To mark the centennial anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, NMAAHC has created the Tulsa Collections Portal offering greater access to the museum’s objects, documents, period film and dozens of hours of survivor’s memories.

Born in 1879, the civil rights lawyer Buck Colbert (B.C.) Franklin moved from the all-Black Oklahoma town of Rentiesville to Tulsa in 1921. He set up his law practice in Greenwood. His wife and children (including 6-year-old John Hope Franklin, the preeminent historian and founding chair of NMAAHC’s Scholarly Advisory Committee) planned to join him at the end of May.

Anita Williams Christopher laid out some of her father William D. Williams’ collection of materials related to the massacre on the top of an old desk that had belonged to her grandparents, John Wesley and Loula Mae Williams, proprietors of the Dreamland Theatre, one of Greenwood’s most iconic and prosperous institutions.

George Monroe was almost five years old on May 31, 1921, when his world was set on fire.

When NMAAHC was chartered in 2003, it held not a single artifact in its collections nor a single photograph in its archives. African American history, largely denied by public institutions—including the Smithsonian itself—is a foundational component of the nation's story.

The Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma has a history that is rooted in the history of Black settlements and towns in 19th century Oklahoma and a wider geography of communities of freedom that stretch far and wide across the continent for hundreds of years.

In 1921, Tulsa boasted a well-developed middle-class African American community concentrated in a neighborhood called Greenwood. But from May 31 to June 1, white mobs looted and burned more than 1,000 homes, businesses, and churches, and murdered dozens of African Americans in the deadliest race riot in U.S. history.

In the 1970s, New York City’s northernmost borough fostered the newly emerging hip-hop music and cultural scene.