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This video provides an overview of the events in Tulsa, OK.

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The massacre of Tulsa's "Black Wall Street"

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Article: Tulsa To Search For Mass Graves

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Article: Tulsa To Search For Mass Graves

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The estimates about how many were killed in Greenwood, OK vary. To this day most of those who were killed have not been laid to rest. This article discusses the effort to find where the victims are buried.

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They marched into the thriving black Tulsa neighborhood on May 31, 1921, with shotguns and Molotov cocktails. Some wore masks, while others proudly showed their white faces.

Over the next two days, the mob killed hundreds of African Americans, drove thousands more from homes and looted businesses before burning them to the ground.

The rampage, known as the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, is among the worst incidents of racial violence in American history - and for nearly a century leaders throughout Oklahoma seemed determined to ignore it.

Now a reckoning is underway.

On Monday, Tulsa officials announced plans to excavate a plot of land that they believe is a mass grave containing many of the victims. The digging is scheduled to begin in April.

"We are committed to exploring what happened in 1921 through a collective and transparent process," said Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum. "Filling gaps in our city's history, and providing healing and justice to our community."

Racial terrorism was common in the segregated South, and Oklahoma was no exception. The Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit based in Alabamathat focuses on criminal justice reform, has documented 36 lynchings in Tulsa County between 1877 and 1950 - more than in any other county in the state.

Greenwood was something of a rarity in its heyday, a neighborhood founded after the Civil War that grew into a flourishing destination for blacks fleeing the Deep South just as an oil boom was getting underway. With its burgeoning black-owned businesses, it became nationally known as "Black Wall Street."

"Greenwood epitomized black entrepreneurism in the face of Jim Crow," said Ricco Wright, a businessman and activist who has pressed local and state officials to address its grim history. "It showcased black self-sufficiency and it showcased black excellence."

He said his great-grandfather, a sharecropper outside Tulsa, would travel to Greenwood on the weekends to buy groceries and visit a doctor.

But the success of Greenwood bred resentment in white Tulsa.

The violence there began like so many other incidents of that era - with rumors that a black man had tried to sexually assault a white woman, in this case inside an elevator. A 2001 report from a commission that studied the massacre concluded that most likely the man had tripped and bumped into the woman, who screamed and ran off.

No matter the facts, as the news swirled, an armed mob assembled and stormed the neighborhood. For 18 hours, whites ran through the streets, shooting black residents and torching homes, churches, a hospital and a library, littering the streets with charred family Bibles, rag dolls, quilts and photographs.

Oklahoma officials initially put the death toll at 36, where it remained for decades. Only later did historians who studied the massacre arrive at the current estimate of 300.

Some 9,000 black people were left homeless. The property damage was estimated at $1.8 million - the equivalent of $26 million today.

Nonetheless, the massacre remained a footnote in Oklahoma history. Many Americans only learned about it last fall with the release of HBO's superhero drama "Watchmen," which focuses on race relations in Tulsa and includes a scene of the massacre.

By then, city officials had already started to respond to Tulsa residents pushing for justice. Last June, the mayor created a committee to investigate the massacre and attempt to find where the victims were buried.

Scientists located four potential sites using ground-penetrating radar and in December announced that "anomalies" at two of them indicated they could be mass graves.

One site, which officials plan to excavate this spring, was within the Oaklawn Cemetery. No date has been set for excavation of the other site, which is nestled along the banks of the Arkansas River.

If remains are unearthed, researchers could hone their estimate of the death toll and learn more about how people perished. Through DNA analysis, the remains could also be identified and traced to living descendants, who could then conduct proper burials.

For many in Tulsa's black community, news of the planned excavation was a welcome first step.

"It's no doubt long overdue," said Wright. "Tulsa and Oklahoma has failed to really recognize the past until now."

Karlos K. Hill, chair of the African and African American studies department at the University of Oklahoma, praised the news as a critical move toward honoring the victims and confronting a long avoided question: Are there mass graves?

