Tulsa's forgotten riot: ninety years after racial violence left as many as 300 people dead, a city begins to remember.

• Author: Sulzberger, A.G.
• Position: NATIONAL

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Some secrets are so deeply buried, they're virtually erased from history.

A brutal race riot 90 years ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is one such case. It began the night of May 31, 1921, and continued into the next day. By some accounts, it was the most deadly racial violence in U.S. history, with an estimated 100 to 300 people killed and more than 8,000 left homeless.

Yet for decades, the riot wasn't mentioned in history books or classrooms--or even spoken about. Many lifelong Tulsa residents say they had never heard of the riot until recently.

Now, advocates for the dwindling number of surviving victims, like 94-yearold Wess Young, are trying to revisit this ugly episode in hopes of achieving some kind of justice before time runs out. Though only 4 at the time, Young can still recall fleeing with his mother and sister the night a mob of armed white men rampaged through his black neighborhood.

By the time they returned the next day, their home and the 35 blocks that made up the community of Greenwood--an area so bustling with black-owned businesses it was dubbed the "Negro Wall Street"--had been burned to the ground.

Explosive Accusations

Tulsa observed the 90th anniversary of the riot in June, but efforts to increase awareness of it and secure compensation for victims have had mixed results: Civic leaders have built monuments to acknowledge the riot, including a new Reconciliation Park, and over the last few years, the riot has been slowly introduced into the curriculum in Tulsa's public schools. But the event is just starting to get national attention in history textbooks, and victims' attempts to secure payment for damages have failed.

Young and his wife, Cathryn, worry it will only be easier to forget the riot as he and the 40 or so other survivors die.

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"I think they are trying to keep this hidden," says Cathryn. "Don't talk about it, don't do nothing about it until all these people are dead."

Long before black neighborhoods erupted in rioting in cities across the U.S. during the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s, a string of riots started by whites occurred in the years after World War I ended in 1918. The Tulsa riot, like several of the others, seems to have begun with the explosive accusation that a black man had assaulted a white woman. (The charges were later dropped.)

On May 31, 1921, hundreds of armed white men gathered outside the courthouse where the defendant was being held, and a group of...