You are standing on the northwest corner of Greenwood and Archer. In 1921, most of Tulsa was informed by newspapers like The Tulsa Tribune and Tulsa World. In the Black community, The Tulsa Star and The Oklahoma Sun offered alternative viewpoints. In a time before radio or television, the printed page was the source for current events. White and Black media differed markedly in perspective. This was especially true when it came to the events before and during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

Fear and sensationalism were just as much a part of selling the news as it is now. In those days, few phrases had more power to fuel terror and prejudice than “Negro uprising,” two words shrouded in condescension and judgment. The words signaled a long-held and deep-seated fear among whites that Black people would organize and arm themselves in large numbers, seeking wholesale revenge on white America for centuries of maltreatment. Few things struck more panic in white America—or sold more papers—than talk of rebellion, rumors of Black/white romances, or supposed Negro uprisings.

In the early 1920s, racial tension and violence was at an all-time high. Black veterans were returning from Europe. They had risked their lives for freedom and democracy, and now they expected to experience it for themselves in their own country. The Ku Klux Klan, the infamous KKK domestic terrorist clan, was back with a vengeance, stoking fears and growing its ranks by the thousands. Mob violence, lynchings, race riots, and “Negro uprisings” filled the columns of the front pages with regularity. Newspapers sensationalized the stories and kept the narrative consistent: whites were the victims of Black violence and targets of their evil plots. Therefore, any response to it, no matter how extreme, was considered justified. The consequences for Black people, deserved. Deadly, race-driven confrontations in places like Houston, East St. Louis, and Elaine, Arkansas were all characterized as “Negro uprisings,” reported with a complete disregard for the facts on the ground.

This false, warped narrative was used to malign a small group of Tulsa's Black citizens who simply wanted to protect one of their own on the evening of May 31. Following an editorial in The Tulsa Tribune, one that called for its readers to “nab a Negro" that night, men from the Greenwood District went to the Tulsa courthouse to prevent a growing white mob from lynching a Black teenager—a teenager who was supposedly innocent until proven otherwise. But the threat of a “Negro uprising,” a baseless fear that had been fueled by white media for years, helped to turn a gun’s misfire into a massacre.

In the immediate wake of the violence and destruction of the Greenwood District, Tulsa’s two leading white newspapers published reactions that expressed horror and regret. Their remorse, however, vanished quickly. By June 3, Tulsa's white newspapers turned their columns into a blame game. Many reasons would be entertained, including lax law enforcement of drinking and prostitution, the sheriff’s failure to disarm the Negroes, and even the corruption of youth because of movies. But within a few days, white newspapers came to a singular conclusion: Black Tulsans were the real culprits, and they had brought this on themselves.

Attempting to minimize the carnage, The Tulsa World and the Tulsa Tribune dramatically reduced the initial death counts. These reductions countered the consistent high estimates by the American Red Cross, yet even as death totals could be whitewashed, property destruction could not. And so, white newspapers began crafting a narrative of Black culpability.

One stark example came from Richard Lloyd Jones, a white Tulsan who, on June 1, blamed Tulsa city authorities for the violence. But by June 4, Jones had recanted, writing a column for The Tulsa Tribune that blamed Greenwood's Black residents. Filled with crude, racial slurs and stereotypes, Jones' editorial concluded rather bluntly that “the bad Negroes started it.”

This rewriting of history continued. Eventually, white newspapers would report that the destruction of Black Wall Street was a net positive for Tulsa, saying it had eradicated a blight upon the community.

Over time, with no memorials, anniversaries, or public events to acknowledge what had happened, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre would be buried in history until just recently, completely absent from public school textbooks and Oklahoma curricula.

By 1971, on the fiftieth anniversary, two hundred Black Tulsans commemorated the massacre, but the rest of Tulsa, all but ignored it. The Tulsa Tribune was the only white print media outlet to publish a brief remembrance—yet it was the papers' first and only reference to the massacre since the 1920s.