Education For Life Academy

Education For Life Academy

Where Black History Lives!

Unit 7: The Great Migration & Harlem Renaissance (1916 – 1935)

The Standing on the Shoulders of Giants Curriculum

Rather, those arrested were Black and the National Guard detained roughly 5,000 Black men and women for days. A grand jury eventually blamed Black residents for the riot, and thousands of African Americans who lost their homes lived in tents throughout the city that were monitored by the police. Despite the city’s refusal to offer aid to survivors, African Americans rebuilt their community within a span of five years and it flourished until the era of desegregation in the 1960s.

In 1997, the Oklahoma State Legislature authorized a commission to study and research the Tulsa (Greenwood) Race Riot of 1921. The findings, which were released in 2001, called for reparations to be paid to survivors and their descendants. In fact, a number of survivors, represented by African-American Harvard Law professor Dr. Charles Ogletree, sued for reparations, taking their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet restitution was denied based on a statute of limitations that required the filing of lawsuits within two years. In 2013, the Oklahoma police chief issued a formal apology for the role police officers played in the 1921 Greenwood massacre.

The massacre at Greenwood was not the only instance of white violence committed against a thriving Black community. In the summer of 1919, known as the “Red Summer,” whites attacked African Americans and burned down Black neighborhoods in cities all over the country, including Chicago, Illinois, Omaha, Nebraska, Knoxville, Tennessee and Washington, D.C. In 1923, false allegations of rape justified the lynching of a Black man in the booming Rosewood community in central Florida. When African Americans defended their community, white men killed Black men and women and burned down their homes and businesses. No one was charged for these murders or the destruction of property.