The Justice Department issued a report Friday on the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, when as many as 10,000 white Tulsans murdered hundreds of Black residents and burned businesses and homes to the ground in an attack that federal investigators found “was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.”
“The Tulsa race massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings, and locked the survivors in internment camps.”
“Until this day, the justice department has not spoken publicly about this race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa. This report breaks that silence by rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report lays bare new information and shows that the massacre was the result not of uncontrolled mob violence, but of a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood.”
The Cold Case Unit in the Civil Rights Division’s Criminal Section “spoke with survivors and with descendants of survivors, examined firsthand accounts of the massacre given by individuals who are now deceased, studied primary source materials, spoke to scholars of the massacre and reviewed legal pleadings, books, and scholarly articles relating to the massacre,” according to DOJ.
The resulting 126-page report is the federal government’s “first thorough reckoning” with the massacre and—unlike an earlier cursory and informal review that blamed Black men for the massacre—it “officially acknowledges, illuminates, and preserves for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims.”
A “Systematic and Coordinated” Attack
The report documents events between May 31 and June 1, 1921, when “white Tulsans mounted a concerted effort to destroy a vibrant Black community, remembered today as Black Wall Street.” The violent attack by as many as 10,000 white Tulsans that destroyed Greenwood was “so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.”
The trigger for the violence, investigators reported, “was the kind of unfounded condemnation that, at the time, commonly justified unspeakable treatment of Black men.”
On May 30, while working in a building in downtown Tulsa, 19-year-old Dick Rowland boarded an elevator operated by Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white girl. When a store clerk heard a scream, he ran to the elevator to find Ms. Page. The clerk assumed that the young Black man in the elevator had tried to attack Ms. Page and quickly called police to arrest Dick Rowland.
Ms. Page told police that Mr. Rowland had startled her by touching her arm but insisted she did not want to press charges. Rumors soon spread, however, and turned into a sensationalized allegation that Dick Rowland had attempted rape.
Police arrested Mr. Rowland at his Greenwood home and jailed him at the courthouse. The next night, a mob of white men gathered at the jail seeking to lynch him, but 30 armed Black men from Greenwood were there to ensure that the sheriff and deputies were able to protect Dick Rowland from that fate.
“The white mob saw this effort to save Rowland as a challenge to the social order and quickly recruited others,” DOJ found. “The mob grew. A confrontation broke out, and when someone fired a shot, ‘all hell broke loose.’”
Tulsa police “deputized hundreds of white residents, many of whom—immediately before being awarded a badge—had been drinking and agitating for Rowland’s murder,” DOJ reported. According to the report, more than 500 men were deputized in less than 30 minutes.
Police and National Guard troops organized these and other white Tulsans—many of whom were veterans with previous war experience—into “martial forces” that “invaded” Greenwood, the report found. “It was not a wild and disorderly mob,” the report makes clear, “but an organized force” that carried out a “coordinated invasion” at daybreak on June 1, launched by a whistle.
Planned and systematic violence and arsons followed. The invaders were “organized and efficient in their destruction,” the department reported, as they looted, burned, and destroyed 35 city blocks. Many Black families fled for their lives, leaving behind their homes and possessions, as white residents chased them across the city and looted their homes. “The destruction of the district was total.”
The Aftermath
Law enforcement (Tulsa Police and National Guard) actively participated in the destruction, federal investigators found. They disarmed Black residents, confiscated their weapons, and detained many in makeshift camps under armed guard. Investigators also found credible reports that at least some law enforcement officers participated in murder, arson, and looting.
The massacre killed as many as 300 Tulsans, perhaps even more. Investigators wrote that an accurate death toll may never be determined due to “the haphazard disposal of bodies in the Arkansas River, on flatbed rail cars, and in unmarked mass graves,” and because many survivors fled the city and never returned. In addition to the deceased, the Red Cross estimated another 700 victims were injured, according to the report.
Thousands of Black residents were left homeless. Tulsa officials promised to help Greenwood rebuild, DOJ said, but city government instead “put up obstacles to residential reconstruction,” and imposed harsh new fire codes to prevent residents from rebuilding in the area.
Survivors were left with little to nothing, but the city failed to offer meaningful financial or other help. Victims were never compensated for the loss of their homes or businesses, and the perpetrators were not held accountable then—or now, as DOJ acknowledged that “there is no living perpetrator for the Justice Department to prosecute.”
Justice Delayed
One hundred years after the massacre, three survivors—Mrs. Viola Fletcher, now 110, her younger brother Hughes Van Ellis, who died in 2023 at 102, and Lessie Benningfield Randle, now 110—testified before Congress and called for local and federal officials to confront the truth about the Tulsa Massacre.
“I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home. I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams,” Mrs. Fletcher testified before a House Judiciary Subcommittee. “I have lived through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I cannot.”
The known survivors sued the city of Tulsa for covering up the attack, portraying Black victims as instigators of the violence, and profiting from the use of victims’ names and stories while survivors and their descendants continue to live in poverty. The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed the suit last summer.