The Eruption of Tulsa

"White, who at that time served on...the NAACP, traveled to Tulsa incognito to investigate the devastation." - Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (1992)

"The NAACP sent investigators life Walter White into regions where lynching took place and then printed their findings in a national forum." - Rioting in America (1999)

What sparked the Tulsa race riot in 1921, and who was to blame for the destruction, injuries, and deaths that resulted?

Light-skinned African-American NAACP civil rights investigator Walter Francis White (1893 -1955) was sent to Tulsa hours after the burning stopped to investigate the scene and in 1921 published his findings in a short 8-page report titled "The Eruption of Tulsa."

The Tulsa race massacre took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US. Alternatively known as the Tulsa pogrom, the Tulsa race riot or the Black Wall Street massacre, the event is considered one of "the single worst incident[s] of racial violence in American history". The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood - at the time one of the wealthiest Black communities in the United States, known as "Black Wall Street".

More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 Black residents of Tulsa were interned in large facilities, many of them for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead.

White used his appearance as passing for a white person to increase his effectiveness in conducting investigations of lynchings and race riots in the American South. He could "pass" and talk to white people as one of them, but he could talk to black people as one of them and identified with them. Such work was dangerous: "Through 1927 White would investigate 41 lynchings, 8 race riots, and two cases of widespread peonage, risking his life repeatedly in the backwaters of Florida, the piney woods of Georgia, and in the cotton fields of Arkansas."

White first investigated the October 1919 Elaine Race Riot, where white vigilantes and Federal troops in Phillips County, Arkansas killed between 100 and 237 black sharecroppers. The case had both labor and racial aspects. Black sharecroppers were meeting on issues related to organizing with an agrarian union, which white vigilantes were attempting to suppress. They had established guards because of the threat, and a white man was killed. The white militias had come to the town and hunted down black people in retaliation for that death and to suppress the labor movement.

About the author:

Walter Francis White (July 1, 1893 - March 21, 1955) was an African-American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a quarter of a century, 1929-1955, after joining the organization as an investigator in 1918.