The Tulsa Race Massacre and the Wealth That Burned on Greenwood

On the morning of May 31, 1921, a young Black man named Dick Rowland was arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma, after an encounter in the elevator of the Drexel Building downtown with a young white woman named Sarah Page, who operated it. What exactly happened in that elevator has never been established; the most common later account is that he stumbled and stepped on her foot. By that afternoon the Tulsa Tribune had published a story that inflamed the city, and by evening a white crowd had gathered at the courthouse where Rowland was held. A group of armed Black men, many of them veterans of the First World War, went to the courthouse to help protect him from being lynched. A shot was fired in a scuffle. What followed, through the night and into June 1, was the destruction of Greenwood, the Black district north of the railroad tracks, by a white mob, some of its members deputized by local authorities. When it ended, roughly thirty-five blocks lay in ashes. The charges against Dick Rowland were later dropped.

In short: In 1921 a white mob burned Tulsa's prosperous Black Greenwood district, killing many residents and destroying homes, churches and businesses. Insurers refused claims, the city tried to block rebuilding, and no one was held to account. More than a century later, survivors and descendants are still pressing for repair, and the case raises a hard question about what a government owes for wealth it helped destroy.

The district that made itself

Greenwood was not an accident. In the early twentieth century, as Tulsa boomed on oil money, Black Oklahomans and migrants from the South built a community around Greenwood Avenue. Segregation laws and custom kept Black residents out of white Tulsa's shops and neighborhoods, and the money Black residents earned tended to stay in Greenwood because there was nowhere else to spend it.

Entrepreneurs built on that. O. W. Gurley, a landowner and businessman, bought land in the area and sold lots to Black buyers. J. B. Stradford built a hotel that was among the finest Black-owned hotels in the country. There were grocers, barbers, doctors, lawyers, restaurants, churches, a hospital, a library, schools, theaters and newspapers. Greenwood was not wealthy by the standards of Tulsa's oil barons, and many residents were working people who cleaned and cooked in white homes across the tracks. But it was a place where Black families owned property and businesses and passed them on.

That ownership is what burned. Homes are the main form of wealth most American families have, and a business is the next. In a few hours, Greenwood's residents lost both.

May 31 and June 1, 1921

The violence started late on May 31 and went on through the next day. White rioters, many of them armed, crossed into Greenwood, looting and setting fires. Black residents defended their homes and were outnumbered. There are accounts, from survivors and other witnesses, of airplanes flying over the district during the attack, and some survivors said people were shot from them; historians and a state commission have treated those accounts seriously while noting how much remains uncertain about what the planes did.

The National Guard was called in, and its troops, along with local authorities, rounded up thousands of Black residents and held them in detention centers, including the convention hall and the fairgrounds. Many were released only when a white employer vouched for them. Meanwhile, their homes burned.

The death toll has never been settled. Official counts at the time were in the dozens. A state commission that studied the massacre in the late 1990s and reported in 2001 concluded that the number was far higher, with estimates ranging up to about three hundred. Many of the dead were buried in unmarked graves. In 2020 the city of Tulsa began excavating at Oaklawn Cemetery as part of an investigation into those graves, and remains have been found and identification work has gone on since.

Who refused to pay

The story of the money is where the injustice compounds. Greenwood's residents and businesses filed claims with their insurers and with the city. The insurers, by most accounts, refused to pay, citing clauses in their policies that excluded losses from riots. A great many claims against the city, totalling millions of dollars in 1921 money, were filed, and virtually all were rejected. No one was prosecuted for the killings or the arson.

The city went further. Shortly after the massacre, Tulsa passed a fire ordinance requiring new buildings in the burned area to be built of fireproof materials, which would have made rebuilding prohibitively expensive for most residents. City leaders also discussed turning the area into an industrial or railroad district. Black lawyers, including B. C. Franklin, father of the historian John Hope Franklin, challenged the ordinance in court and won. Franklin reportedly worked out of a tent in the weeks after the fire.

Greenwood rebuilt, largely with its own money and labor, and by the late 1920s and 1930s it had a working commercial district again. But it never recovered the wealth that was lost, and its later history includes another loss: urban renewal and highway construction in the 1960s and 1970s cut through the district and displaced many of the businesses that had come back. Interstate highways now run through what was once the heart of Greenwood.

It is worth pausing on how much the rebuilding asked of people who had just lost everything. Families who had owned homes spent the winter of 1921 in tents and makeshift shelters. Businesses reopened in temporary structures. The money came from savings that survived, from loans among neighbors and from churches, not from the institutions that should have paid.

The long silence and the 2001 commission

For decades, the massacre was barely discussed in Tulsa's official history. Survivors talked about it among themselves, but schools did not teach it and newspapers rarely mentioned it. Some records went missing.

In 1997 the Oklahoma legislature created a commission to study what happened. Its report, released in 2001, documented the destruction, concluded that city and state officials had failed to stop the violence and in some cases had joined in, and recommended reparations, including direct payments to survivors. The legislature did not make direct payments. It passed a reconciliation act that created scholarships and other programs, which supporters of repair called an important acknowledgment and critics called a substitute for what the commission had asked.