"It's been a sore spot in the community and a sore spot in the state," Hill said.

"Think about all the death and destruction. And no one - to this day not a single person - has been held accountable. It's devastating," Hill said. "Hopefully people in the community get the answers they deserve."

But residents also made clear that justice would depend on more than finding remains.

Nehemiah Frank, a Tulsa native who started the Black Wall Street Times, a digital media company focused on social justice issues, remembers hearing stories about the riots from his grandparents. Frank's family once owned a shoe shine parlor in Greenwood, but they lost everything in the fires.

"We're talking about generations being set back because of this racist terror," Frank said. "Sure, the excavations are, no doubt, a good thing and a step, but we should at this time be talking about reparations of some sort."

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Tulsa finally decides to address 1921 race massacre with search for mass grave

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They marched into the thriving black Tulsa neighborhood on May 31, 1921, with shotguns and Molotov cocktails. Some wore masks, while others proudly showed their white faces. Over the next two days, the mob killed hundreds of African Americans, drove thousands more from homes and looted businesses before burning them to the ground.

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This manuscript of an eye-witness account to the massacre is in the Smithsonian.

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The ten-page manuscript is typewritten, on yellowed legal paper, and folded in thirds. But the words, an eyewitness account of the May 31, 1921, racial massacre that destroyed what was known as Tulsa, Oklahoma's "Black Wall Street," are searing.

"I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top," wrote Buck Colbert Franklin (1879-1960).

The Oklahoma lawyer, father of famed African-American historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), was describing the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood known as Greenwood in the booming oil town. "Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes-now a dozen or more in number-still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air."

Franklin writes that he left his law office, locked the door, and descended to the foot of the steps.

"The side-walks were literally covered with burning turpentine balls. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well why every burning building first caught from the top," he continues. "I paused and waited for an opportune time to escape. 'Where oh where is our splendid fire department with its half dozen stations?' I asked myself. 'Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?'"

Franklin's harrowing manuscript now resides among the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. The previously unknown document was found last year, purchased from a private seller by a group of Tulsans and donated to the museum with the support of the Franklin family.

In the manuscript, Franklin tells of his encounters with an African-American veteran, named Mr. Ross. It begins in 1917, when Franklin meets Ross while recruiting young black men to fight in World War I. It picks up in 1921 with his own eyewitness account of the Tulsa race riots, and ends ten years later with the story of how Mr. Ross's life has been destroyed by the riots. Two original photographs of Franklin were part of the donation. One depicts him operating with his associates out of a Red Cross tent five days after the riots.

John W. Franklin, a senior program manager with the museum, is the grandson of manuscript's author and remembers the first time he read the found document.

"I wept. I just wept. It's so beautifully written and so powerful, and he just takes you there," Franklin marvels. "You wonder what happened to the other people. What was the emotional impact of having your community destroyed and having to flee for your lives?"

The younger Franklin says Tulsa has been in denial over the fact that people were cruel enough to bomb the black community from the air, in private planes, and that black people were machine-gunned down in the streets. The issue was economics. Franklin explains that Native Americans and African-Americans became wealthy thanks to the discovery of oil in the early 1900s on what had previously been seen as worthless land.

"That's what leads to Greenwood being called the Black Wall Street. It had restaurants and furriers and jewelry stores and hotels," John W. Franklin explains, "and the white mobs looted the homes and businesses before they set fire to the community. For years black women would see white women walking down the street in their jewelry and snatch it off."

Museum curator Paul Gardullo, who has spent five years along with Franklin collecting artifacts from the riot and the aftermath, says: "It was the frustration of poor whites not knowing what to do with a successful black community, and in coalition with the city government were given permission to do what they did."

"It's a scenario that you see happen from place to place around our country . . . from Wilmington, Delaware, to Washington, D.C., to Chicago, and these are in some ways mass lynchings," he says

As in other places, the Tulsa race riot started with newspaper reports that a black man had assaulted a white elevator operator. He was arrested, and Franklin says black World War I vets rushed to the courthouse to prevent a lynching.

