What Photographs Reveal About the Tulsa Race Massacre
From The Observatory
Source: Public Domain Review
Photographs taken during and after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre document the scale of the violence against Greenwood, reveal how white participants framed the destruction, and shape how this history is understood today.
This essay has been excerpted and adapted from Karlos Hill’s The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021). It was originally published as “Photographing the Tulsa Massacre of 1921” on the Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to reuse it, please see: https://publicdomainreview.org/reusing-material/. This version was produced for the Observatory by the Independent Media Institute.
“What Photographs Reveal About the Tulsa Race Massacre” by Karlos K. Hill is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
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During the early 20th century, the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was known as the “Negro Wall Street of America” because of its prosperous Black business community. In 1921, Greenwood was home to nearly 11,000 Black people—one-tenth of Tulsa’s overall population—and spanned a 35-block area. The district boasted close to 200 businesses, including 31 restaurants, more than two dozen grocery stores, five hotels, four drugstores, and two theaters. There were a dozen churches, as well as two schools, two hospitals, two newspapers, and a public library. Most of the businesses and residential properties were owned by Black Tulsans. The Black professional class comprised not only clergy and teachers but also three lawyers, including the pioneering Buck Colbert Franklin; 15 doctors, one of whom was a nationally acclaimed surgeon, Dr. A. C. Jackson; and enterprising business people such as Greenwood’s founder, O. W. Gurley. This level of affluence emerged at a time when most Black southerners lived in rural areas and toiled as sharecroppers on white-owned plantations. For all these reasons, the Greenwood District was not just a wealthy Black community in the age of segregation; it was, and remains, a potent symbol of Black excellence. The eruption of white mob violence in downtown Tulsa on May 31, 1921, interrupted Greenwood’s historic ascendancy.
What has come to be known as the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was instigated by speculation that 19-year-old Dick Rowland, who was Black, had attacked Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white elevator operator. While it is unclear precisely what occurred during the brief interaction between the two in an elevator in Tulsa’s downtown business district on May 30, we know that Page screamed and Rowland fled the elevator in a panic. There is no record of what Page told bystanders or the police who interviewed her following the incident, but police authorities were left with the impression that Rowland had attacked her.
The following afternoon, on May 31, the Tulsa Tribune published an incendiary article, “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator,” which asserted that Rowland had indeed assaulted Page. As was common for the era, the Tribune insinuated that he had attempted to rape her. Word began to spread about the alleged attack, and by evening, a large number of whites had begun to gather in front of the Tulsa County Courthouse, where Rowland was being held in the county jail. It quickly became clear that some among the crowd intended to lynch him. Fearing that the lynching of Dick Rowland was imminent, a small, armed contingent of Black men, some of whom had served in World War I, came to the courthouse around 9:00 p.m. to offer the authorities their assistance. They left upon being promised that no harm would come to Rowland, but their brief presence further enraged the growing white mob. By 9:30, almost 2,000 angry whites were milling around outside the courthouse, many with guns, and the county sheriff was preparing his deputies to make a stand should the building be attacked. When a second, larger group of Black men arrived to help protect Rowland, they were again told that their services were not needed. This time, however, a white bystander, perhaps angered by the sight of Black men carrying weapons, attempted to take the gun of a Black veteran who was walking away with the rest of the group. As the men struggled, one of their guns went off. In the chaos of the moment, armed whites began shooting indiscriminately at the retreating Black men, some of whom shot back.
In that first quick interchange of gunfire, 20 people were killed or wounded. The Black men hastily left the scene, but they were followed by armed whites, who engaged them in further gunfire on Fourth Street and then on Cincinnati Avenue, resulting in additional casualties. That initial pursuit ended when what was left of the group of Black men made it across the tracks of the Saint Louis–San Francisco Railway (popularly known as the Frisco Railroad), the demarcation line between white Tulsa and Black Tulsa.
Believing that the armed Black people had instigated the firefight, Tulsa authorities joined forces with the enraged white civilians who had been at the courthouse, and together they set out to put down the “negro uprising.” Tulsa police haphazardly appointed between 250 and 500 white men (and even white youth) as “special deputies,” granting them the authority to arrest as well as shoot and kill Black people whom they viewed as in rebellion against white Tulsans. According to one eyewitness and participant in the massacre, the deputized whites were specifically told to “get a gun and get a nigger.”
