“What I saw was bad enough,

and yet I cannot tell all that I

saw.”
- "Events of the Tulsa Disaster," by Mary E.
Jones Parrish

Documented instance of racial violence resulting in

property or economic loss

On May 31, 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma, became the site

of a horrific massacre that was shrouded in
silence for decades.

A White mob descended on the city’s prosperous

Black enclave of Greenwood and proceeded to
burn, loot and kill until scores were dead and 35
city blocks were destroyed.

One hundred years later, Tulsa is still reckoning

with this violent history. As it does, Americans
across the country face another truth: Tulsa
wasn’t alone.

Between the end of the Civil War and the 1940s,

the destruction seen in Tulsa happened in various
ways to communities of color across the country.

These acts of racial violence took aim at the roots

of generational wealth, shaping the nation and its
inequities in ways we still see today.

Burned from the land: How 60

years of racial violence shaped
America
By Channon Hodge, Breeanna Hare, Tami Luhby, Elias
Goodstein, Priya Krishnakumar, Nadia Lancy, Toby Lyles,
Amy Roberts and Clint Alwahab, CNN
Published May 30, 2021

A
s the Civil War neared its end, Union General
William Sherman had been convinced that
newly emancipated slaves needed their own
land to secure their freedom. He issued Special Field
Order No. 15, setting aside 400,000 coastal acres of
land for Black families and stating that, “…no white
person whatever, unless military oJcers and soldiers
detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside.” A
provision was added later for mules.

In three months, the potential of Sherman’s order

vanished with a single shot. That April, President
Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and in the fall
President Andrew Johnson reversed Sherman’s order,
allowing Confederate planters to regain the land. It
demonstrated a ruthless appropriation that would be
repeated for decades to come.

Still, Black Americans created pockets of wealth

during the Reconstruction years and into the early
20th century. Yet where Black Americans created a
refuge, White Americans pushed back through
political maneuvering and violence. This year marks
the centennial of one such event: the heinous attack
on the Black enclave of Greenwood in Tulsa,
Oklahoma.

The Williams Dreamland Theatre was destroyed during the Tulsa Race
Massacre in 1921. (Photo by Greenwood Cultural Center/Getty Images)

A glistening city-within-a-city, Greenwood was home

to grocery and retail stores, theaters, restaurants and
hotels – all the businesses and services that would
cater to Black residents of a segregated state.
Greenwood’s streets were lined with the stately
mansions of doctors and business tycoons as well as
the more modest dwellings of domestic workers. It
was so prosperous it became known as “Negro Wall
Street.”

The aYuence of Greenwood “created this tie-in

between Black Tulsans and White Tulsans,” says
University of Tulsa anthropologist Alicia Odewale in
CNN Films’ “Dreamland: The Burning of Black Wall
Street,” airing Monday at 9 p.m. ET. “But it’s all about
perspective. White Tulsans talked about Greenwood
as ‘Little Africa’ or ‘Nigger Land.’”

One hundred years ago, on May 31, 1921, that racial

animosity became fuel for a massacre.

A lynch mob formed in downtown Tulsa after a 19-

year-old Black man was accused of assaulting a
White woman. That night, thousands of White Tulsans
launched an all-out assault on Greenwood with rifles,
machine guns, torches and aerial bombings from
private planes.

The rampage lasted into the next afternoon, leaving

10,000 Black Tulsans homeless and their community
burned to nothing but ash and rubble.

The Greenwood District is seen burning during the riot on June 1, 1921.
The text seen on the image was etched onto the negative at the time of
printing, according to the Smithsonian. (Smithsonian National Museum of
African American History and Culture/Gift of Cassandra P. Johnson Smith)

It’s still unknown how many people were killed but it’s
estimated as many as 300 lost their lives in the
massacre.

It was one of the worst acts of racial violence in

American history. And it was part of a larger pattern of
assault.

“We estimate that there were upwards of 100

massacres that took place between the end of the
Civil War and the 1940s,” says William Darity Jr., a
Duke University economist who co-authored “From
Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in
the Twenty-First Century,” with writer and folklorist A.
Kirsten Mullen. “And they take place North and South,
East and West.”

We looked back through research and news

clippings, paying particular attention to around 50
racially charged incidents between 1863 and 1923
when people of color lost property or economic
opportunity. The events highlighted here reveal how
acts of racial violence of diferent scope played out
across the country and targeted various ethnicities.
Historians then helped us examine how and why they
had occurred and where we still see the impact today.

"The South lost the Civil War. The South’s

response to that loss was that it was going to
win the race war."

1863: Detroit, Michigan

On March 6, 1863, a tavern owner named William

Faulkner was found guilty of sexually assaulting a
White girl. Outside the courthouse, a mostly White
crowd clashed with oJcials as they tried to get at
Faulkner.

