What role did planes play in the deadly 1921 Tulsa race massacre?
Right after Memorial Day that year, a white mob destroyed 35 city blocks in the Greenwood District, a community in Tulsa, Oklahoma known as “Black Wall Street.” Following an allegation that a black man sexually assaulted a white woman, the Tulsa massacre left between 100 and 300 dead, the decimation of more than 1,200 houses and the burning of churches, schools, of shops, a hospital and a library, according to a 2001 report by the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, the most comprehensive examination of the massacre. For its part, the Red Cross reported that the attack left more than 10,000 Tulsa residents homeless. Calculated in today’s dollars, the property damage would be valued at tens of millions of dollars.
“I am in a position to state,” said Walter White, who visited Tulsa for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People shortly after the riots, “that the Tulsa riot, in the sheer brutality, and the willful destruction of life and property, is unparalleled in America. “
When martial law was declared on June 1 to end the fighting, journalists, residents and others began to collect accounts on what exactly had happened during those 18 hours in the district of Greenwood. Historians still assess the viability of witness reports of low-flying planes, raining bullets, or arsonists, which have become an enduring theme in the reconstruction of events. But even though it was known that only about 15 planes had been stored at local airfields in 1921, it remains a mystery who possessed those used in the attack on Tulsa – and how exactly they were mobilized as part of one of the most heinous national terrorists. attacks in American history.
“There is no doubt that there were planes flying over Greenwood during the massacre,” said historian Scott Ellsworth, professor of African American studies at the University of Michigan who has studied the Tulsa massacre in depth, to HISTORY.com in an interview. “There is evidence of this from African-American and white communities. But Greenwood was blown to the ground by a white mob. It wasn’t destroyed from the air, ”says Ellsworth, author of two books on the Tulsa Massacre.Death in a Promised Land: the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and The inauguration: an American city and its quest for justice.
READ MORE: Tulsa’s ‘Black Wall Street’ flourished as a stand-alone hub in the early 1900s
Aerial view of Tulsa, Oklahoma, c. 1918.
Historical maps / ullstein bild / Getty Images
“ Fast-approach planes ” and other reports from the black community
Mary E. Jones Parrish was a teacher and journalist in the Greenwood District who collected first-hand photos and accounts of the massacre, including her own. In her Events of the Tulsa disaster, self-published in 1922, she remembers seeing “fast approaching planes” and that “more than a dozen planes went up and started dropping turpentine balls on Negro residences”. One of the anonymous eyewitnesses she cites said she saw low-flying planes that “left a mass of flames all over the block” as they passed over the neighborhood. Reporting for The nation, Walter White wrote that “eight planes were used to spy on the movements of the negroes and, according to some, were used to bomb the colored section”. According to the 2001 Commission report, the black newspapers were “full of stories of turpentine or nitroglycerin bombs dropped and men firing from planes.”
Buck Colbert Franklin, a lawyer from Tulsa and father of historian John Hope Franklin, also remembered “turpentine balls” falling from the sky. “I could see planes circling through the air,” Franklin wrote in a 10-page manuscript on a yellow legal pad that was discovered in 2015. “They multiplied and hummed and pitched and dived low. I heard something like hail falling from the top of my office building … The sidewalks were literally covered with turpentine balls on fire. I knew only too well where they came from, and I knew only too well why each burning building was first grabbed from above.
WATCH: “Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre” premieres Sunday, May 30 at 8/7 am on The HISTORY® Channel. Watch a preview now.
A hairdressing salon confession
Anecdotes have also emerged from other communities in Tulsa. According to the Commission report, in the early 1950s a middle-aged white man stood over the head of a Tulsa barbershop boasting that he and a friend had flown a plane overhead. of Greenwood during the massacre and dropped dynamite. For historian Ellsworth, the story is credible. “Apart from the 50 or so copies of Mary Parrish’s book, there was nothing [at that time] published on the bombings, ”Ellsworth said. “It was not a subject that was printed. That’s why I believe that unless this old man makes it up, which I doubt, his story rings true.
Other accounts recall men armed with rifles targeting fleeing residents from low-flying planes. A Mexican immigrant, who lived on the edge of the Greenwood neighborhood, later told her family members that she saw two black boys being followed down the street by a two-seater plane. According to the Commission’s report, “the man in [the] the back seat pulled on the boys. She then ran away and grabbed the boys and took them into the house. “
READ MORE: How the Tulsa Race Massacre was covered up
Where did the planes come from?
In 1921, Tulsa had two airfields. The larger of the two, operated by the Curtiss-Southwest Airplane Company, contained two steel hangars and 14 airplanes. The smaller field housed a single shot. In his account of escaping the riots, Parrish refers to the “aviation fields” approach, which would likely have been Curtiss-Southwest, according to the commission report. There, she remembers seeing the “planes come out of their shelters, all ready to fly, and these men with powerful guns getting in.”
At the time, the government did not require registration of planes, so it is difficult to know their ownership. But the Commission’s report suggests most were likely owned by Curtiss-Southwest, oil companies and individuals.
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The ongoing debate
Eyewitness accounts from the residents of Black Tulsa were essential in unraveling the truth about the planes over the Greenwood district. To varying degrees, historians have accepted these accounts and tried to weigh this vast evidence against the plausibility of the bombings. “There is enough evidence from the African American massacre survivors that you saw planes drop something from the planes and hear an explosion later,” says Ellsworth. But he points out that historians of the massacres are still trying to find the “turpentine balls” mentioned in some accounts. Ellsworth himself is less convinced of the reports of Molotov cocktails and turpentine balls: “I definitely believe that Greenwood was bombarded from the air … but more likely with sticks of dynamite.”
In the Tulsa Riot Commission report, researchers concluded that some form of airstrike on Greenwood District did take place, but failed to give it the same importance as some eyewitnesses who lived through the massacre. “It is reasonable to think that there was plane fire and even the fall of arsonists, but the evidence seems to indicate that it was of a minor nature and had no real effect in the riot” Richard S. Warner of the Tulsa Historical Society wrote in the report. He quotes Beryl Ford, an authority on Tulsa’s photographic history, who analyzed the damage to buildings visible in the images. The photos show debris strewn only inside the building shells; Had explosives been used, Ford points out, the debris would also have been strewn outside.
“While it is certain that the planes were used by the police for reconnaissance [and] photographers… there were probably white people who shot guns from airplanes or dropped gasoline bottles or something, ”the report concludes. “However, they were probably few in number.”
