The Tulsa Massacre They Don't Teach You in School — Mother Randle's Testimony

[00:00:00]There is a woman living in Tulsa, Oklahoma right now. Her name is Lesie Benningfield Randall. She is known as Mother Randall. She is 111 years old.

[00:00:09]When she was 6 years old, she watched white men come into her neighborhood and tear it apart. She is the last person alive who remembers what happened on May 31st, 1921.

[00:00:21]And before she is gone, before the last witness leaves, I need to make sure you understand what she saw. Here is the Greenwood district she remembers >> ship in the age of Jim Crow are Amazon, Debbie and Ron Green, Humanities Texas, Nissan Foundation, and Texas Capital.

[00:00:42]Our patron sponsors are Dallas Tourism Public Improvement District and Match Group. And our exhibition sponsors are Bank of Texas and Larry Ginsburg.

[00:00:53]Greenwood, a neighborhood on the north side of Tulsa, Oklahoma. And by 1921, by the time Mother Randall was a small child running through its streets, it was the most prosperous black community in the entire United States. They called it Black Wall Street. Before we go into what happened on May 31st, I want you to know what existed. Because the magnitude of what was destroyed is only visible if you first understand the magnitude of what was built. Tulsa [music] in 1921 was an oil boom town. Oklahoma had struck oil in 1905. The city was growing faster than almost anywhere in America.

[00:01:31]And within the city, in a segregated black neighborhood of approximately 10,000 people, an entire economy had been constructed. Not constructed by government investment, not constructed by charitable donations from white philanthropists, constructed by black Americans who had been excluded from white society and had built their own.

[00:01:49]Here is what Black Wall Street actually contained.

[00:01:53]>> Very intentful in creating [music] Greenwood.

[00:01:58]>> These were members of a black community who were showing black people that a new world was possible. They were a sign and a symbol to black communities about all of the wonderful things that we could be.

[00:02:12]>> You have all sorts of businesses in Greenwood. You have everything.

[00:02:16]191 businesses, four hotels, eight churches, seven grocery stores, two hospitals, the only medical facilities available to black residents in the entire city. two Masonic lodges, real estate offices, law firms, doctor's offices, dental offices, drugstores, auto garages, beauty salons, and barber shops, a junior high school, a library, and the Dreamland Theater, a three-story building owned by John and Lula Williams. The first floor, a confectionary with a 12-oot soda fountain and seating for 50 people.

[00:02:51]Above that, a rooftop garden restaurant.

[00:02:55]John and Lula were also the first black Tulsans to own a car. The Tulsa Star, a newspaper founded by AJ Smitherman, a black man, outspoken, powerful, despised by the white establishment for the same reason a black newspaper is always despised, because it told the truth. And Mount Zion Baptist Church, a congregation that had raised money for decades to build a proper home. The new building cost $92,000.

[00:03:22]They held their first service on April 4th, 1921.

[00:03:27]April 4th, 1921, 40 days before the massacre. That church had existed for 40 days when the white mob burned it to the ground. I want to give you the economic argument for why this community existed in this form.

[00:03:41]Segregation created black wall street.

[00:03:44]Black residents were not permitted to shop at white businesses. They were excluded from white hospitals, white schools, white hotels, white theaters, white barber shops. So the black community of Greenwood built their own.

[00:03:57]Every dollar spent in Greenwood circulated within Greenwood. It did not leave the neighborhood and enrich white business owners. It stayed. It multiplied. It built wealth. This is the economic logic that every pan-African economist has described when they talk about community self-sufficiency.

[00:04:15]Money that circulates within a community builds that community. The irony of segregation is that it forced black Americans to practice exactly the economic self-reliance that pan-Africanists have been advocating for ever since. Black Wall Street was what African economic sovereignty looks like.

[00:04:34]And the white establishment of Tulsa had been watching it grow. As PBS historian and community member says directly, this was not about the boy in the elevator.

[00:04:43]This was about blacks becoming too economically powerful. Now, the spark.

[00:04:48]May 30th, 1921. A Monday. Dick Roland is a young black man, a shoe shiner. He works in a building at Third and Main Street, downtown Tulsa. To reach his workplace, he regularly uses the elevator in the Drexel building. The elevator is operated by Sarah Page, a white woman. There is documentation suggesting Dick Roland and Sarah Page knew each other, were not strangers, had interacted many times. On May 30th, something happened in that elevator.

[00:05:19]Accounts differ. Sarah Page may have screamed. Dick Roland fled the scene.

[00:05:24]The Tulsa police were called. The next morning, they arrested Dick Roland. By that point, rumors of what had supposedly happened had been traveling through Tulsa's white community for hours, growing, changing, becoming more extreme with each retelling. On May 31st, the Tulsa Tribune published a front page story. The headline described an attempted assault. The article inflamed a city that was already tense.

