Sociological Focus

Abstract

The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the worst incidents of racial violence in the history of the United States. A prosperous community before the massacre, over 1200 businesses and homes in the predominately Black Greenwood District of Tulsa were destroyed over 2 days in 1921. Systemically covered up and ignored for decades, the massacre has had widely unknown effects on individual residents. Using 1900–1940 linked census data, I examine a range of massacre impacts on survivors. I find that prior to the massacre, Greenwood was an exceptionally upwardly mobile Black community, both in inter- and intragenerational terms, with residents experiencing enormous homeownership and occupational gains relative to Blacks nationwide. In the aftermath, however, homeownership rates collapsed, residents experienced downward occupational mobility, and family structure broke down. Broadly, the massacre displaced survivors to other parts of the country, generally relegating them to residence in poor neighborhoods. Ultimately, I argue that the massacre’s effects are not best understood in terms of short-term shocks to wealth, as previous research has focused, but instead in the composite set of stratifying conditions that the massacre induced.