100 years after Tulsa race massacre, African Americans still feel outcast

On the eve of a visit from President Joe Biden, popular with African-American voters, who will attend Tuesday's commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the massacre, and after a year marked by the Black Lives Matter movement, the killings resonate with current events more than ever. "They came over and destroyed Greenwood and burned everything down," Bobby Eaton, 86, a neighborhood resident and former civil rights activist, told AFP. A century ago, in the southern US town, the arrest of a young Black man accused of assaulting a white woman sparked one of the worst outpourings of racial violence ever seen in the country.

On May 31, 1921, after the arrest of Dick Rowland, hundreds of furious white people gathered outside the Tulsa courthouse, signalling to Black residents that a lynching -- a common practice at the time and until as recently as the 1960s -- was imminent. A group of African-American World War I veterans, some of them armed, mobilized in an attempt to protect Rowland. Tensions spiked and shots were fired. Fewer in number, the African-American residents retreated to Greenwood, known at the time for its economic prosperity and many businesses.

The next day, at dawn, white men looted and burned the buildings, chasing down and beating Black people living there. All day long, they ransacked Black Wall Street -- police not only did not intervene but joined in the destruction -- until nothing was left but ruins and ashes, killing up to 300 people in the process. The destruction left some 10,000 people homeless. Even 100 years after the massacre, racial tensions remain high.

An urban planning policy, called urban renewal, carried out by the Tulsa city council since the 1960s, has had the effect of driving out African-American owners whose houses or businesses, deemed dilapidated, were demolished to make way for new buildings. The construction of a seven-lane highway through the middle of the main street finished disfiguring the neighborhood. A few meters from a cafe, in the Greenwood Art Gallery, manager Queen Alexander, 31, arranges the exhibited paintings, which celebrate African-American culture. For her, Greenwood without its African-American owners and historic buildings is no longer really Black Wall Street but "Greenwood district with some Black business leases."