The Violence That Shaped Our Nation
From his office window, attorney Buck Colbert “B.C.” Franklin could see planes circling low overhead Greenwood, the thriving African American district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the early morning hours of June 1st, 1921, and they were growing in number. Moments later, he heard “something falling like hail upon the top of my office.” The planes were dropping bombs. In a 1931 manuscript, Franklin vividly described what he witnessed during those horrifying hours, when thousands of white citizens brutally attacked the African American community of 15,000 situated within 35 blocks surrounding the corner of Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street, just north of the railroad tracks that divided the city’s black and white sections. Homes and businesses were set on fire, raided, homeowners who remained to defend their homes were shot and their property looted. Franklin’s is one of many first-person accounts that chronicles one of the worst acts of racial violence in U.S. history.
Oil money had flowed plentifully into Tulsa since 1905, making it one of the fastest-growing cities in Oklahoma, swelling the population from 18,000 to 100,000 in 10 years. Yet racial tensions persisted, and like other communities nationwide, it adhered to the norms of Jim Crow, going so far as to segregate their telephone-pole installations. African Americans were barred from shopping in white-owned businesses, so they established their own self-sustaining enterprises. A modest few thrived in a professional class of doctors, lawyers, and entrepreneurs. The vast majority of Tulsa’s black residents — blocked from white-only jobs in the oil industry — settled on low-wage, menial service jobs; they still were able to reap material comforts.
Yet, the yellow journalism of the Tulsa Tribune had exacerbated deepening racial resentment, and the kindling that sparked this particular atrocity was the accusation of an alleged assault of a white-girl elevator operator by a black shoeshine boy. Soon, rumors spread that he was going to be lynched; black Tulsans from Greenwood flocked to offer additional armed protection to the sheriff to defend the boy from a white mob. By the late morning, a white mob advanced across the railroad tracks.
“Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues in the air,” Franklin wrote. “Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes — now a dozen or more in number — still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural bird of the air.” Franklin noted his frustration when he had tried in vain to contact the sheriff’s office and the fire department: “Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?”
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/tulsa-race-massacre-juneteenth-american-violence-1017511/