"Then whites were deputized and handed weapons, the shooting starts and then it gets out of hand," Franklin says. "It went on for two days until the entire black community is burned down."

More than 35 blocks were destroyed, along with more than 1,200 homes, and some 300 people died, mostly blacks. The National Guard was called out after the governor declared martial law, and imprisoned all blacks that were not already in jail. More than 6,000 people were held, according to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum, some for as long as eight days.

"(Survivors) talk about how the city was shut down in the riot," Gardullo says. "They shut down the phone systems, the railway. . . . They wouldn't let the Red Cross in. There was complicity between the city government and the mob. It was mob rule for two days, and the result was the complete devastation of the community."

Gardullo adds that the formulaic stereotype about young black men raping young white women was used with great success from the end of slavery forward to the middle of the 20th century.

"It was a formula that resulted in untold numbers of lynchings across the nation," Gardullo says. "The truth of the matter has to do with the threat that black power, black economic power, black cultural power, black success, posed to individuals and . . . the whole system of white supremacy. That's embedded within our nation's history."

Franklin says he has issues with the words often used to describe the attack that decimated the black community.

"The term riot is contentious, because it assumes that black people started the violence, as they were accused of doing by whites," Franklin says. "We increasingly use the term massacre, or I use the European term, pogrom."

Among the artifacts Gardullo and John W. Franklin have obtained, are a handful of pennies collected off the ground from a young boy's home burned to the ground during the riot, items with labels saying this was looted from a black church during the riot, and postcards with photos from the race riots, some showing burning corpses.

"Riot postcards were often distributed . . . crassly and cruelly . . . as a way to sell white supremacy," Gardullo says. "At the time they were shown as documents that were shared between white community members to demonstrate their power. Later . . . they became part of the body of evidence that was used during the commission for reparation."

In 2001, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission issued a report detailing the damage from the riots, but legislative and legal attempts to gain reparations for the survivors have failed.

The Tulsa race riots aren't mentioned in most American history textbooks, and many people don't know that they happened.

Curator Paul Gardullo says the crucial question is why not?

"Throughout American history there's been a vast silence about the atrocities that were performed in the service of white history. . . . There are a lot of silences in relation to this story, and a lot of guilt and shame," Gardullo explains. That's one reason why the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, will be featured in an exhibition at the new museum called "The Power of Place." Gardullo says the title is about more than geography.

"(It's) the power of certain places, about displacement, movement, about what place means for people," he says. "This is about emotion and culture and memory. . . . How do you tell a story about destruction? How do you balance the fortitude and resilience of people in response to that devastation? How do you fill the silences? How do you address the silences about a story that this community has held in silence for so long and in denial for so long?"

Despite the devastation, the black community in Tulsa was able to rebuild on the ashes of its neighborhood, partly because Buck Colbert Franklin battled all the way to the Oklahoma Supreme Court to defeat a law that would have effectively prevented African-Americans from doing so. By 1925, there was again a thriving black business district. John W. Franklin says his grandfather's manuscript is important for people to see because it deals with "suppressed history."

"This is an eyewitness account from a reputable source about what he saw happen," he grandson John W. Franklin says. "It is definitely relevant to today, because I think our notions of justice are based partially on our own history and our knowledge of history. But we are an a-historical society, in that we don't know our past."
The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture opens on September 24 of this year on the National Mall.

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A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

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The ten-page manuscript is typewritten, on yellowed legal paper, and folded in thirds. But the words, an eyewitness account of the May 31, 1921, racial massacre that destroyed what was known as Tulsa, Oklahoma's "Black Wall Street," are searing. "I could see planes circling in mid-air.

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This painting by Noah Davis depicts Black Wall Street. It hangs in a museum in Harlem.

