US admits to Tulsa racist crime after a century.
According to Al Jazeera, more than 104 years after the largest racial massacre in American history and the burning of the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a report released by the US Department of Justice on Friday revealed that some law enforcement officers were involved in the 1921 massacre, in which about 300 people, most of them black residents of the Greenwood neighborhood, were killed.
Despite the seriousness of the information in this regard, the US Department of Justice stated that there was no way to prosecute the crimes and punish the perpetrators, and the youngest possible suspect in the crime is now over 115 years old.
The report revealed that law enforcement officers at the time, both from the Tulsa police and the US National Guard, disarmed black residents of the Greenwood neighborhood and detained many of them in temporary camps under armed guards. There are also credible reports that some law enforcement officers arrested a large number of blacks, some of whom participated in the burning of the neighborhood and the killings.
The report cited eyewitness accounts of a police officer who had accused him of shooting all the blacks in Greenwood.
According to the report, the same American officer arrested six men in Greenwood, tied them together with ropes, and ordered them to run behind the officer’s motorcycle to the detention center. One eyewitness also said that he saw officers searching black men under the pretext of finding weapons, but their main goal was to steal the men’s money and shoot them if they protested. Another officer also boasted that he had killed four black men.
Christine Clark, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, said the Tulsa massacre was a racially motivated and criminal act of large-scale brutality and injustice, and an attempt to destroy the black community.
In 2020, nearly a century after a white mob killed 300 people in a rampage through Greenwood, a predominantly black neighborhood, city officials began excavating a section of Oaklawn Cemetery on the city’s east side, seeking evidence of a possible mass grave.
The Tulsa massacre, like many crimes of racial violence, began with a false accusation; on May 31, 1921, a white mob gathered outside a courthouse where a young black man was being held on charges of assaulting a young white woman who was operating an elevator at a drugstore.
Eventually, a group of white men met with a group of black men at a police station, and a shootout and scuffle ensued. The white mob eventually descended on Greenwood, a wealthy, self-sufficient neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street,” and, with the help of the National Guard, set it on fire.
The death toll from the massacre may have reached 300, making it one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history; hundreds more were injured, and an estimated 8,000 or more were left homeless.
After the massacre, officials worked hard to erase it from Tulsa’s historical record; the victims were buried in unmarked graves and police records disappeared.