THE 1921 PROJECT:

On the night of 31 May 1921, a white mob descended upon the prosperous, all-black neighborhood of Greenwood, in north Tulsa, Oklahoma. In less than 24 hours, the mob - enraged over the thwarted lynching attempt of a 19-year-old black shoeshiner who probably stepped, accidentally, on a white elevator attendant's foot - burned what had been known as "Black Wall Street" to the ground, destroying more than 1,200 black businesses, churches and homes and leaving over 10,000 residents homeless. The exact death toll was not recorded, but Red Cross estimates at the time put it upwards of 300 black people. Survivors recounted planes flown by white pilots that dropped kerosene bombs from above, and recalled witnessing dozens of black bodies dropped from bridges into the Arkansas River, or into mass graves.

The 1921 Tulsa massacre was one of the most deadly acts of mass racial violence in the United States, but for decades, it went unknown by even close descendants of the survivors - silenced by fear of reprisal, and whitewashed from history books. Though Tulsa police allowed the rioters to burn one of the most successful black neighborhoods in the country, even deputizing some looters, no one was ever held responsible for the losses.

But with the centennial this weekend, a year after Black Lives Matter protests across the country following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor turned the national spotlight on the injustice of Tulsa and the country's corrosive amnesia over racial violence, there's renewed momentum on seeking justice for the losses, and a slew of memorials tracing the long shadow of inequity, distortion and silence cast by the massacre.

"It's not a movie, it's not a chapter in a book," said DeNeen L Brown, a Washington Post reporter whose coverage of reparations efforts in Tulsa are featured in the new PBS documentary Tulsa: The Fire and the Forgotten, told the Guardian. "It happened to real people."

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