A Short Note On Oklahoma Race Riots And The Black Wall Street

Once the police arrested Marquette Frye, angry Watts's residents began stoning passing cars and setting them on fire (Bradley 895).Two days later, on the morning of August 13th, massive amounts of people marched into the business district and started a free-for-all on the local stores. Firebombs and attacks against white owned businesses followed. Then they started dragging people from their cars and beating them. Watts had a storehouse of combustible materials located on the southeast side of Los Angeles. A minor clash between police and black residents resulted in an explosion that ripped through Watts (Magill 1924).

"Black Wall Street" was the name given to Greenwood Avenue of North Tulsa, Oklahoma during the early 1900’s. Because of strict segregation, Blacks were only allowed to shop, spend, and live in a 35 square block area called the Greenwood district. The "circulation of Black dollars" only in the Black community produced a tremendously prosperous Black business district that was admired and envied by the whole country.

The Civil War was fought over the “race problem,” to determine the place of African-Americans in America. The Union won the war and freed the slaves. However, when President Lincoln declared the Emancipation Proclamation, a hopeful promise for freedom from oppression and slavery for African-Americans, he refrained from announcing the decades of hardship that would follow to obtaining the new won “freedom”. Over the course of nearly a century, African-Americans would be deprived and face adversity to their rights. They faced something perhaps worse than slavery; plagued with the threat of being lynched or beat for walking at the wrong place at the wrong time. Despite the addition of the 14th and

White supremacy in Tulsa during 1917 to 1921 was soaring, white citizen of Tulsa thought with events of bombing a wealthy oilman home to the killing of a taxi cab driver that they should have take the law into their own hands. African Americans were terrified in the white citizens actions. African Americans felt that they would not get equal justice with the law, so African Americans had to stand together against white supremacy and challenge their authority. Which leads into the events that start of the Tulsa race riot. Dick Rowland work as a shoe shiner on Main Street. There were no toilet facilities for the boot shiners, so the owner of the shine parlor where Rowland worked arranged for the employees to use the restroom across the street on the top floor. So the morning of “May 31, 1921” Rowland went across the street to us the bathroom. Dick Rowland got onto the elevator to go to the top floor of the building. Minutes later the young lady ran out of the elevator with scratches on her hands,

The Tulsa Riot of 1921 was a tragic racial riot that resulted in the periodic destruction of Greenwood, a neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Nicknamed “Little Africa”, Greenwood was described as a vibrant community, and was built up by African Americans. This community, however, was completely destroyed by a massive mob of white men, whose anger stemmed from rape allegations of an African American man. Before and after the Tulsa Riot occurred, African Americans of the Greenwood community faced social issues due to the prevalence of racism among white men across the nation.

This paper explains a very important moment in the history of our government that took place in Illinois in 1917. As World War I was beginning for the United States things were heating up in East St. Louis, Illinois. Anti-black riots killed or injured over one hundred black civilians. Then a Silent Parade of over ten thousand black citizens from New York broke out. Civil rights have always been an issue in our government, and according to www.kidzworld.com, after these anti black riots, things eventually led to the development of the The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and from that, Rosa Parks did not give up her seat on the bus. The creation of the NAACP also influenced the Little Rock, Arkansas incident, Martin L. King’s “I Have a Dream” Speech, and many other things which eventually led to equal rights for everyone with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This paper will explain the riots and how it shaped our government into providing equal jobs for all races.

Imagine living in a town that was once thriving with successful businesses to a community that barely exist. As you travel down the deserted roads of your community you are surrounded by boarded up memorable buildings, deteriorating homes, and empty storefronts. The water tower that stands tall for all to see is now covered by rust. While the streets in which you are traveling on show signs of frequent patchwork in an effort to salvage the road. As you pass by what once was your favorite mom and pop’s restaurant you began to reminisce on the time you spent there with loved ones. This has become the story of residents in Boley, Oklahoma; one of the first all black towns in the state.

Have you ever said that you wanted to start a riot, and people have responded by saying that’s not funny? Well here’s why they say that. On May 31, 1921 a riot occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It all happened when Dick Rowland (an African American) was accused of raping a white woman named Sarah Page in an elevator, when Rowland had tripped and grabbed her arm by accident. A salesclerk overheard the scream and called the police. Rowland was arrested. There were angry whites that were outside the courtroom protesting for Rowland to be lynched. The violence started for some people on May 31, 1921 and went on until June 1, 1921. 1265 homes, dozens of office buildings, restaurants, churches and schools had been destroyed during this

The Elaine Race Riot can be even said as the Elaine massacre that had taken place on September 30, 1919, in Elaine in Phillips County, Arkansas, in the Arkansas Delta. The fight started when around 100 African Americans, commonly black farmers on the farms of white landlords joined a consultation of the Progressive Farmers and the Household Union of America at a church in Hoop Spur, the Phillips County that was three miles north of Elaine. The assembly was managed by Robert Hill; he was the organizer of the Progressive Farmers and the Household Union of America. The main goal of the meeting was that one of the numerous black sharecroppers in the Elaine area during the former months was achieving better payments for their cotton crops from the white farm owners who conquered the area during the Jim Crow’s era.

Pre-existing racism in Tulsa was the foundation on which all the other causes of the riot were built upon. Wide-spread segregation was still common in America at that time and it was accepted by many in the North and South that whites were inherently superior to blacks. These views were particularly strong in the South, where emancipated blacks were seen as a threat and scourge to white Southern culture, a culture which was utterly dominated by whites and where blacks were oppressed with no hope of equal protection under the law, equal representation, etc. This was also the case in Tulsa in the early 1900s. Blacks were segregated against by the white residents and as a consequence formed their own community, called Greenwood, on the north side of the Frisco Railroad tracks, which was heralded by

We have always had racial riots since the beginning of American history, from the Stono Rebellion to Charlottesville. Each riot has a reason behind it, for Stono, it was a tribute to the resist of African Americans to the oppressive system of slavery. During the lynching

The beginnings of the riots came on March 3, 1991, when Rodney King was stopped and brutally assaulted by police. King was stopped after a high speed chase police after police caught him intoxicated and was subsequently forced out of the car (History.com). From there, police began to unlawfully assault Rodney King, leaving him with a fractured skull, along with a broken cheekbone (History.com). A witness, George Holliday, filmed the officers beating Rodney King; a day after the tape was airing on CNN for the rest of the country to witness (Los Angeles Daily News). Four officers were later arrested and put to trial a year later, however all of them were not pleaded guilty. The verdict angered a massive amount of African

medical facilities, theaters, hotels, banks and retail stores. Black Wall Street brought great African Americans from across the world, such as, Booker T. Washington, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington and Madame C.J. Walker; this is Black excellence at its finest. Ultimately, Black Wall Street was burned to the ground by Klux Klan members and was never rebuilt.

In July 23, 1967, the Detroit Police department busted a bar with a prominent number of African Americans. They arrested every person in the bar. More and more people started to gather on 12th street to watch the proceedings. That is when the rioting started. The crowd began to get more violent as more people joined.

Even though there are different accounts of the events that took place in Memphis, between April 30 and May 3, 1866, what occurred was racially motivated to an extent. In the evening of Monday April 30, 1866, a few officers were walking down Causey Street. They met a few discharged African-American soldiers who were celebrating their release from the Army and forcefully moved them off the sidewalk.1 In doing so a Negro fell, and in turn an officer tripped over him.2 The police then drew their weapons and proceeded to attack the Negroes for no reason. Logically this was not necessary. After a few minutes the police stopped beating the men and continued with their day. The Black ex-soldiers got up and returned to Fort Pickering.