May 31, 2004
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83 YEARS AGO TODAY
May 31 1921
After a white woman claims that a black man had grabbed her arm in an elevator, the largest race riot in U.S. history breaks out in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Marauding whites set fire to the exclusively-negro Greenwood district. The official death toll is reported as 36, but later historians estimate it was more like 300.
The riot resulted in a reported four thousand African American men being detained for three days in internment camps. Thirty-five blocks of Greenwood were totally destroyed, starting with the business district and winding down though the poorer neighborhoods. The number of dead has always been difficult to place because of the dumping of bodies in the Arkansas River and the prohibition on funerals following the riot.
Eyewitness reports support a higher count of those dead. A magazine article reports that officials at the Salvation Army said they had fed thirty seven grave diggers on two days and twenty on two others.
During the first two days these men dug 120 graves in each of which a dead Negro was buried. No coffins were used....Added to the number accounted for were numbers of others--men, women and children-- who were incinerated in the burning houses in the Negro settlement.
Another eyewitness reported that someone positioned a machine gun atop of a building and set about firing into the African American community causing people to flee into the hills.
Private planes were reported flying over the community "dropping fire from the sky" . The Chicago Defender "reported that black neighborhoods in Tulsa were bombed from the air by a private plane equipped with dynamite."
No European American was ever arrested for the devastation to life and property during the riot in Tulsa. The only individual ever indicted was J. B. Stadford, an influential African American businessman who went to the police station that day as a peacemaker. He was forced to flee and never returned to Tulsa
http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/tulsa19b.html
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