DOJ Report Shines a Harsh Light on the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, Illuminating a History of Racial Violence in Oklahoma

On January 9, 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice released its Review and Evaluation of the Tulsa Race Massacre of May 31-June 1, 1921. The depart­ment char­ac­ter­ized the report as ​“the fed­er­al government’s first thor­ough reck­on­ing” designed to acknowl­edge, illu­mi­nate, and pre­serve for his­to­ry the ​“hor­ri­ble ordeals of the massacre’s vic­tims” even if they found no legal avenue for pros­e­cu­tion of the crimes com­mit­ted over a century ago. 

The report con­firms that no fed­er­al charges were filed at the time, nor were any state mur­der charges brought, even though there was evi­dence to sug­gest that a num­ber of unarmed and flee­ing Black cit­i­zens of Tulsa were shot point blank in and around their homes or as they fled the city. Several accounts are well doc­u­ment­ed, includ­ing the mur­der of A.C. Jackson, a Black doc­tor ​“rec­og­nized as one of the country’s lead­ing sur­geons.” A white landown­er, John Oliphant, report­ed going to the all-Black Greenwood neigh­bor­hood of Tulsa on June 1, 1921, to check on his prop­er­ty and see­ing the 70-year-old Dr. Jackson walk out of his home with his hands in the air, sur­ren­der­ing to armed white men. Mr. Oliphant recount­ed to the fed­er­al inves­ti­ga­tor sent to Tulsa after the mas­sacre that despite Dr. Jackson’s lack of resis­tance and Mr. Oliphant’s pleas, one of the white men shot Dr. Jackson, who lat­er died from his wounds. Mr. Oliphant then wit­nessed the shoot­er and his com­pan­ions loot­ing Dr. Jackson’s house. 

As not­ed in DPI’s October 2022 report on race and the death penal­ty in Oklahoma, Oklahoma was no stranger to extra­ju­di­cial vio­lence against its Black cit­i­zens in the peri­od lead­ing up to the mas­sacre. Between 1900 and 1930 there were more lynch­ings than exe­cu­tions. Oklahoma became a state in 1907, and from that point until the Tulsa Massacre in 1921, extra­ju­di­cial lynch­ings were favored almost 2 to 1 over legal­ly sanc­tioned exe­cu­tions (36 lynchings/​19 exe­cu­tions). Of the 19 indi­vid­u­als exe­cut­ed in this time­frame, 13 were Black (68%). Given the rel­a­tive size of the Black pop­u­la­tion at the time (7.5%), these num­bers mean that a Black per­son was 25 times more like­ly than a white per­son to be executed. 

In the mod­ern era, Tulsa itself has been a nation­al out­lier in exe­cu­tions. As of 2022, Tulsa was tied with Montgomery County, Texas as the most pro­lif­ic exe­cu­tion­er of any coun­ty between 500,000 – 750,000 in size and had the sec­ond largest per capi­ta exe­cu­tion rate at 2.6 per 100,000 pop­u­la­tion. Tulsa County ranked fifth for juris­dic­tions with the most exe­cu­tions in the coun­try since 1972. 

Death sen­tences in the mod­ern era in Tulsa are also fre­quent­ly over­turned. A review of death sen­tences imposed in Tulsa between 1972 and January 1, 2021, sur­faced that near­ly half (24) of all death sen­tences imposed (50) have been reversed or have result­ed in a com­mu­ta­tion or exon­er­a­tion, mak­ing a death sen­tence no more sta­tis­ti­cal­ly reli­able than a coin toss. 

The Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 was notable for the lev­el of par­tic­i­pa­tion of local police and nation­al guard forces. This pat­tern of police vio­lence con­tin­ues into the mod­ern era. In 2022, accord­ing to the Tulsa Police Department, Police Scorecard, the Tulsa Police Department has the sec­ond dead­liest police force among the 100 largest city police depart­ments in the U.S. The aver­age rates of killings by the Tulsa police depart­ment was 9.5 per 1,000,000 res­i­dents, while the aver­age among the 100 largest city police depart­ments was 4.4. Data from 2013 – 2021 show that Black peo­ple are over­rep­re­sent­ed in fatal police encoun­ters with these police depart­ments: 24% of peo­ple killed by the Tulsa Police Department were Black.