| In 1921, Tulsa was considered the "Oil Capital of the World," and the black community was among the most prosperous in the nation. The Greenwood section of town was known both as "Little Africa" and as "The Black Wall Street." The film does an excellent job of concisely laying out the various conditions that set the stage for the riot, from the return of unemployed (and heavily armed) veterans from WWI to the popularity of the film "Birth of a Nation" and the growth of the Ku Klux Klan. The catalyst for the violence was a misunderstood incident where a black man named Dick Rowland accidentally fell onto a white female elevator operator, who screamed for help. As historian Don J. Guy points out, though, this wasn't the real incident -- that occurred at the local newspaper, The Tulsa Tribune, which published an afternoon article distorting the event and calling for a lynching. By that evening, crowds of white men were gathered at the jail seeking blood, and violence soon broke out between them and a much smaller group of blacks. Supposedly to keep the public order, the sheriff began deputizing any white citizen who wanted to join the police force, and soon hundreds of Klansmen, now representing the law, began organizing what, in the words of historian and retired General Ed Wheeler, was effectively a military operation. By the next day, over 300 blacks had been killed, over 1200 homes had been burned, and the surviving African-American population of Tulsa was forced into ... |