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Noah Davis ( 1983-2015 ) Black Wall Street, 2008 Oil and acrylic on canvas 60 × 62 in. The Studio Museum in Harlem; gift of David Hoberman 2014.17.2

Noah Davis depicted the black body in scenes that blend the everyday with the fantastical. Black Wall Street shows a moment of stillness before and after unseen violent acts, evidenced by the lifeless body on the ground and the bomblike object falling from the sky. The title refers to the town of Greenwood, a once-prosperous African-American neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was known as "the Black Wall Street." In 1921 a white mob burned Greenwood to the ground in what is sometimes referred to as the "Tulsa Race Riot" or the "Tulsa Massacre."

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Noah Davis depicted the black body in scenes that blend the everyday with the fantastical. Black Wall Street shows a moment of stillness before and after unseen violent acts, evidenced by the lifeless body on the ground and the bomblike object falling from the sky.

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This Twitter thread by an historian about American racial violence is...a lot. But it includes some important resources, stories, and links that more Americans should know.

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Racial Violence Syllabus (August 2017) - Wakelet

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An overview of online resources. Compiled in response to &quot;Unite the Right&quot; rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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This feature done by Ebony Magazine in 2013 describes what happened when white supremacists destroyed "Black Wall Street," which was an economically thriving neighborhood in Tulsa, OK.

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Black Wall Street was in Greenwood, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tulsa, was the type of community that African Americans are still, today, attempting to reclaim and rebuild. Black Wall Street was modern, majestic, sophisticated and unapologetically Black. Tragically, it was also the site of one of the bloodiest and most horrendous race riots (and acts of terrorism) that the United States has ever experienced.

Today marks ninety-two years since as many as 300 African Americans lost their lives and more than 9,000 were left homeless when the small town was attacked, looted and literally burned to the ground beginning in 1921. It's impossible, however, to realize what was lost in Greenwood, which was affectionately known as "Black Wall Street."

The Greenwood community, where black wall street existed, seems almost imagined when we examine it through a historical lens. The oil booms of the early 1900's had many moving to Tulsa for a shot at quick economic gains and high life, and African Americans hoped to prosper from the new industry as well. Tulsa, like many cities and towns throughout the US, was hostilely segregated, with African Americans settling into the northern region of the city. As we often saw before integration, Blacks in the area created entrepreneurial opportunities for themselves, which housed an impressive business center that included banks, hotels, cafes, clothiers, movie theaters, and contemporary homes. Greenwood residents enjoyed many luxuries that their White neighbors did not, including indoor plumbing and a remarkable school system that superiorly educated Black children.

It was pure envy, and a vow to put progressive, high achieving African Americans in their place that would cause the demise of the Black Mecca many called "Little Africa", and its destruction began the way much terrorism, violence and dispossession against African Americans did during that era. A young White woman accused a young Black man of attempted sexual assault, which gave local mobs and White men acting as police just cause to invade the unsuspecting community. On the malevolent and horrifying attack, Linda Christenson writes the following:
"The term "race riot" does not adequately describe the events of May 31-June 1, 1921 in Greenwood... In fact, the term itself implies that both blacks and whites might be equally to blame for the lawlessness and violence. The historical record documents a sustained and murderous assault on black lives and property. This assault was met by a brave but unsuccessful armed defense of their community by some black World War I veterans and others. During the night and day of the riot, deputized whites killed more than 300 African Americans. They looted and burned to the ground 40 square blocks of 1,265 African American homes, including hospitals, schools, and churches, and destroyed 150 businesses. White deputies and members of the National Guard arrested and detained 6,000 black Tulsans who were released only upon being vouched for by a white employer or other white citizen. Nine thousand African Americans were left homeless and lived in tents well into the winter of 1921."
Recently, the mother of a Palestian activist friend of mine asked me why African Americans don't fight harder for reparations. It was a difficult question to answer, but my most immediate response centered on the historical erasure of communities like Greenwood and the state-sponsored violence against African Americans that created its expiry. Even after slavery was abolished, any advancements towards the American dream, that Blacks paid most dearly to establish, was met with revulsion and terror, often from those whose legal obligation was to serve and protect. For that a debt is surely owed. Further, when we consider the deaths of those Black Tulsans that built black wall street and the inevitable property loss that followed, we again see one example of many that proves how wealth inequities and disparities became a part of the substance of this nation- inequities and disparities that must be considered before we go blaming Black youth for the catastrophes this nation has endorsed.

