Dick Rowan News Today

In the 1920s, there was a Strong Black Community here in tulsa called greenwood. These people were the core of black entrepreneurship. People call it The Black Wall Street. Greenwood was like putting harlem, Bourbon Street, and Chocolate City all in one place. But White Tulsans talked about greenwood as Little Africa or [bleep] land. Tulsa was a powder keg, needing only something to set the community alight. Between 100 and 300 people, most of them black, were killed. Today we call it a massacre...

People describe it as a massacre. ive been calling it a war. >> theres systemic causes for what happened here in 1921. but we fixate on this trigger incident that involved a black boy and a white girl on an elevator. the teenage boy is a boy named dick rowan. hes at work on memorial day, shining shoes in downtown tulsa. dick rowland was 19 years old in the spring of 1921. he worked in a white-owned and white-patronized shine parlor on main street in downtown tulsa. >> his nickname is diamond dic...

And the crowd around him wouldnt let anybody touch him or pick him up, wouldnt let an ambulance pick him up. but he was the first man that was shot in a riot. >> nobody cares about dick rowan anymore. the white mob is now out to get any black person in their sights. >> the teeming white mob spilled over the frisco tracks into the greenwood community. carrying rifles, pistols, matches and cans of gasoline. in the words of one of the massacre survivors, all hell broke loose. looting, shooting, bur...