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The Tulsa race massacre took place May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of White residents, many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US. Alternatively known as the Black Wall Street Massacre, the Greenwood Massacre, the Tulsa Massacre, the Tulsa pogrom, or the Tulsa race riot, it marks one of "the single worst incident(s) of racial violence in American history". The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft, destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district – at that time the wealthiest Black community in the United States, known as "Black Wall Street".
wikipedia
"Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator," read the attention-grabbing headline in the May 31, 1921, edition of the white-owned Tulsa Tribune.
That was "The Story That Set Tulsa Ablaze," the Black-owned Black Dispatch would later declare.
The deeply flawed story of an alleged assault attempt by a Black man of a white woman in an elevator has been credited by historians as helping to instigate a massacre that in less than 24 hours left an estimated hundreds of Black residents dead and destroyed 35 blocks of a prosperous Black enclave in one of the deadliest episodes of racial violence in American history...
The Oklahoman, May 26, 2021
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