When a group of Black men gathered north of the Frisco tracks, forming a defensive wall to prevent the swelling white mob from crossing en masse into Black Tulsa, they were violently confronted around midnight by the Tulsa police, the local unit of the Oklahoma National Guard, and the hastily assembled contingent of armed “deputies.” Whites who had already made it into the Black community were now shooting randomly through windows and setting homes and businesses on fire. In at least a few cases, Black people were deliberately murdered, including an elderly couple who were gunned down inside their home. The most destructive and perhaps deadliest race massacre in American history had begun, and it would continue unabated for approximately twelve hours. By noon on June 1, by one contemporaneous estimate, as many as three hundred people had been killed, and Greenwood’s business district, as well as more than one thousand Black residences, lay in ashes.
The vast majority of contemporaneous press coverage, official reports, and subsequent histories refer to the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, as the “Tulsa Race Riot.” To be sure, since the middle of the 19th century, “race riot” has been the generic term used to describe outbreaks of violence between different racial or ethnic groups. However, there has been a growing consensus within the news media and the public around “race massacre” as the more appropriate descriptor, which is part of a larger effort to tell the story of what occurred from the vantage point of the Black victims and survivors. The Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission (2015–present), headed by Oklahoma state senator Kevin Matthews, is to be applauded for its leadership in initiating the conversation about how the events can be most accurately framed. The shift in terminology from “race riot” to “race massacre” is a necessary and timely corrective.
First and foremost, the word “massacre” better captures what actually occurred. Had the Black community been able to keep the white invaders from entering the Greenwood District, or had the violence subsided that same night, the term “riot” might be more apt. The following morning, however, white civilians and authorities banded together to launch a systematic assault on Black people and property, and that coordinated incursion places the subsequent events squarely in the realm of a massacre.
According to testimony from both Black and white eyewitnesses, by daybreak on June 1, several thousand armed whites had amassed in various locations along the southern border of the Greenwood District. At approximately 5:00 a.m., a whistle or siren was sounded as a signal for the invasion to begin. As the white mob stormed into Greenwood, a machine gun that had been set up atop a grain elevator sprayed bullets into Black homes, businesses, and churches along Greenwood Avenue. Airplanes flew overhead, from which whites reportedly fired pistols and shotguns (and even dropped rudimentary explosives) down at Black people fleeing the violence.
Once in Greenwood, the invading whites, civilians as well as authorities, reportedly shot and killed any Black person who was found to be armed or who did not immediately surrender, including some who were simply attempting to flee from the violence. Faced with this overwhelming show of force, Black Tulsans reluctantly emerged from their homes, surrendered whatever weapons they possessed, and were taken into custody. They were transported to temporary detention centers—at Convention Hall until it was full, and then to McNulty Park and the fairgrounds—where they were held until they were able to get a white person to vouch for them. There is no evidence that the authorities detained any of the whites involved in the mob violence, let alone arrested them.
Some buildings in Greenwood had already been set ablaze during the nighttime fighting, but whites now systematically looted homes, churches, and businesses and then set them on fire. After some 12 hours of continuous mob violence, almost every significant structure within the thirty-five-block area had been burned to the ground or severely damaged. The invasion of the Greenwood District, in other words, was a far cry from a “race riot” or merely an outbreak of violence between two different racial or ethnic groups: it was an intentional military-style assault on a civilian community.
The financial losses were staggering, totaling approximately $2 million ($26 million in today’s dollars) of Black wealth. White-owned stores that had been looted by whites seeking guns and ammunition during the massacre later received restitution, but even though insurance companies and the city of Tulsa initially promised to recompense Black business owners and Black residents who had lost everything, they never made good on such reparations. Furthermore, Tulsa-area banks and lending institutions refused to provide loans to Black businesses and homeowners seeking to rebuild. In retrospect, the actions of the white mob and local authorities can only be interpreted as a concerted attempt to expel Tulsa’s Black community, as had happened elsewhere in the region. Seemingly underlining this point, a photo of Greenwood engulfed in heavy smoke is captioned “Runing [sic] the Negro out of Tulsa.”
Despite the best efforts of the white mob and the city’s leaders, Black Tulsans rebuilt the Greenwood District brick by brick. By 1942, according to attorney and historian Hannibal Johnson, the district had reached its zenith, with more than 240 Black-owned and Black-operated businesses. In the final analysis, an important legacy of the Tulsa Race Massacre has proven to be the grit and resilience of the Black survivors.
Photographing a Massacre
Beyond documenting the event itself, the photographs of the Tulsa Race Massacre shaped how the violence was interpreted, remembered, and circulated. It is not only one of the most destructive episodes of anti-Black violence in U.S. history—it is also one of the most extensively photographed. Similar outbreaks of anti-Black violence in Chicago (1919), Elaine, Arkansas (1919), and Rosewood, Florida (1923) did not produce an equivalent number of photos.