And as we consider what has become the new face of terror, we should never forget that Greenwood was bombed from the sky by White local and national law enforcement organizations.
To learn more about the attack on "Black Wall Street," check out Scott Ellsworth's account here. Never forget. Josie Pickens is a cultural critic and educator. Follow her musings on twitter: @jonubian

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Black Wall Street and the Destruction of an Institution * EBONY

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Black Wall Street was in Greenwood, Oklahoma, a suburb of Tulsa, was the type of community that African Americans are still, today, attempting to reclaim and rebuild. Black Wall Street was modern, majestic, sophisticated and unapologetically Black. Tragically, it was also the site of one of the bloodiest and most horrendous race riots (and acts [...]

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This site addresses Black Wall Street (Greenwood, OK) in the context of other resources about thriving Black communities in the US.

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African American Settlements & Communities Throughout History

Against all odds, they built self-sufficient communities that came to represent the resilience and innovation of black people in America. These emancipated settlements became beacons for free African Americans and sanctuaries for those daring enough to escape the clutches of slavery. While little remains of these early communities and, in some cases, their stories are just being told, these resources will help you share the tales of the rise and fall of black meccas like Oklahoma's Black Wall Street and New York City's Seneca Village. Through oral history and the examination of primary source documents, students will learn a valuable lesson about how a plot of land and a dream can become a town, and how everything from geography to racial tension can change its trajectory in only a matter of years.

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Middle School Black History Month Teaching Resources | Kiddom

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Against all odds, they built self-sufficient communities that came to represent the resilience and innovation of black people in America. These emancipated settlements became beacons for free African Americans and sanctuaries for those daring enough to escape the clutches of slavery.

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Nearly a century after the Tulsa Race Massacre, the search for the dead continues.

Some of the ruins from the Tulsa Race Massacre in June 1921, when white vigilantes set the Oklahoma city's African-American district ablaze. Credit... Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

The lynch mobs that hanged, shot or burned African-Americans alive during the early 20th century sometimes varied the means of slaughter by roping victims to cars and dragging them to death. The killers who re-enacted this barbaric ritual in Tulsa, Okla., on June 1, 1921, committed one of the defining atrocities of the Tulsa Race Massacre, the bloody conflagration during which white vigilantes murdered at will while looting and burning one of the most affluent black communities in the United States.

The helpless old black man who was shredded alive behind a fast-moving car would have been well known in Tulsa's white downtown, where he supported himself by selling pencils and singing for coins. He was blind, had suffered amputations of both legs and wore baseball catcher's mitts to protect his hands from the pavement as he scooted along on a wheeled wooden platform.

Not far away, in the prosperous black district of Greenwood, white vigilantes systematically torched nearly 40 square blocks. Gone in the blink of an eye were more than 1,000 homes, a dozen churches, five hotels, 31 restaurants, four drugstores and eight doctors' offices, as well as a public library and a hospital. As many as 9,000 black Tulsans were left homeless. Photographs from the period depict shellshocked survivors being marched at gunpoint to temporary concentration camps.

From Day 1, many Tulsans believed that the authorities had sought to suppress the true horror of the episode by setting the death toll at a few dozen. Others have estimated that as many as 300 may have died. The number of fatalities seems destined to remain a mystery.

