Greenwood

Between May 31st and June 1st, 1921, a white mob lay waste to a thirty-block section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, with the active support of the authorities, killing hundreds of Black residents of the Greenwood neighborhood. It is a chilling fact of history that exactly these sorts of neighborhood-destroying massacres -- leaving dozens, hundreds, or sometimes thousands dead -- were taking place in cities all over the Russian Empire only a little more than a decade earlier, targeting Jews. There, this particular form of mob-directed massacre became known as a pogrom. The Greenwood Race Massacre was only the biggest of thousands of other attacks on Black communities by white mobs that took place in different parts of the US. In the immediate wake of US military campaigns, it has often been noted by historians that there is generally a corresponding increase in such racist attacks.