Modern America and the legacy of the Tulsa massacre

Pearl Harbor was not the first air attack on American soil. That scar was inflicted 20 years earlier in Tulsa, Oklahoma. On May 31, 1921, a white army murdered hundreds of Black Americans in a frenzied massacre, and left thousands homeless and destitute. While rioters on the ground shot and burned their victims, aerial assailants dropped improvised bombs and fired rifles upon fleeing civilians.

The slaughter razed 35 city blocks, destroying houses, offices, restaurants, hotels, churches, theatres, medical clinics, chemists, grocery stores, a school, a hospital and the public library. Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood district, the wealthiest Black community in the nation — known as Black Wall Street — was reduced to rubble.

When they were finished, the white murderers went home to their families.