Not only does the large cache of extant photographs afford an opportunity to understand the depth and ferocity of anti-Black violence during the post-World War I era, but the images also provide an unvarnished glimpse into the psychological underpinnings of white supremacist violence, revealing the documentary choices that white participants made as the massacre unfolded. Moreover, the sheer number of these photos is illustrative of how photographing brutal acts of anti-Black violence had become an important social ritual in early-twentieth-century America. Because so many photos of the race massacre are still available to us today, these images continue to demand engagement. In reckoning with this pictorial legacy, important questions arise: Why do so many photos exist? Who took them? What do they tell us about the events they depict?
An extensive photographic archive of the Tulsa Race Massacre exists in part because many white participants sought to document and share their role in the destruction of the Greenwood District. Of the more than five hundred known photographs, only a small number—taken by Reverend Jacob H. Hooker, a survivor of the massacre—are attributed to a Black photographer; his studio, located at 22 North Elgin Avenue, was destroyed and never rebuilt. White Tulsans’ eagerness to photograph the community’s devastation was reflective of turn-of-the-century lynching culture, in which photography was central—by and large, lynching culture revolved around white mobs torturing and summarily killing Black people in public. White-on-Black lynching often became a public spectacle, with as many as several thousand people in attendance. White mobs sought to portray the white community as undifferentiated and united in enacting white supremacy through terroristic violence enacted upon Black bodies. For example, photo postcards of lynchings often pictured a crowd of gleeful whites posing near a lynched Black body. Historian Amy Louise Wood argues that lynching drew white spectators in part because it conferred social authority, allowing participants to shape the narrative and frame themselves as protectors of the community.
The white Tulsans who invaded Greenwood similarly portrayed themselves as protectors, defending their community against an armed “negro uprising.” Through taking or sharing photos of destroyed Greenwood buildings and, especially, of armed whites escorting Black men with their hands raised in surrender, white participants and onlookers sought to demonstrate that white Tulsans had succeeded in thwarting Black violence. Captions such as “Running the Negro out of Tulsa,” “Little Africa on Fire,” and “Herding Them in the Convention Hall” are indicative of this cultural ethos. Race massacre photos were valued as souvenirs that enabled their authors to position themselves within a triumphalist narrative. This is particularly true of those later sold as photo postcards, which also allowed those who purchased and sent them, as well as the recipients who then viewed them, to share in that triumph vicariously.
Although white mob participants enthusiastically took pictures of Greenwood’s destruction, most did not leave a documentary record that would later allow their photos to be traced back to them. This was not an uncommon dynamic. As with lynching photography, rarely did white photographers or whites pictured in race massacre photos identify themselves. The bulk of the images for which a specific creator can be identified were taken by amateur white male photographers. For example, Francis Albert Schmidt, who was the University of Tulsa’s football coach at the time, and University of Tulsa alumnus Joseph McMinn Hause are known to have taken some of the photos that document the detention of Black Tulsans at Convention Hall and McNulty Park.
In contrast to others’ wide-angle images, Schmidt’s and Hause’s photos provide close-up views of Black families being searched by deputized whites and then loaded onto waiting trucks. In addition, there are approximately half a dozen extant photos by Schmidt of the corpses of Black massacre victims. Like his detention images, these photos were taken at close range, revealing victims’ facial expressions, wounds, and personal effects. As many as 300 people are estimated to have died as a result of the massacre, and yet it is rare to find photos that provide visual evidence of the fatalities.
It is unlikely that Schmidt’s and Hause’s photos were intended to document the Black experience of the race massacre; nevertheless, they bring into stark focus the horrific violence suffered by Tulsa’s Black community. At the time, only the state’s Black newspapers (particularly Oklahoma City’s Black Dispatch) and nationally distributed Black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender carried stories on the massacre from the vantage point of Black victims and survivors, under headlines such as “Loot, Murder, Arson! Four Million Dollars Lost,” “Tulsa Aflame; 85 Dead in Riot,” and “Police Aided Tulsa Rioters.” Rather than send reporters and photographers to Tulsa to cover the massacre directly, the editors repurposed photos circulating in white dailies to illustrate how white mob violence, coupled with the complicity of city officials, led to high Black fatalities and to Greenwood’s physical destruction.
