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

by Tim Madigan

Not long into my research, I realized that what happened in Tulsa in 1921 was scarcely an isolated event. It might have been the worst incident of its kind in our history, but almost every month, American newspapers of that time carried new accounts of racial bloodshed in another town or city, new atrocities perpetrated against Black people by mobs of white people. Rather than an exception, I learned, what happened in Tulsa was a metaphor for that period of our history, those particularly ugly years that followed World War I, and for the Black experience in America in the century after the Civil War.

State after state effectively disenfranchised them with voting requirements most Black people had no hope of meeting. Who knew how many windows there were in the White House? That was the kind of question African Americans needed to answer to obtain a ballot. In

“If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control,” said one leading commentator, Madison Grant, “and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed or color,’ the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles and the Viking of the days of Rollo.” Thus was born America’s “nativism” movement, whose progeny would include the modern version of the Ku Klux Klan.