Tulsa Race Massacre

A century ago, America’s simmering racial tensions boiled over on the streets of one Oklahoma city, leaving dozens dead and hundreds more injured. Scott Ellsworth explores what remains the worst single incident of racial violence in US history – the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

- Scott Ellsworth

Mary Parrish hurried home, anxious to finish a novel that she had begun the day before. During an era in which African-American women were routinely forced to the lowest levels of US society, Parrish stood out as a talented writer and successful entrepreneur: she ran her own secretarial school, where she taught typewriting, business correspondence and clerical skills to young black women hoping to find work as office clerks. Parrish was also a single mother, and she and her seven-year-old daughter, Florence, lived on Greenwood Avenue, in the heart of the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Within walking distance from their home, there were two theatres, dozens of restaurants, a public library, grocery stores and dress shops, doctors’ offices and billiard parlours. “On Greenwood one could find a variety of business places which would be a credit to any section of the town,” Parrish wrote. Tuesday 31 May 1921 was a warm spring evening, and there was plenty to do and see.

Only Parrish wasn’t interested. Fetching her daughter from a neighbour, the two climbed the stairs to their second-storey apartment. Little Florence took her place on the sofa along the windows, where she could watch the automobile and pedestrian traffic along Greenwood Avenue, while her mother sunk into her favourite chair, looking forward to a quiet evening of reading. That wasn’t going to happen, though. Within a couple of hours, Florence would watch an unfolding drama outside, as African-American men and women, some with guns, gathered on the street below. And before the clock on the mantel struck midnight, Mary Parrish and her daughter would find themselves at ground zero in the worst single incident of racial violence in American history.