Photographing the Tulsa Massacre of 1921

Not only is the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre the most destructive episode of anti-Black violence in American history, but it is likely one of the most photographed episodes as well. In conducting the research for The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History, I reviewed more than five hundred photos of the massacre.25 To my knowledge, similar outbreaks of anti-Black violence in Chicago (1919), Elaine, Arkansas (1919), and Rosewood, Florida (1923), did not produce an equivalent number of photos. Not only does the large cache of extant photographs afford us an opportunity to understand the depth and ferocity of anti-Black violence during the post-World War I era, but the images also provide an unvarnished glimpse into the psychological underpinnings of white supremacist violence, revealing the documentary choices that white participants made as the massacre unfolded. Moreover, the sheer number of these photos is illustrative of how photographing brutal acts of anti-Black violence had become an important social ritual in early-twentieth-century America. Because so many photos of the race massacre are still available to us today, we are compelled, even obliged, to engage with them. In reckoning with this pictorial legacy, there are some questions we must ask ourselves: Why do so many photos exist? Who took them? What do they tell us about the events they depict? In addressing these questions with sensitivity and empathy, I hope that I can use the photos to shed greater light on aspects of the race massacre that might be faint or imperceptible in other documentary sources.

Long-exposure photograph of Tulsa after the massacre, photographer unknown — Source.

Postcard with the handwritten caption: “All That Was Left of His Home After Tulsa Race Riot” — Source.

An extensive race massacre photo archive exists because so many white participants desired to visually represent and share with other whites their role in the violent destruction of the Greenwood District. Of the more than five hundred photographs I reviewed, only the half-dozen images by photographer Reverend Jacob H. Hooker, himself a survivor of the massacre, are attributed to a Black person (unfortunately, his photography studio, located at 22 North Elgin Avenue, was burned down during the massacre and was never rebuilt).White Tulsans’ eagerness to photograph the community’s devastation was reflective of turn-of-the century lynching culture, in which photography was central. By and large, lynching culture revolved around white mobs torturing and summarily killing Black people in public. White-on-Black lynching often became a public spectacle, with as many as several thousand people in attendance. White mobs sought to portray the white community as undifferentiated and united in enacting white supremacy through terroristic violence enacted upon Black bodies. For example, photo postcards of lynchings often pictured a crowd of gleeful whites posing near a lynched Black body.26 According to historian Amy Wood, there was an appetite among white Americans for witnessing a lynching because it gave them social authority in telling the story as well as the ability to frame themselves as protectors of the community.27