The Tulsa massacre destroyed twelve hundred Black homes and businesses with official complicity.

Evidence

The scale of the destruction during the 1900s is incalculable. Black farms were stolen, shops burned to the ground. White mobs from Florida to North Carolina to Louisiana to Arkansas razed entire prosperous Black neighborhoods and communities. In Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, a district so successful that it became known as Black Wall Street, gangs of white men, armed with guns supplied by public officials, wreaked permanent economic destruction. They burned more than twelve hundred homes and businesses, including a department store, a library, and a hospital, and killed hundreds. These people, it is now believed, were buried in mass graves. Today Greenwood, like so many once-prosperous Black areas, remains severely economically depressed. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1358