“America’s Black Wall Street” lay in ashes, and at least three hundred people-most of them black-were dead. So Veneice packed a small bag, laid the lovely blue gown on her bed, and prayed her prom would go on the next evening as planned.īy mid-afternoon on June 1, the Dunn’s home had been looted and burned by white rioters, along with twelve hundred other residences and businesses. Greenwood was at risk, and the Dunns should stay with him in the country until the threat passed. There were rumblings the evening’s planned violence wouldn’t stop with a lynching, he said. He told them a crowd of angry white men with the makings of a lynch mob had gathered in front of the courthouse where Rowland was imprisoned. Washington High School, and she was thinking about her prom.īut that very afternoon, a white friend of her father’s drove to the Dunn’s home in the thriving black section of Jim Crow-segregated Tulsa called Greenwood. Or about how willing Tulsa law enforcement officials were to turn a blind eye to vigilante “justice.” Or even about Dick Rowland, the young black man arrested in Tulsa that morning on a more-than-questionable charge of “assault” on a white woman. Louis, Omaha, and Chicago in recent years. On May 31, 1921, she wasn’t thinking about how attacks on black communities had rocked Atlanta, St. Before the gunfire and flames, there was a hand-stitched dress-fitted and fine-that made Veneice Dunn feel beautiful.
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