Tulsa Race Riot Timeline with Maps
The Seeds of Catastrophe
May 31, 1921
3:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Partly cloudy ~ High 87° Low 67°
Sunset 7:34 p.m. ~ South winds
•We may never really know what actually happened in the elevator of the Drexel Building on Monday morning, May 30, 1921. A clerk in a nearby store thought there had been a sexual assault. Others believed that there had been a lovers' quarrel between Sarah Page, the white seventeen-year-old elevator operator, and Dick Rowland, a black nineteen-year-old who worked in a shoe shine parlor one block away. But the most likely explanation is that when Rowland entered the elevator that day, he tripped and accidentally stepped on Page's foot. And when she screamed, he fled.
• The Tulsa Tribune decided otherwise. The next day, the afternoon newspaper ran an inflammatory front-page article claiming that Rowland had attempted to rape Page. More ominously, in a now lost editorial, the paper may have claimed that Rowland, who was now in police custody, would be lynched by whites that evening. The May 31st 1921 edition of the Tulsa Tribune rolled off the presses by 3 o'clock. Within an hour, there was - once again - lynch talk on the streets of Tulsa.
•As predicted, whites began to gather outside of the Tulsa County Courthouse, where Dick Rowland was being held, before sunset. The crowd soon grew into the hundreds. At 8:20 p.m., three white men entered the courthouse and demanded that the authorities hand over Rowland, but they were turned away.
•Meanwhile, along Greenwood Avenue, in the heart of the African-American commercial district, word of the impending lynching spread like wildfire. Cries of "We can't let this happen here" were heard as black men and women anxiously discussed how to respond to the oncoming calamity. At 9 o'clock, a group of twenty-five armed black men traveled by automobile to the Courthouse. There, they offered their assistance to the authorities should they white mob attack the Courthouse. Assured that Dick Rowland was safe, they returned to Greenwood.
• The arrival of the black men at the Courthouse electrified the white mob, now more than a thousand strong. White without guns went home to retrieve them. One group of whites tried to break into the National Guard Armory, in order to gain access to the weapons stored inside. but a small contingent of armed National Guardsmen, threatening to open fire, turned the angry whites away.
By nine-thirty that evening, Tulsa was a city that was quickly spinning out of control.
© Tulsa Race Riot Commission
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