A century ago, an empire of African American businesses was built in Tulsa. Though it all came burning down in the massacre of 1921.

In 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma’s Greenwood District, known as Black Wall Street, was one of the most prosperous African-American communities in the United States. But the Tulsa Tribune reported that a black man attempted to rape a white woman. Whites in the area refused to wait for the investigative process to play out, sparking two days of unprecedented racial violence. Thirty-five city blocks went up in flames, 300 people died, and 800 were injured. Defense of white female virtue was the expressed motivation for this collective racial violence.

The riot was one of the most devastating massacres in the history of U.S. race relations, destroying the once thriving Greenwood community. Nine thousand people became homeless.

On Black Wall Street there were modern, majestic, sophisticated, and unapologetically black communities that had black-owned banks, hotels, cafés, clothiers, movie theaters, and architecturally beautiful homes with indoor plumbing and a remarkable school system that superiorly educated black children. Less fortunate white neighbors resented their upper-class lifestyle. As a result of a jealous desire to put Blacks in their place, a wave of domestic white terror rained on Black Wall Street.

There were reports that white men flew airplanes above Greenwood, dropping kerosene bombs. “Tulsa was likely the first city” in the United States “to be bombed from the air,” according to a 2001 report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.

As a result of segregation, a “dollar circulated 36 to 100 times” and remained in Greenwood “almost a year before leaving. Even more impressive, at that time, the state of Oklahoma had only two airports, yet six black families owned their planes.