On May 31, 1921, the Tulsa race riot was touched off after a black elevator operator was alleged to have attacked a white woman in an elevator in downtown Tulsa. Armed whites attacked, burned and looted the local black business community of Greenwood in violence that killed more than 300 people and destroyed more than 1200 homes.



Learn more about the Tulsa race riot. A special commission set up by the Oklahoma legislature decades afterwards submitted this report [PDF] on the riot in 2001.