Over roughly 18 hours, white mobs — deputized by city officials and supplemented by Oklahoma National Guard units — attacked the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood after a young Black man, Dick Rowland, was accused of assaulting a white elevator operator. Mobs looted and burned 35 blocks of homes and businesses, killed an estimated 100–300 Black residents, and left roughly 10,000 people homeless. Aerial firebombing of civilian neighborhoods, by private planes, was used. The massacre was systematically erased from Oklahoma textbooks for most of the 20th century; the first state-mandated curriculum on it was adopted only in 2020.

Why it’s been targeted

Oklahoma’s HB 1775 (2021) bars instruction that causes students “discomfort” on the basis of race; the ACLU and NAACP LDF sued, citing teachers’ fear of discussing the massacre. Carole Boston Weatherford’s Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre (Caldecott Honor, 2021) appears in PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans as challenged in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida districts. The 2023 Florida rejection of AP African American Studies named Reconstruction-era racial violence as objectionable framing.