The Real Story of the Tulsa Race Riot

You’ve been sold a largely false story about this event. Nevertheless it involved some pretty bad behavior on the part of the Whites.

In 1921, a wild race riot wracked Tulsa, Oklahoma. Whites rampaged through Black neighborhoods and murdered over 400 innocent unarmed Blacks who were just sitting there taking it or trying to run away. That’s the story anyway but that’s not really what happened.

The story began when a Black teenager harassed a White woman in an elevator. I imagine it had sexual overtones. She called the police and he was arrested on God knows what charges. The local Blacks were alarmed and showed up armed with a near-posse because they thought the Whites were going to lynch this young man. The Whites apparently had guns too. So we have two groups of armed people - one Black and one White - facing off against each other after the sexually charged and violence-threatening arrest of a Black teenager. No one quite knows what set it off, but it appears that the Blacks fired t…