The Tulsa race massacre, also known as the Tulsa race riot or the Black Wall Street massacre, was a two-day-long massacre that took place between May 31 – June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of whom had been appointed as deputies and armed by city government officials, attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The event is considered one the worst incidents of racial violence in American history". The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood—at the time one of the wealthiest Black communities in the United States, colloquially known as "Black Wall Street." More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 Black residents of Tulsa were interned in large facilities, many of them for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead. The 2001 Tulsa Reparations Coalition examination of events identified 39 dead, 26 Black and 13 white, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates, and other records. The commission gave several estimates ranging from 75 to 300 dead. The massacre began during Memorial Day Weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a Black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a white 17-year-old elevator operator in the nearby Drexel Building. He was arrested and rumors that he was to be lynched were spread throughout the city, where a white man named Roy Belton had been lynched the previous year. Upon hearing reports that a mob of hundreds of white men had gathered around the jail where Rowland was being held, a group of 75 Black men, some armed, arrived at the jail to protect Rowland. The sheriff persuaded the group to leave the jail, assuring them that he had the situation under control. The most widely reported and corroborated inciting incident occurred as the group of Black men left, when an elderly white man approached O. B. Mann, a Black man, and demanded that he hand over his pistol. Mann refused, and the old man attempted to disarm him. A gunshot went off, and then, according to the sheriff's reports, "all hell broke loose." At the end of the exchange of gunfire, 12 people were dead, 10 white and 2 Black. Subsequently, the group reportedly fled back into Greenwood, shooting as they went. Alternatively, another eyewitness account was that the shooting began "down the street