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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. They were hastily trying to get rid of the bodies by dumping them in mass graves around the city. ...

People describe it as a massacre. i've been calling it a war. >> there's 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. he's 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 dick, so he's known to be this flashy young guy. just another person in the community that everyone ...

And the crowd around him wouldn't let anybody touch him or pick him up, wouldn't 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, burning, destroying everything in sight. >> people are taking shelter in