Stories emerged featuring bodies stacked up on street corners, ferried out of town on city-owned trucks, burned in an incinerator or dumped into a river. In his 2019 book "Tulsa 1921: Reporting a Massacre," the journalist Randy Krehbiel unearths a macabre legend that depicts large numbers of dead ground up for use as fertilizer.

Questions that have troubled Tulsa's sleep for nearly 100 years seemed closer to resolution last year when archaeologists identified two possible mass grave sites, one of them at a city-owned cemetery. History itself seemed to be taunting Tulsans when the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March forced the city to postpone a test excavation at the cemetery.

When Tulsa resumes the search for its dead, archaeologists should bear in mind Undersheriff Maxey's portrait of the unnamed dragging victim: an old man with two amputated legs - one stump longer than the other - and a skull bashed in by streetcar tracks.

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A group of National Guard troops, carrying rifles with bayonets attached, escort unarmed African-American men to a detention center after the Tulsa Race Massacre in June 1921. Credit... Oklahoma Historical Society/Getty Images

Greenwood, whose business district was known as the Negro Wall Street, was the seat of African-American affluence in the Southwest, with two newspapers, two movie theaters and a commercial strip featuring some of the finest black-owned businesses in the country. White Tulsa's business elite resented the competition all the more because the face of that competition was black. Beyond that, the white city saw the bustling black community as an obstacle to Tulsa's expansion.

The white press set the stage for Greenwood's destruction by deriding the community as "Niggertown" and portraying its jazz clubs as founts of vice, immorality and, by implication, race mixing. As was often the case in the early 20th century, a false accusation of attempted rape opened the door for white Tulsans to act out their antipathies.

A black man accused of accosting a white woman in a downtown elevator in broad daylight was predictably arrested, and, just as predictably, a mob convened at the courthouse spoiling for an evening's lynching entertainment. Black Tulsans who appeared on the scene to prevent the lynching exchanged gunfire with the mob. Outmanned and outgunned, they retreated to Greenwood to defend against the coming onslaught.

The city guaranteed mayhem by deputizing members of the lynch mob - a catastrophic decision, given that Oklahoma was a center of Ku Klux Klan activity - and instructing them to "get a gun, and get busy and try to get a nigger." The white men who surged into Greenwood may well have been told to burn the district. Greenwood's defenders fought valiantly but were quickly overwhelmed.

A 2001 report on the destruction commissioned by the Oklahoma State Legislature included a photograph of Greenwood burning. The telling, misspelled caption reads: "RUNING THE NEGRO OUT OF TULSA."

Writing in the same report, the historian Danney Goble likened the attack to the murderous pogroms that the Russian Empire unleashed on Jewish communities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In both cases, the authorities hoped to drive out despised minorities by allowing marauders to kill and loot at will. Mr. Goble argued that the Tulsa massacre was best seen against the backdrop of at least 10 lesser-known pogroms in other Oklahoma towns that had drenched the decade leading up to 1921 in African-American blood.

Two other historians, John Hope Franklin and Scott Ellsworth, described the vast scope of the destruction:

"Practically overnight, entire neighborhoods where families had raised their children, visited with their neighbors, and hung their wash out on the line to dry, had been suddenly reduced to ashes. And as the homes burned, so did their contents, including furniture and family Bibles, rag dolls and hand-me-down quilts, cribs and photograph albums."

In a less racist judicial system, black Tulsans might have successfully sued the city for encouraging Greenwood's destruction. But as the legal scholar Alfred Brophy told a congressional hearing in 2007, all-white grand juries in a 1920s-era court system infiltrated by the Ku Klux Klan foreclosed any possibility of justice for African-Americans.

Whites set fire to the predominantly black Greenwood neighborhood after a black man was accused of sexually assaulting a white woman. Credit... Oklahoma Historical Society/Getty Images

The remarkable Olivia Hooker was 6 years old the day her family's business, the clothier Elliot & Hooker's, was rendered down to ash. She grew up to become the first black woman to enlist in the Coast Guard, and she later joined with other Greenwood survivors in an unsuccessful federal lawsuit that sought restitution from the city and state.