Some of the most memorable photos of the massacre were taken not by amateurs but by two of Tulsa’s established professional photographers, Clarence Jack and Alvin Krupnick. A week following the massacre, one of Krupnick’s most compelling images was published in the New York Times. Depicting a dejected Black female survivor sitting on the back of a truck with her few salvaged possessions, exhaustion, and desperation clearly etched on her face, it evocatively captured the human tragedy of the massacre. In the days and months ahead, Krupnick would continue to photograph the Greenwood District and its Black survivors. His post-massacre photos document Greenwood’s gradual reemergence from rubble-filled ruins, to a tent city, to restored homes and businesses. Krupnick’s race massacre photography is both eloquent and historically important, but there is another point that should not be overlooked: as the owner of a commercial studio, he likely processed numerous photos for white customers who had taken part in the massacre.
It has long been rumored that Tulsa police were sent to photography studios throughout the city to confiscate any massacre photos that were being developed. While this rumor has never been either disputed or confirmed by archival research, a box containing confiscated photos allegedly surfaced at the Tulsa police station more than 50 years later, in 1972 or 1973. A sergeant purportedly showed the photos to several officers in a break room. Thirty years later, one of the officers who had seen the confiscated photos shared the story with archivist and local historian Dick Warner. He told Warner that the photos he viewed were gruesome. One he remembered showed the lifeless bodies of a Black man, a Black woman, and two children draped over a fence. In another case, a Black man was being dragged behind a car. Several of the photos, he believed, showed white men digging trenches in which the bodies of Black massacre victims were being dumped. After reportedly resurfacing decades later, the confiscated photographs again disappeared, and despite efforts by historians, including Dick Warner and Scott Ellsworth, to locate them, they have not been recovered.
While this episode has often been marginalized in public memory, the events in Tulsa in 1921 remain essential to understanding the history of racial violence in the United States. The photographic record underscores the scale of the destruction and the need to center the experiences of victims and survivors in how this history is remembered.
Far From Justice
For scholars of racial violence, images of lynching and mob brutality are tragically familiar. Yet photographs of the Tulsa Race Massacre retain a particular force. They compel sustained attention not only because of their scale but also because they document an episode of destruction that reshaped an entire community.
There is an eerie, almost surreal quality to these images. At first glance, they can resemble photographs of European cities after aerial bombardment during World War II. The visual evidence is difficult to reconcile: a residential neighborhood spanning 35 blocks reduced to rubble within hours. Without this photographic record, such a claim might seem implausible.
In this sense, the images function as historical evidence that resists denial. They bring into view aspects of the massacre that might otherwise be obscured or contested. At the same time, they cannot fully convey the lived experience of the violence—the terror of witnessing loved ones killed, families detained, or an entire community destroyed. The photographs document the aftermath and fragments of the event, but the full human experience remains, in many ways, beyond recovery.
Perhaps the most chilling photos are those that show whites standing over the bodies of deceased Black people or posing in front of building ruins. The identities of many individuals pictured in these photographs remain unknown, raising questions about their roles—as participants, bystanders, or looters—and about whether these images may still be connected to living memory or identifiable individuals. Of course, merely knowing the names of white participants and spectators would be far from justice, but it would nonetheless be significant, in that it would remove white anonymity and provide at least a measure of accountability for some whites’ role in the massacre. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that we will ever know the identities of the white civilians and civil authorities who participated in the destructive frenzy in the Greenwood District. When it comes to anti-Black violence, justice is often deferred or incomplete.
What of the unidentified Black victims depicted in these photographs? The images raise unresolved questions about who they were, how they died, and whether their families were ever able to recover their remains or find any measure of closure. In some cases, the possibility that victims were buried in unmarked or mass graves underscores the extent to which violence continued beyond death, complicating efforts at remembrance and accountability.
More than a century later, these questions remain unresolved. The photographs make it difficult to deny the scale of the violence, even as they leave much of the human experience beyond recovery. They document destruction, but also reveal the limits of what documentation can capture.
These images point to systems of white supremacy, racial segregation, and anti-Black violence that made such events possible. At the same time, they invite ongoing reflection on how this history is remembered and what responsibilities follow from its enduring legacy.
Contemporary residents of Greenwood have described a persistent sense that the ground beneath them may hold the remains of massacre victims, reflecting the unresolved legacy of possible mass graves. Ongoing efforts to locate and identify these burial sites are widely seen as an important step toward historical clarity and community closure.
At the same time, the legacy of the massacre continues to shape debates over reparations for descendants of victims and survivors. Questions of restitution and accountability remain complex, but they are central to broader discussions about how to address the long-term consequences of racial violence. The photographic record, by documenting both the extent of the destruction and its human toll, continues to inform these conversations and to frame ongoing efforts toward recognition and justice.
