The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

by Tim Madigan

Whites worried that Negroes would take their jobs, or that Negro men would deflower their women, or the whites were enraged by uppity coloreds who were no longer content to ride in segregated rail cars.

Newspapers ran ads inviting the public to witness the burning of live colored men.

Patriotic organizations sprang up by dozens, promulgating paranoia and intolerance as much as love of country.

Within just a few years, the Ku Klux Klan became a terrifying and ruthlessly effective tool for expressing wounded Southern pride, for punishing Northern carpetbaggers, and for reminding the freed Negro of his place.

By the end of the 1870s, the North had effectively washed its hands of the South, abandoning its attempts to secure and protect the rights of the freedmen. Jim Crow reigned. Hoods became unnecessary for those participating in public murders, lynchings that were often a cause for school holidays and community festivals, whose goings-on were reported in newspapers across the South like baseball

box scores were.