Dr. Hooker, a psychologist, offered a harrowing portrait of the massacre when she testified before Congress in 2007. The invaders of Greenwood, she said, raked her neighborhood with machine-gun fire. Her mother pointed to the source of the gunfire and said: "That thing up there on the stand with the American flag on top of it is a machine gun. And those are bullets hitting the house. And that means your country is shooting at you."

While fleeing the mob, Dr. Hooker's mother paused to lecture white parents who had brought their children to witness the conflagration. Trained in oratory at the Tuskegee Institute, she intoned that this deed "would be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation" - at which point she was asked to stop, because the white children had grown frightened. The marauders stripped the Hooker home of furs, jewelry, silver - and took axes to fine furnishings not easily carried away.

Dr. Hooker died in 2018 at the age of 103. Soon afterward, the commission set up to coordinate centennial activities for what was increasingly referred to as a massacre - as opposed to a riot - changed its name. The 1921 Race Riot Centennial Commission became the 1921 Race Massacre Centennial Commission.

The change reflects lingering resentment over the fact that insurance companies had seized upon a "riot exclusion clause" to deny claims filed by Greenwood property owners. The wording also bespeaks a realization that the assault was a deliberate attempt to terrorize and force black people out of the city.

People searching through rubble after the Tulsa Race Massacre. Credit... Oklahoma Historical Society/Getty Images

Some of the white men who ravaged Greenwood may have convinced themselves that the armed black men who confronted the mob at the courthouse were part of a conspiracy to take over the white city. No such pretense was even remotely available to the killers who roped the helpless pencil seller to a car and dragged the life out of him along Main Street. The event was a carnival of death, staged for their amusement.

This atrocity was given a single sentence in a larger news article about the carnage: "One Negro was dragged behind an automobile, with a rope around his neck, through the business district." In recent years, however, the incident has become a bloody shorthand for the hatred of blackness that underlay this massacre as a whole.

Consider the critically acclaimed HBO series "Watchmen." While making a new generation of viewers familiar with this bloody episode, the writers used their version of the dragging as a metaphor for white supremacist violence not just in Tulsa but in the country as a whole.

In 1921, the white civic elite did its best to shield the city from negative publicity by limiting news coverage. Not long after the conflagration, for example, Tulsa's police chief barred the taking of photographs in the devastated area without police permission - as "a precaution against the influx here of Negroes and other critics seeking propaganda for their organizations."

The description of the dragging that Undersheriff Maxey shared with Ms. Avery 50 years after the fact offers a window into how this public silencing was achieved. He despised the leader of the killers - who was dead by the time of the 1971 interview - and seemed to have had genuine affection for the pencil seller. Nonetheless, he declined to name the main perpetrator because he "had people" in Tulsa. Multiply this mind-set by the thousands of men who had either participated in the violence or knew someone who had, and you quickly get a sense of how this story was pushed to the margins of public awareness.

Like many other Tulsans, Undersheriff Maxey doubted the city's suspiciously low body count. During the Avery interview, he spoke of seeing five or six truckloads of black bodies moving up Main Street to an unknown destination. "I seen them haul truckload after truckload of colored people in those things, stacked up like cordwood," he said. Asked where the dead might have gone, he replied, "I don't even know that, but they was hauling them out somewhere, I guess, and put them in ditches or something."

As Tulsa scours the landscape for its dead, the centennial of one of the most destructive episodes of racial terrorism in the country's history is fast approaching. When archaeologists resume their work, modern-day Tulsans could well learn more about the blood-drenched episode that has haunted the city's dreams for nearly a century.

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Opinion | The Burning of Black Wall Street, Revisited

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Nearly a century after the Tulsa Race Massacre, the search for the dead continues. The lynch mobs that hanged, shot or burned African-Americans alive during the early 20th century sometimes varied the means of slaughter by roping victims to cars and dragging them to death.