Shelter from the Storm
The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 left thousands homeless in 14 hours. Where did they go?
By Jezy J. Gray
This story originally appeared in the June 2021 issue of The Curbside Chronicle.
On the evening of June 1, 1921, approximately 10,000 people found themselves newly homeless in the city of Tulsa. The prior 14 hours brought a grim tide of violence as a deputized white mob laid siege to the Greenwood district on the city’s north side, obliterating 35 blocks of homes and businesses in what was one of the country’s most prosperous Black communities.
The terror raged through the night and into the morning. As smoke lingered in the fading light of day, the land scarred by swaths of scorched buildings, the scope of the atrocity was coming into clearer view. Life on “Black Wall Street” would never be the same.
Before the massacre, this vibrant area of Tulsa had been nationally renowned as one of the shining examples of Black success in the segregated United States. With nearly 200 locally owned businesses ranging from movie theaters to medical facilities, barbershops, restaurants, grocery stores and more, the northside district — which originally began to flourish after the oil boom of the 1910s — garnered praise from civil rights leaders like W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. The Atlanta Black Star reports that a “dollar circulated 36 to 100 times” and remained in Greenwood “almost a year before leaving.”
As the attack intensified on the morning of June 1, thousands of Greenwood residents were rounded up and detained at sites across the city by the National Guard, local police and roaming bands of armed white citizens. Contemporary landmarks like Cain’s Ballroom and the Tulsa Theater were converted into makeshift detention camps, where those who surrendered to authorities could only wonder in fear about their homes and businesses as the city burned. Those who stayed behind to defend their property faced the bullets of marauders and improvised explosives dropped from low-flying planes.
Reporting from The Tulsa World suggests “hundreds and perhaps thousands” fled the city in response to the violence. Oral histories suggest that some found sanctuary in private homes and churches, but it’s unclear how widespread this actually was. Many spent the next winter living in tents provided by the American Red Cross as they worked to rebuild, a task thwarted at every turn by a committee of influential white business owners and real estate developers known as the Tulsa Real Estate Exchange.
Through dubious enforcement of the local fire code, the committee — which included one of the city’s founders, W. Tate Brady, a former Ku Klux Klan member who served as night watchman during the Massacre — schemed to displace the Black community to the outer reaches of Tulsa by re-zoning formerly residential areas for industry.
“They came up with a master plan, not to rebuild, but to move the whole Black district further north and east,” said Russell Cobb, author of The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion and Lies in America’s Weirdest State. “A lot of it has to do with the railroads, because the MKT [Missouri–Kansas–Texas] line comes in and basically bifurcates white Tulsa and Black Tulsa. They wanted to push it further afield, so the idea was to move them out of the way. Then Tulsa, in its expansion, could take over what had been the Greenwood district.”
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