The massacreIt began, like so much racial violence, with a false allegation that a black man had raped a white woman. The man was Dick Rowland, and he was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, an elevator operator, on May 30, 1921. Rowland was arrested the next morning and jailed in the Tulsa County Courthouse, where the sheriff had allowed a lynch mob to kidnap another black man the year before. Many white people went off to get their own weapons, and the crowd grew to more than 2,000. Finally, according to the 2001 commission report, a white man tried to grab a black man’s gun, the gun went off, and the white mob spread out through the streets of downtown Tulsa, shooting black people on sight.

Source: New York Times June 20, 2020 09:01 UTC