One of the most horrific instances of white nationalist terrorism perpetrated in the United States began in Tulsa, Oklahoma on Memorial day, 1921, the same way many other incidents at the time did — when a young black man was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman.

As word began to spread that a nineteen-year-old black shoeshiner had allegedly assaulted a white elevator operator (there was no evidence to support this claim) bolstered by rumors of a lynching in a ‘sensationalist’ local newspaper, a white mob formed the following day outside the Tulsa courthouse.

The terrified young man had fled the night before to his mother’s house in Greenwood, a historically African-American neighborhood of the city, before being taken into custody. Black residents gathered several blocks away from the courthouse on Greenwood Avenue, discussing their options as they recalled recent lynchings and were determined to prevent another.

Many of the older, wealthier residents warned against a dramatic response, worried that it would backfire and put at risk the capital they had invested in Greenwood’s thriving commercial district, commonly referred to as the “Black Wall Street” at the time.

A group of the younger men, many of them World War I veterans, nevertheless armed themselves and marched to the courthouse, announcing their intention to help the Sheriff protect the wrongly accused young man. The Sheriff asked them to leave, but not before the mob present had time to soak in the image of the armed group of young black men in front of them.

White men quickly ran home to get their own guns, a group of them attempting unsuccessfully to storm Tulsa’s National Guard armory, and the now well armed crowd outside the courthouse grew larger as tensions flared.

That evening, a larger group of around seventy young black men returned to the courthouse armed, and a white man reportedly fired the first shot after a black man refused demands to give up his weapon. Both sides immediately opened fire following the first shot, leaving over ten people dead outside the courthouse in the initial confrontation.

The outnumbered black men retreated towards Greenwood as an all-out firefight ensued, with the manic white mob shooting any blacks in sight and looting stores to restock on ammunition along the way.

The scene that followed for the rest of the night was one of abject terror for black residents of Tulsa, as they were killed indiscriminately and many began to flee the city. By the end of the night, another angry white mob formed outside the courthouse but was still denied entry, their attempts at a lynching thwarted.

Sometime around 1am on the first day of June, 1921, the white mob set fire to several businesses on the edge of Greenwood, reportedly sending away firefighters who arrived at gunpoint. It only took a few hours for the blaze to spread out of control, and by early morning Greenwood residents had either fled the city in terror or dug in to defend themselves and their property.

At daybreak a train whistle rang out, and the white mobs began to swarm into Greenwood. Shooting indiscriminately while taking casualties of their own from snipers and entrenched residents, the mob pushed blacks further north to the edge of the city. White residents began to enter homes throughout Greenwood, looting them and ordering occupants onto the street where they were herded to detention centers.

Eyewitness reports described watching as airplanes flew overhead, strafing residents on the streets with rifle fire and fire bombs. The six biplane trainers left-over from World War I added to the already catastrophic damage done to Greenwood by the mobs and fires, in an aerial support campaign that police later described as intended to prevent a “negro uprising”.

The National Guard arrived with just over one-hundred troops from Oklahoma City on the Governor’s orders shortly after 9 a.m., declaring martial law nearly three hours later at 11:49 a.m. after having consulted with local officials. By noon the rest of the fighting had been suppressed, and Greenwood, a thriving success story of black prosperity and wealth only a day earlier, was essentially destroyed.

Remaining Greenwood residents sift through rubble following the riots.

Estimates of how many were killed in the terror campaign range from thirty to three-hundred, although the exact number is impossible to know considering how many residents were killed by the fires and the rush to bury bodies resulted in spotty record-keeping.

Almost two hundred businesses were recorded as lost in the fires, as well as over a thousand homes, several churches, and the only black hospital in the district. An estimated 10,000 Greenwood residents were left homeless.

Fitting with the narrative of white supremacy inherent in most U.S. history, no prosecution was ever moved forward for any of the riot’s white perpetrators and the terrorist actions of Tulsa’s white population were largely scrubbed from their collective memory for the next seventy-five years.

A state government led commission started in 1996 would eventually provide a comprehensive analysis of the events and recommend that reparations be paid to survivors and their descendants, a request fulfilled by the state legislature in 2001 in the form of three-hundred college scholarships offered to descendants of Greenwood residents.

In 2015 a previously undiscovered eyewitness account of the events that occurred in Greenwood was unearthed, written by a lawyer who had watched what amounted to a full-scale fire bombing campaign of the city from his office window. It reads, in part:

“I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top,”

“The side-walks were literally covered with burning turpentine balls. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well why every burning building first caught from the top. I paused and waited for an opportune time to escape. ‘Where oh where is our splendid fire department with its half dozen stations?’ I asked myself. ‘Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?’”