Remembering the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre with Author Tim Madigan

On June 1, 1921, a mob made up of thousands of white people descended on Tulsa, Oklahoma's Greenwood community, then known as the Negro Wall Street of America, home to thriving black Americans. The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (recently renamed the Tulsa Race Massacre) turned 35 square blocks into smoldering rubble, leaving an estimated 300 people dead—the vast majority of them African Americans—and 10,000 homeless. 

What do we understand about the circumstances and rising tensions leading up to this event?

I think it’s vitally important to remember that what happened in Tulsa was completely consistent with what was going on in the nation at the time, unique only in its terrible scope.

During that moment of the Jim Crow era, lynching was a spectator sport of sorts, reported in Southern newspapers. The KKK had become one of the most celebrated fraternal orders in the United States, popular in the North and South alike.

The first blockbuster movie, released in 1915, was Birth of a Nation, which celebrated the Klan and invoked the most odious racial stereotypes. The film was endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson and the chief justice of the US Supreme Court.

Thousands of African American men had fought and died for their country in World War I, expecting that because of their sacrifice, they would return to a different world.

Places like Greenwood, where black Americans prospered, inspired resentment among many white Americans. Meanwhile, thousands of African American men had fought and died for their country in World War I, expecting that because of their sacrifice, they would return to a different world. Instead, the dehumanizing nature of segregation and racial violence had gotten worse in the United States, not better.

All these tensions came into play in Tulsa. The place was a pile of dry straw, just waiting for a match.

Who was Richard Lloyd Jones and what role did he play in the massacre?

It could be argued that if not for Jones, the publisher of the Tulsa Tribune, the massacre would never have happened. Having arrived in Tulsa just the year before, Jones found himself in a newspaper war against the Tulsa World and fanned racial flames in an attempt to boost circulation.

In late May 1921, an African American shoeshine boy named Dick Rowland was arrested for allegedly assaulting a white elevator operator named Sarah Page. (The two had known each other and were probably romantically involved.) Local police had more or less determined there was no validity to the assault accusation. They kept Rowland behind bars mostly for his own protection.

But on May 31, the Tulsa Tribune published a front-page article with inflammatory and largely...

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