[00:05:50]The Ku Klux Clan had experienced a major resurgence across America after the First World War. Tulsa had significant clan membership. The years following World War I had seen racial violence spike across the country. What historians call the Red Summer of 1919 had seen dozens of cities erupt. Tulsa's white community was already at a breaking point. The Tribune article broke it. By evening on May 31st, a white mob had gathered at the courthouse where Dick Roland was being held. The rumor was that they were going to lynch him. Word reached Greenwood. And here is the part of the story that the mainstream history often glosses over.

[00:06:30]The black men of Greenwood, many of them World War I veterans who had fought for America in Europe, went to the courthouse armed. They were not going to let the mob murder Dick Roland without resistance. A standoff formed outside the courthouse. A shot was fired. No one knows who fired it. And then everything broke. The white mob turned toward Greenwood. Let's pause for a second to say a big thank you to the Black Culture Diary community where black voices, stories, and legacies are preserved and amplified. By becoming a member, you're not just supporting the channel, you're becoming part of a powerful cultural movement. Let's continue. The early hours of June 1st, 1921.

[00:07:12]Here is what happened next. Take a careful look at this footage.

[00:07:17]>> Something [music] terrible happened here.

[00:07:21]And for decades, people didn't talk about it.

[00:07:24]>> I was an adult before I ever heard about it. It [music] was something that was was was hidden.

[00:07:29]>> This entire historic community was obliterated. Bodies dumped in rivers, bodies dumped in mass graves. [music] It was an absolute massacre. White riers entered Greenwood at dawn. Some of them had been officially deputized, armed and sworn in by city government officials.

[00:07:46]They were legal agents of the state attacking their own citizens. They looted. They burned. They shot at people fleeing. Eyewitnesses reported that planes flew over Greenwood during the attack. Some accounts said shots were fired from the planes. Others said they were used for observation, tracking where residents were fleeing. The 2001 Oklahoma State Commission could not definitively confirm that shots were fired from aircraft, but the planes were there. Eyewitness after eyewitness placed them there. Whatever the planes were doing, the attack on the ground was total. 35 city blocks burned. 1,256 homes destroyed. Another 215 looted. The Dreamland Theater burned. Mount Zion Baptist Church burned. 40 days old.

[00:08:36]$92,000 of community savings ash. The Tulsa Star newspaper burned. A Jay Smitherman was later charged with inciting riot. He fled with his wife and five children. Never returned to Tulsa.

[00:08:50]Both hospitals burned. The only medical facilities available to 10,000 black Tulsans gone. The junior high school, the library, the Masonic lodges, the drugstores, the barber shops, all of it.

[00:09:04]By the time the Oklahoma National Guard imposed martial law around noon on June 1st, 18 hours after the first shot, Greenwood was ash. Now, the people, 800 people treated for injuries. 232 listed as seriously wounded. 6,000 black residents of Tulsa were detained, arrested, held in makeshift camps, jails, and at the fairgrounds. Many were not released until a white employer vouched for them. Your employer, who you worked for, who paid your wage, had to come and confirm that you were acceptable enough to release. 10,000 people made homeless. 10,000 in a city of 100,000. One in 10 Tulsans was now homeless, and every single one of them was black. Some spent that winter, the winter of 1921 to 1922, living in tents.

[00:09:55]As for deaths, the official count at the time was 36. The 2001 Oklahoma State Commission estimated between 100 and 300. Most historians now believe approximately 300 people died. Some evidence suggests the number may be higher. The searches for mass graves that have been conducted in recent years have not resolved the question. We may never know exactly how many people were killed. What we know is that Dick Roland was exonerated. Sarah Paige refused to press charges. The accusations against him were dropped. What we know is that not one white perpetrator was ever imprisoned for the massacre. Now, I want to give you the legal strategy behind the silence because the massacre being buried for 70 years was not an accident.

[00:10:40]It was engineered. The event was called the Tulsa race riot, not the massacre, not the attack, the riot. The word riot was chosen deliberately. And this is the part of the story that almost nobody teaches. The victims of the massacre could not collect insurance. The perpetrators of the massacre face no criminal prosecution and the government that had deputized some of those perpetrators face no accountability. The naming of an event is never neutral.

[00:11:08]When you call it a riot, the destruction becomes mutual chaos. When you call it a massacre, it becomes what it was, an organized attack on a defenseless community by people acting with the blessing of the state. Oklahoma did not officially rename it the Tulsa race massacre until 2018. That is 97 years of official denial baked into the language.

[00:11:30]Insurance policies in 1921 contained riot clauses. If a property was destroyed in a riot, the insurance company was not obligated to pay. The black residents of Greenwood filed more than $1.8 million in claims against the city, equivalent to $32 million in 2025.

