WIKI TIKI WEDNESDAT - TULSA, 1921

I always say that TV is a teaching tool, and  the series premiere of ‘The Watchmen’ on HBO proved that.

I had never heard about this historical event before!

From Wikipedia:
The Tulsa race riot (also called the Tulsa race massacre, Greenwood Massacre, or the Black Wall Street Massacre) of 1921 took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  It has been called "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history."

The attack, carried out on the ground and by air, 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".

More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and more than 6,000 black residents were arrested and detained, many for several days.  The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead, but the American Red Cross declined to provide an estimate. A 2001 state commission examination of events estimated that between 100 to 300 African Americans were killed in the rioting.

The riot began over Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, the 17-year-old white elevator operator of the nearby Drexel Building. He was taken into custody. A subsequent gathering of angry local whites outside the courthouse where Rowland was being held, and the spread of rumors he had been lynched, alarmed the local black population, some of whom arrived at the courthouse armed. Shots were fired and twelve people were killed; ten white and two black.  As news of these deaths spread throughout the city, mob violence exploded. Thousands of whites rampaged through the black neighborhood that night and the next day, killing men and women, burning and looting stores and homes. About 10,000 black people were left homeless, and property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property ($32 million in 2019).

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