The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

On the night of May 31 through to June 1, 1921, following an alleged assault on a white woman, a mob of hundreds of white supremacists descended upon the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Known at that time as Black Wall Street, Greenwood was one of the most prosperous African American neighborhoods in the nation. By the end of the race riot, hundreds of buildings had been laid to waste, over 10,000 Greenwood residents were left homeless, and up to 300 people had been murdered. Following the massacre, the Greenwood district remained a shadow of itself, and reports of the attack were largely unheard of for nearly a century. 

Author Tim Madigan’s work The Burning: Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 gives an in -depth and haunting look into the events of that fateful day. Shedding light not only on the barbarism of the perpetrators in Tulsa, but also exposing America’s long history of countless race massacres that occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth, and first half of the twentieth, centuries in the United States.