How 24 Hours of Racist Violence Caused Decades of Harm

The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 was over in less than 24 hours, but the damage that the city’s Black citizens suffered went on for decades. Indeed, the full magnitude of the community’s economic loss is still coming into focus even on the centennial of the event—in part because new digital tools allow scholars to mine census records for data about its aftermath.

On May 31, 1921, a mob of more than 1,000 white men descended on the jail where a Black teenager was being held on suspicion of assaulting a young white woman. In response, more than 50 Black men came to the aid of the police defending the jail. When these outnumbered Black men retreated to Greenwood, a predominantly Black neighborhood, the white mob attacked its residents and burned their homes, businesses, churches, school, and hospital. Despite efforts by local authorities to cover up these events—whose death toll is now estimated at nearly 300—journalists, historians, and