Abstract
James West was attending a play when a youth rushed in and delivered the warning that a resident of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s black district, might be lynched. West, a teacher and fellow resident of the district known as “Greenwood,” hurried home and awaited further development. Later that evening and into the early morning hours, West lay awake as the sound of gunfire erupted throughout his district. Shortly after 5:30 a.m., white men arrived at his home and ordered him outside. West was placed with a larger group and was violently escorted to Tulsa’s Convention Hall. Around the same time, Carrie Kinlaw and her sisters emerged from their Greenwood home after growing increasingly concerned about the safety of their mother, who lived a few blocks away. Upon arriving, they placed their mother on a cot and carried her while bullets flew all around. Eventually, gangs of rioters from all ages surrounded them, and they watched helplessly as nearby homes were broken into, looted, and destroyed (Parrish 1998, pp. 37, 50).
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Messer, C.M. (2021). The Tulsa Massacre and Its Context. In: The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74679-7_1
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