The Tulsa Massacre of 1921 is generally considered one of the single worst acts of racist violence in US history. A prosperous area known as Black Wall Street was burned to the ground by an angry mob. It started with an interaction between a black man and a white woman on an elevator.
The massacre began during Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white 21-year-old elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building. He was arrested and rumors that he was to be lynched were spread throughout the city, where a white man named Roy Belton had been lynched the previous year. Upon hearing reports that a mob of hundreds of white men had gathered around the jail where Rowland was being held, a group of 75 black men, some armed, arrived at the jail to protect Rowland. The sheriff persuaded the group to leave the jail,…
