It’s not just Tulsa: A Brief American History of White-on-Black Massacres

The centennial of the Tulsa massacre has brought a lot of attention to the tragedy that killed more than 800 people and destroyed the wealthiest Black town in America, known as Black Wall Street.

Many Americans have brought up how they never knew of this tragedy. I was one of them. I learned about it after the first episode of HBO’s The Watchmen. It got me to wondering how many more massacres there were that aren’t told in our history books.

The answer is a lot. In fact, there were so many I had to have some criteria to keep the list from getting too long.

First, I was only looking at White-on-Black massacres. There are massacres of Indigenous People, Latinos and Asians that are just as horrific. But each minority race in America has had its own unique struggle. When you throw them all together, you lose sight of those struggles. So I want to keep them distinct.

Second, I kept it to incidents where there were more than 100 victims. There are many more incidents that were under that threshold, but it would be near impossible to include all of them into a single article.

I also don’t believe that my list is in any way complete. It’s not like there’s a database I can draw from. There is a list of massacres in America posted in Wikipedia that made for an excellent starting point, though.