two men who had built the district ended up in different places. Gurley and his wife Emma were eventually released from internment. According to Franklin’s memoirs, Gurley left Oklahoma for Los Angeles, where the couple settled in a four-bedroom home and ran a small hotel.
A rumor circulated in Tulsa that Gurley had been lynched and buried in an unmarked grave. It was not true. Stradford fled Tulsa permanently. He had been indicted by a grand jury that blamed Black Tulsans for starting the violence.
He never returned. His grandson, John W. Rogers Jr. , later became chairman of Ariel Investments.
Those who remained, with no insurance money and no assistance of any kind, began clearing bricks with their hands. By 1922, one year after the district had been burned to the ground, eighty businesses had reopened in Greenwood. Photographs from that first winter show people living in tents during the Oklahoma cold while working their lots. Mount Zion, having finished paying for a $92,000 building and watching it burn eight weeks later, refused to declare bankruptcy.
The congregation held services in the surviving basement and began again. In 1942, twenty-one years after the massacre, a new Mount Zion building was completed at a cost of $150,000. Greenwood recovered and prospered again during the 1930s and 1940s as a commercial and cultural district. But the wealth never returned to its former level, and the second decline was not caused by fire.
Starting in the 1960s, an interstate highway was routed directly through Greenwood, and urban renewal programs demolished much of what remained. Businesses that had survived the massacre did not survive the highway intersection. Meanwhile, the event itself was disappearing from the record. There were no public ceremonies, no memorials, no anniversaries.
Researchers did not begin investigating seriously until the 1970s. In 1997, the Oklahoma legislature created a commission to study the massacre. Its report, published in 2001, documented the killings, the unlawful imprisonment, the forced labor, and the cover-up, and recommended reparations for survivors. The state never paid anything.
Two survivors continued the fight more than twenty years after that report was written. Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Ford Fletcher had been small children in Greenwood in 1921. A century later, they were plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa, argued under Oklahoma’s public nuisance law. The theory was that the destruction of 1921 had never been remediated, that its effects on North Tulsa remained ongoing and measurable, and that the city had continued to benefit from the massacre by commercially promoting its history while the affected community remained impoverished.
On April 2, 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court heard oral arguments. Randle and Fletcher, then 109 years old, attended in person. On June 12, 2024, the court ruled against them by a vote of eight to one. In October of that year, seven justices declined without comment to reconsider the case.
Fletcher was 110 by then. Randle was 109. The city said it respected the decision. One hundred and three years after the massacre, no person or institution had been held legally accountable, and no survivor or descendant had received reparations.
But something else had been happening a few miles from the courthouse. Since 2021, the city had been excavating Oaklawn Cemetery searching for the people buried without names. The work was slow and required forensic precision. Investigators looked for adult male remains in simple wooden coffins matching written reports from 1921, then searched for signs of gunshot injuries.
In July 2024, the first victim was identified by name through DNA and genetic genealogy. He was C. L. Daniel, a Black World War I veteran from Georgia with no known connection to Tulsa, apparently a passerby.
In June 2025, a second victim was identified: James Goings. A fifth excavation began on October 14, 2025 and uncovered forty-two previously unknown graves. Two of the people leading this work were descendants of survivors. Brenda Nails-Alford’s grandparents, James Nails Sr.
and Vasie Nora Nails, had owned Nails Brothers shoe and record stores in Greenwood with her great-uncle Henry. Everything they owned was destroyed in 1921. Her grandfather had studied at Prairie View A&M and earned a degree in shoemaking. He did everything he was supposed to do.
She was now digging in a cemetery looking for the neighbors he lost.