[00:11:50]Not one claim was paid. Not one. And then after the insurance denial, a group of white developers pushed the city to pass a fire ordinance that would have required fireresistant construction on a scale that most black residents could not afford. The purpose, prevent them from rebuilding on their own land. A court struck that ordinance down, but the intent was clear. They burned the neighborhood. They denied the insurance claims. They tried to pass a law preventing the rebuilding. And then the history books went silent. The Tulsa race massacre was not mentioned in most history textbooks for 70 years. The people of Greenwood passed the story down through oral history, through churches, through family dinner tables, but the official record pretended it had barely happened. Here is a reminder to please like and share the video and subscribe to our channel to watch more videos on black culture, history, civilization, and identity. Let's continue now. Now, the rebuild because this part of the story is also remarkable. Despite everything, the denial of insurance claims, the attempted ordinance, the lack of government support. By the end of 1922, 80 new businesses had reopened in Greenwood. 80 businesses in one year.

[00:13:10]People who had lost everything began again. By the 1940s, the Greenwood district had been rebuilt and was thriving again. Not as prosperous as 1921. The assets, [music] the institutions, the capital that had accumulated over decades had been destroyed, but functional, alive. And then came the second destruction.

[00:13:37]In 1921, the predominantly black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma was victim to one of the biggest massacres on US soil.

[00:13:49]More than 1,000 African-American homes and businesses were looted and burned to the ground. In the 1960s and 1970s, urban renewal programs and highway construction did to Greenwood. What the white mob of 1921 had not fully finished. Interstate 244 was built straight through the Greenwood district.

[00:14:09]More of what had been rebuilt was demolished for highway rightway. The community that had survived a massacre, denied insurance, survived attempted disenfranchisement, and rebuilt itself was then demolished again by a government program called urban renewal.

[00:14:25]This is the story that the 2020 video called the Greenwood tragedy that did not end in 1921 because it did not. Now, the reparations. In 1997, the Oklahoma State government created a commission to formally document what had happened. In 2001, the commission recommended direct payments to survivors and their descendants, a memorial, scholarships, economic development for the Greenwood community. The scholarship fund was established for a limited time. The direct payments were never made. In 2026, a lawyer named Deario Solomon Simmons published a book called Justice for Greenwood: From Massacre to Reparations. The legal case for reparations on behalf of survivors and descendants is still being litigated.

[00:15:15]Not one direct payment has ever been made to a survivor or descendant of the Tulsa race massacre. Now, I want to bring you back to the woman we started with. Here she is.

[00:15:26]>> I guess I might have been five, I guess.

[00:15:28]I don't know. Very small. [music] But I remember some of the things that happened. I remember men coming to the house. They were white men. [music] I don't know what they call themselves.

[00:15:44]Crooler clans or what they call themselves were coming in.

[00:15:48]>> Lesie Benningfield Randall is 111 years old in 2026.

[00:15:53]Her fellow survivor Viola Ford Fletcher died on November 24th, 2025.

[00:15:58]Mother Randall is now the only person alive who was there. the only living memory of what Black Wall Street looked like before it burned. The only living witness to what it felt like to be six years old watching your neighborhood destroyed. She testified before the United States Congress in 2021 at the centennial of the massacre. She was 107 years old when she testified. She said, "I am 107 years old and I have never seen justice." In 2026, that remains true. Let me close with the argument this story makes because it is the same argument that connects Black Wall Street in 1921 to the conversations BCD has been having all year. Black Wall Street was the proof of concept. It proved that black economic self-sufficiency is not only possible, it is extraordinarily powerful when the conditions allow it.

[00:16:51]Every dollar that stayed in Greenwood built Greenwood. the Dreamland theater, the hospitals, the law firms, the Masonic lodges, the churches, all of it built by people who could not rely on the white economy to serve them. So, they built their own. And when the white establishment of Tulsa looked at what had been built, their reaction was not admiration, it was terror. As the historians say, this was not about the boy in the elevator. This was about black people becoming too economically powerful. The massacre did not happen because Dick Roland rode an elevator.

[00:17:27]The Greenwood district had accumulated in two decades what took most communities a century. By 1921, the community's assets were estimated at $2 million, equivalent to approximately $35 million today. Property values in Greenwood had been rising every year.

[00:17:44]Black professionals, doctors, lawyers, dentists had clientele who couldn't access white practices. The segregation that was designed to limit them had instead created a captive market that enriched the community and surrounding white communities noticed. It happened because black Wall Street was working.

[00:18:03]And when black economic power works historically, consistently, it has faced this response. Not competition, not absorption, not negotiation, destruction. In 1921, the destruction took 18 hours. It took 70 years for the official record to acknowledge it happened. And over 100 years later, the last woman alive who saw it has not received justice. That is not history.

[00:18:30]That is the present. Let us know in the comments section. Did you learn about Black Wall Street in school? And what do you think is the most important lesson the Greenwood story holds for black communities trying to build economic power today? Do you want to watch more videos like this one? If so, subscribe to our channel and press the bell icon next to it. We have decided to bring videos on something nobody talks about.

[00:18:53]Black culture, civilization, history, and evidence about how glorious blacks have been. Thanks for watching and until the next video, stay tuned.