The Black Holocaust in America

The Black Holocaust in America

The black holocaust in America is the name of given to the people of Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 1921 where black were building their own economic communities a decade before the national depression in America. During the oil boom of the 1910s, the area of northeast Oklahoma around Tulsa flourished, including the Greenwood neighborhood, which was known as "the Negro Wall. The area was home to several projecting black businessmen, many of them multimillionaires. Greenwood swanked a variety of prosperous businesses that were very efficacious up until the Tulsa Race Riot. Not only did African Americans want to fund to the achievement of their own shops, but also the racial segregation laws disallowed them from shopping anywhere other than Greenwood. One of the nation's vilest acts of racial violence, the Tulsa Race Riot, happened there in late May and early June of 1921, when 35 square blocks of homes and businesses were incinerated by mobs of angry whites. The riot began because of the unproven assault of a white elevator operator, 17-year old Sarah Page, by an African American shoe shiner, 19-year old Dick Rowland. When Rowland was acquitted of his charges the Tulsa Tribune got conformation of the incident and chose to circulate the story in the paper on May 31, 1921. Soon after the newspaper article appeared, there were updates that a white lynch mob was going to take problems into its specific hands and kill Dick Rowland.