"Mobsters had kicked a hole in the side of the store and had set it on fire.  That was the saddest day of my life.  That riot cheated us out of childhood innocence.  My life dreams were destroyed too by that riot.  In fact, I had made up my mind to become a school teacher when I grew up.  But that riot put an end to that.  We lost everything in the riot, and I had to drop out of school to work and help with family support.  Not only did I not become a shool teacher, I was not able to even finish high school!  What a loss that was to Tulsa and to society.  I had such a calling for the teaching profession, and I had such a love for learning and for teaching.  I know in my heart that I would have been a good teacher." 

"We found that we had lost everything.  Everything we owned had been stolen or burned.  I wondered why we had come back.  There was nothing to come back to.  The rented house was badly burned and everything stolen or burned.  Even my child toys and treasures had been taken.  What the mobsters hadn't stolen, they scattered about, set on fire, or smashed and damaged.  I just down and cried.  I was a nervous wreck."  

"My parents, David and Hattie Humphrey, moved from Ft. Gibson, Oklahoma, to Tulsa.  At the time of the riot, they lived at 2111 N. Lansing Avenue in a home which they owned.  They attended the Holiness Church on the corner of Marshal and Lansing.  The pastor was Rev. Nichols.  There were six children then.  We had a house, a horse, a cow, and some chickens.  Our house was burned down during the riot and we lost everything that we had.  The riot was an aweful thing.  It scarred us."

"When the riot broke out, I was a teenager working as a bellhop at the Mills hotel in downtown Tulsa.  We made good money.  Tulsa was a booming oil town and people were always coming to Tulsa.  Hotels, restaurants, entertainment places, taxis, shoe shine parlors, department stores, banks, churches (so many on Boulder Avenue that it was called Cathedral Row) - all profited in the booming oil town.  And then came the riot!"  

"My father, Hosea Oscar Vaden, owned one of the most popular pool halls in Tulsa at the time of the Tulsa riot.  Vaden's Pool Hall was located on Greenwood Avenue next to Art's Chili Parlor.  Across the street was another pool hall, Spann's Pool Hall.  Younger people went to Spann's, and older people came to dad's pool hall.  Famous people were always coming to play pool at Vaden's Pool Hall.  Boxer Joe Louis always came by my dad's pool hall to buy newspapers.  Dad sold 'Black Dispatch' newspapers and also white Tulsa newspapers.  My parents also owned a home on Elgin Street, which burned to the ground in the riot.  I was too yourng to personally remember details of the riot, but I heard my parents talk about the riot - how bad it was, how it destroyed so much property that blacks had worked so hard to aquire."

"A family friend came from a hotel on Greenwood where he worked and knocked on our door.  He was so scared he could not sit still, nor lie down.  He just paced up and down the floor talking about the 'mess' going on downtown and on Greenwood.  When daylight came, black people were moving down the train tracks like ants.  We joined the fleeing people.  During this fleeing frenzy, we made it to Golden Gate Park near 36th Street North.  We had to run from there because someone warned us that whites were shooting down blacks who were fleeing along railroad tracks.  Some of them were shot by whites firing from airplanes.  On June 1, 1921, we were found by the guards and taken to the fairgrounds.  A white man who mother knew came and took us home.  Going back to Greenwood was like entering a war zone.  Everything was gone!  People were moaning and weeping when they looked at where their homes and businesses once stood.  I'll never forget it.  No, not ever!"

"My Johnson relatives had acquired 700 acres of land in Arkansas after the Civil War, but there was so much hatred and envy of black landowners by Southern whites that my family lost all that land.  Due to the deliberate racial injustice of taking their land, and threats against black landowners, my relatives secretly fled Arkansas.  One of mother's brothers had been targeted and would probably have been murdered had the family remained in Arkansas.  That is h ow my mother arrived in Tulsa, just in time to become caught up in the worst race riot in America history!"

"I saw what I thought were little black birds dropping out of the sky over the Greenwood District.  But those were no little birds; what was falling from the sky over the Negro district, as it was called in those days, were bullets and devices to set fires, and debris of all kinds.  Mother, sensing the danger, ran out and got me and took me into the house.  I saw a truckload of dead bodies being carried somewhere.  I was just spellbound looking at those bodies - bodies that looked like they had just haphazardly been thrown onto that truck, with arms and legs just dangling  I got closer so I could see better and I noticed that the faces and arms were black but that when the arms dangled, a person could see white at the top of the arms.  I asked about that.  I learned later that those were white men who had painted their faces and arms black so they could get into the Greenwood community under false pretenses.  But when they started shooting down the black people, their game was up and they, themselves, got shot down.  Many other black riot victims told of white bosses who had cots, blankets, and food already in place at their homes and businesses just waiting for their black employees when the riot broke out.  They had to know that the riot was coming."

"At the time of the Tulsa riot, my mother, Willie Williams Pannell Dawson worked for a white lady, Mrs. Van Horn.  During the riot, my mother, stepfather, and I fled the rito area with a lot of other colored people.  I don't remember much about the riot>  I do know that our home was burned down and that we were taken by authorities to the fairgrounds."

"I was just a year old during the riot.  My mother said she joined the crowd of running black men, women, and children trying to escape the mobs who were approaching the Greenwood area.  She had me in her arms and she was terrified.  She said she and the group she was with ran all the way to Claremore, Oklahoma.  then a truck of soldiers came and took them to a detention center in Tulsa.  I don't remember which center she said they were taken to.  My mother didn't know where my father was.  Later, we learned he had been taken to another detention center.  After the riot was over, mother and dad were reunited.  Dad never heard a word from the city about what happened to his wagon and his two horses.  He never got a dime from the city from the loss of his 'work capital' - that wagon and those two horses." 

"At the time of the Tulsa riot, my father, J.D. (Dick Bell) and my mother, Ida Mae Bell lived at 418 N. Cincinnati Avenue in Tulsa.  My mother was eight months pregnant with me.  Dad and mother came from Missouri to Tulsa in 1918 to get in on the oil boom successes there.  Dad was a chauffeur for rich whites such as Tate Brady, Judge Shea, and the owner of Crosby Farms.  When the riot started, mother and dad fled along the Santa Fe Railroad tracks, with other fleeing black refugees all the way to Mohawk Indian Nation Park.  Dad had always been fascinated with the police force.  Appointments of blacks to the police force had always been 'political plum' appointments in return for support of the winning political party at the time.  In 1925, two Tulsa commissioners, Thomas I. Monroe and A.P. Bowles, Democrats, recommended that my dad be appointed to the police force.  In the next election, the Republicans won and Dad lost his job.  the next election a Democrat won, and Dad was back on the force."