On January 10, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Dept released a report of its investigation of the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The story of the massacre has been told before: Over the course of two days, as Bob Avakian wrote, "...armed mobs of racist white people, including many police, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, slaughtered hundreds of Black people, terrorized thousands, and burned down a thriving Black community, with its churches, hospitals, homes, schools, libraries, and businesses." For a concentrated and powerful exposure of the massacre, see the piece on this that is part of the American Crime series at revcom.us. 

The new Justice Department report is a valuable, if painful, must-read—for two related reasons as stated in the press release announcing this report. First, it further fleshes out the truth about what happened: “The Tulsa Race Massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community.” And the second reason is the thread that runs through the report and is the heart of what is new that was uncovered: “This report lays bare new information and shows that the massacre was the result not of uncontrolled mob violence, but of a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood.” (Greenwood was the Black section of Tulsa.)

The report is thoroughly documented, with broad and diverse sources. Its primary finding is that “what had initially been sporadic and opportunistic violence became systematic, yielding a much more devastating result, due to coordinated efforts among white residents and law enforcement entities.” 

A Systematic Massacre

The report begins by describing what Tulsa and Greenwood were like before the massacre. What stands out here is that the massacre took place a few years after the end of World War I—many men from Tulsa, Black as well as white, had been in the U.S. Army in that war and gained extensive military training. 

On May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black youth working as a shoe shiner, was falsely accused of assaulting a young white female elevator operator. (The woman later said Rowland had “made no bad remark of any kind,” and she did not pursue charges.) The next day, word spread in the Black community that a white mob was mobilizing outside the jail, intent on lynching the youth. 

A group of Black men came from Greenwood, some with weapons, to help defend the jail. They left, but returned after hearing the angry white mob had grown to thousands. A shot was fired, and soon over a dozen men, Black and white, were killed. 

The white mob began chasing the Black men back to Greenwood. Meanwhile, the police got busy deputizing as many as 500 white men in less than 30 minutes. A light-skinned Black journalist, who could pass for white, wrote later that he, too, was made a special deputy. He reported he was told that he could now “go out and shoot any ni**er you see and the law’ll be behind you.” Another white witness reported that he was told by police authorities to “get a gun and get busy and try to get a ni**er.” Then, unable to get to the weapons inside the Armory, these “special deputies” broke into hardware stores and pawnshops where arms were kept as a police captain gave out the weapons. 

The section of the report titled “White Tulsans Organize” describes how "[T]he Tulsa Police Department and local members of the National Guard, aided by white veterans of the American Legion, organized these white men into companies." One sheriff drove to a town outside of Tulsa to recruit more white men, “intimating a raid on the [N]egroes.”

All this was no secret. The June 1, 1921 edition of the Tulsa Daily World reported that “[f]or three hours city officials, under direction of J. F. Adkison, police commissioner, and Charles Daley, inspector of police, with the assistance of part of the Home Guard company, formed armed white men into companies.”

There were three companies of these white men, and each was given a different location to begin the invasion at dawn. When the whistle was blown, they opened fire, and crossed into Greenwood. They moved efficiently from house to house, burning the community. The report says that “The burnings were methodical, which corroborates that they were the product of a plan rather than spontaneous acts of violence.”

They systematically destroyed Greenwood neighborhoods, block by block. A journalist who studied the massacre described the efficiency of the process: “The fires were set systemically, like this: A team of white men, some of them deputized by police, entered a chosen home, blowing the lock off the door if necessary.” They would then tear down drapes, wrench open dresser drawers, gather the bedding, wooden furniture, and other flammable items into the center of a room, douse them in kerosene and light  a match. As they moved north, they set fire to practically every building in Greenwood.

A white witness saw “hundreds of whites, including white women and white girls,” undisturbed by police, “carrying Victrolas [record players], trunks, clothing, furs” and other items “out of [N]egroes’ houses before they were burned.” 

White men in private airplanes kept tabs on Black Greenwood residents and informed law enforcement of the movements of Black people. And there were witnesses who saw men with high-powered weapons boarding those airplanes. There were allegations that the planes dropped bombs, dynamite, or kerosene on Greenwood buildings, but the report says these could not be confirmed.

The primary role of the National Guard in the massacre was to capture Black men and take them into custody. This had the effect of facilitating the burning and looting of unprotected Black homes by the white mobs. During and after the massacre, police and special deputies arrested Black residents of Greenwood and put them into concentration camps. At their fullest, there were between 4,000 and 6,000 people living in the camps.

And the report notes, “Photographs were taken of the destruction of Greenwood, some of which were turned into postcards. One of the most infamous bore the caption, 'Run[n]ing the Negro Out of Tulsa.'” This is like the postcards that white people made of lynchings. As revolutionary leader Bob Avakian said in his speech Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, and What It's All About: 

In the ugly history of this country, and all its horrors, selling postcards of the hanging, in particular, selling postcards of the lynchings of Black men was literally a pastime, a kind of social activity, in which all too many white people took part, for a hundred years and more, even after slavery was ended.

The report does not rule out that the destruction of Greenwood had been planned in advance. “It well may be, as some scholars have suggested, that before dawn on June 1 (when white Tulsans were organizing for invasion), men with property interests (or their representatives) participated in planning the invasion of Greenwood with the goal of acquiring land.” 

Just a week after the massacre, a new city fire ordinance was passed making rebuilding in most of Greenwood far too costly for the Black people who had been driven out. The report concludes that “those who drafted the ordinance planned to drive Black people out of Greenwood.” And it quotes a news article saying, “The land would 'never again be a [N]egro quarter but will become a wholesale and industrial center,' explaining that this result had been accomplished through the ordinance.'” 

The last section of the report explains why there are no legal recourses at this point for this barbarous crime. The report does not raise the obvious question: Why were there no charges ever brought against those, including in official positions, who carried out the Tulsa massacre? 

This report has come out on the eve of the inauguration of Trump and his MAGA fascism. Bob Avakian has emphasized that “there is a direct line from the pro-slavery Confederacy, at the time of the Civil War, to the fascism of today, with its determination to make America once again openly, aggressively white supremacist, male supremacist, and anti-LGBT people.” (See his social media message @BobAvakianOfficial REVOLUTION #102: “Two Countries” Within This Country—And The Whole Damn System’s Got To Go! This is not a time for demoralization and despair—it is a time for righteous anger and revolutionary determination.") The barbaric Tulsa massacre—the systematic mass murder and destruction of an entire Black neighborhood—is right in that “direct line from the pro-slavery Confederacy,” which has now brought this fascism to power.