Survivors then went to court. A federal lawsuit filed in 2003 was dismissed on the ground that it was filed too late, and the Supreme Court declined to hear it in 2005. Another case, filed in 2020 by the last known survivors, including Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, under Oklahoma's public nuisance law, was dismissed by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in 2024. Viola Fletcher testified before a congressional subcommittee in 2021, when she was 107, describing what she saw as a child.

In January 2025, the Justice Department released a review of the massacre under a law meant to investigate unresolved civil rights killings. It described the massacre as a coordinated, military-style attack and found that no living person could now be prosecuted.

Three survivors and a clock

For most of the past twenty-five years, the fight over Greenwood has had a cruel timetable built into it. The people with the strongest claim to repair were the survivors themselves, and every year there were fewer of them.

By the time the state commission reported in 2001, the survivors still living had been small children in 1921. By the time their 2020 lawsuit was filed, the known survivors were three: Lessie Benningfield Randle, Viola Fletcher and Fletcher's younger brother, Hughes Van Ellis, who had served in the Army in the Second World War. They were all past one hundred years old. Their lawyers argued that the harm of the massacre was ongoing, because the city had never addressed the damage and had in some ways profited from it, including by promoting the district's history for tourism.

The courts did not accept that theory. Hughes Van Ellis died in 2023, before the case was resolved. When the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed the suit in 2024, the two women who remained had spent much of the last years of their lives waiting in court.

Whatever one thinks about the legal arguments, the timeline is its own judgment. A state commission recommended direct payments to survivors when there were still many of them alive. Nothing of that kind was paid. Governments have a way of waiting out claims they do not want to pay, and in this case the waiting worked.

The descendants of Greenwood's residents now carry the claim forward. Their argument is different from the survivors' in one important way: they are seeking repair for the loss of wealth that would have passed to them, rather than for injuries they suffered directly. That makes the case harder in court, which tends to want an injured person standing before it, and arguably easier in moral terms to explain, because the lost inheritance is exactly what the massacre took.

The argument over repair

Here is the argument for repair, and the strongest objections to it.

The case for repair is direct. A specific group of people, living in a specific place, lost specific property and lives in an attack that local authorities failed to stop and in some cases joined. The insurers refused to pay. The city refused claims and tried to block rebuilding. Those are injuries with identifiable causes and identifiable victims, and the government's role is documented. Ordinary principles of justice say that people who are wrongfully harmed, especially with government participation, should be made whole as far as possible.

The objections usually take three forms. First, nearly everyone directly responsible is long dead, and today's taxpayers did nothing wrong. Second, it is hard to know how to calculate a loss from more than a century ago, or how to identify descendants fairly. Third, some argue that targeted payments based on race are divisive, or legally risky after recent court rulings.

These deserve answers. On the first: governments are continuing bodies. Cities and states pay debts and honor contracts made long before current officials took office; they can likewise owe for wrongs done in their name. On the second: the difficulty is real, but courts and commissions handle complicated damage calculations constantly, and the descendants of Greenwood property owners are often identifiable from records. Investment in the district itself, through housing, business support and education, is another way to direct repair to the community that was harmed. On the third: repair for Greenwood is not a payment based on race in the abstract. It is compensation to the victims of a particular event and their families, which is a different legal and moral claim.

The recent proposals in Tulsa have reflected that last point, focusing on the community and on descendants of the people who lived there. Tulsa's mayor, Monroe Nichols, the city's first Black mayor, proposed in 2025 a privately funded trust aimed at housing, homeownership and economic development in north Tulsa. Whether proposals like that are enough is a fair question for descendants to answer.

Repair also has a practical side that is easy to overlook in the moral argument. Money directed to north Tulsa for housing, homeownership and small business would land in a part of the city that still has lower incomes and fewer services than much of the rest. Residents of every background who live there would see the benefits. Done carefully, repair for a historical wrong can also be good economic development for a place that needs it.

What Greenwood says about wealth

The Greenwood story is often told as a story about racism, and it is. It is also a story about how wealth is built and destroyed, and who gets help when disaster strikes.

When a natural disaster hits a community today, governments and insurers step in; it is not always enough, but there is a system. Greenwood's residents faced a man-made disaster and found every part of that system closed to them. The insurers did not pay. The city did not pay. The state did not pay. Generations of potential inheritance, the money that lets a family buy a home, start a business or pay for college, disappeared.

That is one reason the racial wealth gap in the United States is so large and so stubborn. Black families were blocked from building wealth by law and custom, and when they built it anyway, it was sometimes destroyed. The inequality and taxing the rich coverage on this site follows the debates over how wealth is distributed and taxed now; Greenwood is part of how today's distribution came to be.

What you can do

The fight over Greenwood is local, but its questions are national.

• See the wealth gap in today's numbers. The inequality page shows the share of the nation's wealth held by the top 1% and the bottom 50% over time. The pattern has roots in events like Greenwood.
• Support civil rights and community groups. The organizations directory lists civil rights and racial justice nonprofits in Oklahoma and every other state, including groups working on historical repair.
• Tell your representatives what you think about repair. Bills to study reparations have been introduced in Congress for decades. Find your members with the representatives lookup and ask where they stand.
• Learn the history where you live. Many American cities had their own racial violence in the early twentieth century, much of it barely taught. The racial justice page follows efforts to document it and repair what it destroyed.

Dick Rowland walked out of jail a free man. The neighborhood that had tried to protect him spent the next century trying to get back what was taken from it.