According to Encyclopedia Britannica - The Trail of Tears was the forced relocation during the 1830s of Eastern Woodlands Indians of the Southeast region of the United States (including Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole, among other nations) to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. Estimates based on tribal and military records suggest that approximately 100,000 indigenous people
were forced from their homes during that period, which is sometimes
known as the removal era, and that some 15,000 died during the journey
west. The term Trail of Tears invokes the collective suffering those people experienced, although it is most commonly used in reference to the removal experiences of the Southeast Indians generally and the Cherokee
nation specifically. The physical trail consisted of several overland
routes and one main water route and, by passage of the Omnibus Public
Lands Management Act in 2009, stretched some 5,045 miles (about 8,120
km) across portions of nine states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Tennessee).
The roots of forced relocation lay in greed. The British Proclamation of 1763 designated the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River as Indian Territory. Although that region was to be protected for the exclusive use of indigenous
peoples, large numbers of Euro-American land speculators and settlers
soon entered. For the most part, the British and, later, U.S.
governments ignored these acts of trespass.
In 1829 a gold rush
occurred on Cherokee land in Georgia. Vast amounts of wealth were at
stake: at their peak, Georgia mines produced approximately 300 ounces of
gold a day. Land speculators soon demanded that the U.S. Congress
devolve to the states the control of all real property owned by tribes and their members. That position was supported by Pres. Andrew Jackson, who was himself an avid speculator. Congress complied by passing the Indian Removal Act
(1830). The act entitled the president to negotiate with the eastern
nations to effect their removal to tracts of land west of the Mississippi and provided some $500,000 for transportation and for compensation to native landowners. Jackson reiterated his support for the act in various messages to Congress, notably On Indian Removal (1830) and A Permanent Habitation for the American Indians (1835), which illuminated
his political justifications for removal and described some of the
outcomes he expected would derive from the relocation process.
Greenwood, Oklahoma was known as the Mecca for black enterprise. It
was a district featuring 108 black-owned businesses, two theaters, two
black schools and 15 doctors’ offices. With Tulsa being segregated by
north and south, there was only one place you could go if you were black
and wanted to establish a name for yourself. For many, that safe haven
was Greenwood. It became so prestigious that Booker T. Washington coined
the term “Negro Wall Street of America.”
On May 31st, 1921, Greenwood was destroyed. 50 square blocks were
decimated, burned to the ground by angry white mobs. Many homes and
businesses were looted in one of America’s worst race riots. The cause:
white outrage over a false sexual assault allegation.
The Tulsa race riot of 1921, occurred between May 31 and June 1, 1921, when a white mob started attacking residents and businesses of the African-American community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in what is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in the history of the United States. The attack, carried out on the ground and by air, destroyed more than
35 blocks of the district, at the time the wealthiest black community in
the nation. More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and more than 6,000 black residents were arrested and detained, many for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 39 dead, but the American Red Cross estimated 300.
The riot began over a Memorial Day weekend after a young black man
was accused of raping a young white female elevator operator at a
commercial building. After he was taken into custody, rumors raced
through the black community that he was at risk of being lynched.
A group of armed African-American men rushed to the police station, to
prevent a lynching, where the young suspect was held and a white crowd
had gathered. A confrontation developed between blacks and whites; shots
were fired, and some whites and blacks were killed. As this news spread
throughout the city, mob violence exploded. Thousands of whites
rampaged through the black community that night and the next day,
killing men and women, burning and looting stores and homes. About
10,000 black people were left homeless, and property damage amounted to
more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property
($31 million in 2018). Some black people claimed that policemen had
joined the mob; others said that National Guardsmen fired a machine gun
into the black community and a plane dropped sticks of dynamite.
In an eyewitness account discovered in 2015, Greenwood attorney Buck
Colbert Franklin described watching a dozen or more planes, which had
been dispatched by the city police force, drop burning balls of
turpentine on Greenwood's rooftops.