When they couldn’t, they roamed Detroit’s streets,

attacking African Americans and setting buildings on
fire, which left nearly 200 Black residents homeless.
Local papers had called Faulkner a “negro,” though
Faulkner said he was Spanish Indian. Faulkner’s
accusers later recanted, and he was released from
prison, as noted in research by the late Matthew
Kundinger when he was a University of Michigan
history student. (Michigan Journal of History)

1875: Clinton, Mississippi

On September 4, 1875, between 1,500 and 2,500

people, most of whom were newly enfranchised Black
Republicans and their families, gathered at the site of
a former plantation for a picnic and political rally
ahead of an election.

A White Democrat who’d been invited to the event

heckled a speaker, inciting a fight. Witnesses said the
White Democrats turned their weapons on the crowd
and started firing. In the days after, a “presumed race
riot” became a “massacre.” (Mississippi Encyclopedia)

T
he achievements of Black Americans made
them vulnerable to attack, said Trina Shanks,
a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute.

“If Blacks were successful and actually were visibly

prosperous, that made them a target. Some of the
violence might have been triggered by this economic
envy,” said Shanks, director of community
engagement at the University of Michigan’s School of
Social Work. She explains that some White Americans
thought, “How can we make sure that we reserve
these economic benefits and opportunities for the
White population and our children and push Blacks
out so there can be more for us.”

The front page of the Detroit Free Press

on March 7, 1863.

This dynamic played out in Wilmington, North

Carolina, where many Black Americans achieved
economic success for several decades in the late
1800s. They worked throughout the major port city as
professionals, skilled artisans and industrial workers.
They formed a building and loan association, built
libraries and created baseball leagues. During the
1870s and 1880s, some Black businessmen and
entrepreneurs amassed wealth rivaling that of many
Whites, according to a 2006 historical report
produced by the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot
Commission, which was created by the state’s
General Assembly.

They were gaining political power, too, having an

impact on multiple elections in the 1890s and
securing seats in the city government.

As Black people increased their political and financial

capital, many White residents grew increasingly angry
and organized to regain control of the city.

It all came to a head just after the November 8

election in 1898. White Democrats in Wilmington
forced the resignation of the city’s White mayor and
local government members of both races in a coup,
as well as the removal of Black employees from their
municipal positions. At least 60 members of the city’s
Black community were killed, according to the News
& Observer, while some have estimated a death toll
into the hundreds. More than 2,100 Black residents
fled, and the homes of at least 1,500 Black people
were then taken by White residents at low cost.

White supremacists burned down Wilmington, North Carolina’s Daily

Record newspaper building in their 1898 attempt to overthrow the city’s
biracial government. (Library of Congress/Corbis/VCG/Getty Images)

This result, where White people benefited in the

aftermath of violence, repeats itself well into the 20th
century in places like Ocoee, Florida, where a
successful Black labor broker’s attempt to vote in
1920 sparked a massacre so violent that Black
residents abandoned their properties. Within a month,
their land was advertised for sale at “special bargains”
by a Confederate veteran, the Orlando Sentinel found.

The racial violence during and after Reconstruction in

the South began as Whites sought to maintain their
supremacy economically, politically and socially,
historian Dominic J. Capeci Jr. wrote in a foreword to
the “Encyclopedia of American Race Riots.”

“The South lost the Civil War. The South’s response to

that loss was that it was going to win the race war,”
Capeci told CNN. He noted that White people sought
to repress Black people, Chinese immigrants and
others throughout the nation in the subsequent
decades, sparked in part by growing competition for
housing and jobs.

"Once upon a time in the West, there were over

200 Chinese communities until the Chinese
[people] who lived in them were driven out."

1877: San Francisco, California

Weary of the high unemployment brought on by a

depression, White Americans and recent European
immigrants turned on the city’s thousands of Chinese
workers. On July 23, 1877, around 8,000 people
gathered for a labor rally in front of City Hall. Violence
broke out and the rally turned into an anti-Chinese mob
that set fire to a city wharf before torching, looting and
murdering its way through the city’s long-established
Chinatown. (SF GATE)

1885: Rock Springs, Wyoming

In the mid-1800s, Chinese immigrants started flowing

into the US in search of gold. When the gold rush ended,
Chinese people found jobs throughout the country. At a
coal mine in Wyoming, White Americans and European
immigrants resented the Chinese laborers for accepting
lower wages and lashed out.

When a fight broke out between the workers on

September 2, 1885, White miners gathered weapons,
surrounded the Chinese enclave in Rock Springs, killed
28 Chinese men and burned down 79 of their shacks
and houses. (WyoHistory.org)

C
hinese laborers had been coming to the
United States since the mid-1800s, with
many fleeing the destruction caused by the
Taiping Rebellion, which began in 1850. In the 1860s,
the Chinese population in the US nearly doubled as
many came to do the dangerous work of building the
Pacific Coast Railroad, according to researchers for
the PBS series “American Experience: The Chinese
Exclusion Act.”

An article from the San Francisco

Examiner on July 25, 1877.

Historian William Wei told CNN that Chinese laborers

were paid lower wages than White Americans and
European immigrants who saw the Chinese as an
economic threat.