You are standing just east of Greenwood Ave on the north sidewalk of Archer, directly across the street from the Greenwood Rising / Black Wall Street History Center. This corner location included the offices of the Oklahoma Sun newspaper, which was destroyed in the massacre.

Here, it is easy to imagine a newsstand serving Greenwood, with Black-owned publications like the local Oklahoma Sun and The Tulsa Star. Along with them: Oklahoma City’s Black Dispatch and Oklahoma News, plus the Muskogee Cimeter and Wichita’s The Negro Star. In a time when the printing press and newspapers reigned supreme, these publications represented one of the only ways to be informed of global, national, and local events from a Black perspective.

These papers chronicled a systematic, decades-long reversal of all that the Civil War and Emancipation had promised: from the inalienable truth that “all men are created equal,” to the Jim Crow segregation laws; from “one man, one vote,” to Black disenfranchisement through voter suppression laws, intimidation, and violence; and from “equal protection under the law,” to the increasing frequency of mob justice.

At the turn of the century, the Oklahoma Territory was a magnet for Black Americans. Some even dreamed that, by the time it joined the Union, Oklahoma could be the first state with a Black majority. But when Oklahoma earned statehood in 1907, its first legislative act was the passage of Jim Crow laws. An act of political betrayal, it was clearly designed to stem the tide of Black migration. Despite this, Tulsa’s Black population skyrocketed from 1910 to 1920, growing from just under 2,000 people to nearly 9,000.

In Greenwood’s newspapers, residents read with increasing alarm about escalating violence against people and communities of color. In 1918, the reported number of lynchings reached a grisly zenith of 62. In addition, so-called “race riots” became so common that 1919 was named “The Red Summer,” after 25 incidents of racial violence occurred in that season alone. It was in this climate that, on the evening of May 31, 1921, a group of Greenwood residents went to the Tulsa courthouse to protect the accused teenager Dick Rowland from the swelling mob.

Many factors played into the group’s decision to take such bold action. Three local events—covered by both Black and white newspapers—proved relevant. The headlines and coverage by these papers were starkly different, and it would only widen the chasm of fear and mistrust between Black and white Tulsans.

The first was two years earlier in 1919, when a group of armed Black citizens crossed into white Tulsa to ensure that a Black prisoner would not be lynched. The standoff was resolved peacefully. Greenwood residents would surely have considered this show of resolve to be a life-saving victory. But in white Tulsa, the Tulsa Tribune described it as “an armed invasion.”

A year later in 1920, a mob seized and lynched a white prisoner housed in the Tulsa County Jail. The Tulsa Star was the only prominent newspaper to condemn the vigilante act. Publisher A. J. Smitherman wrote, “The lynching of Roy Belton explodes the theory that a prisoner is safe on top of the courthouse from mob violence.”

And the last—in October of 1920, as reported by The Tulsa Star—took place in nearby Okmulgee. There, a Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman. When a mob stormed the jail, they discovered that the accused was missing. As a precautionary measure, he had been moved to a safer location by the sheriff. Enraged, the mob decided to invade the “colored business district.” Fortunately, when the mob heard that a large number of Black residents had organized and armed themselves in defense, cooler heads prevailed, thus avoiding a confrontation.

In the final paragraph of a front-page article, The Tulsa Star declared what Black Tulsans would do if faced with the same circumstances. It read: “This attempt to lynch a colored man in Okmulgee has served to intimate what will actually happen here if mob violence is allowed to prevail.” It added, “They also are firm in their determination to protect themselves from mobs.”

Six months later, Tulsa faced similar circumstances. As predicted, the residents of Greenwood did not hesitate to stare down and confront mob violence. They were determined to protect themselves. The result this time, however, would not be a peaceful resolution. Instead, the brewing racial hatred finally boiled over. Violence, death, and destruction followed, and on a scale not theretofore witnessed.

For the next stop on the tour, move west just around the corner onto Greenwood to the next tour marker.