Previously, on Tulsa's Buried Truth.

So it's Monday, May 30th, 1921.

Dick Rowland, 19-year-old black boy, worked as a Shishan boy downtown.

He walks over to the Drexel building on that morning, boards the elevator.

The elevator is being operated manually by Sarah Page. Dick Rowland bumped into Sarah Page.

Sarah Page began to scream.

The elevator landed back in the lobby.

Dick Rowland frightened, ran from the elevator.

Dick Rowland is arrested and locked up at the city courthouse.

He's accused of assaulting a white girl.

Outside, an angry mob of white men has gathered, hell-bent on revenge. Before long, a group of armed black men arrived to protect the team.

They thought he was going to be lynched. There were rumors to that effect. And then, a shot rings out.

I'm Sonny Hosten. This is episode two of Tulsa's Buried Truth.

Here's ABC's Steve Oson-Sami.

All hell is breaking loose outside the courthouse in downtown Tulsa.

Depending on who you ask, there are different stories about who fired the first shot.

But by most accounts, the bullet that starts the bleeding is a warning shot in the air by one of the white

gunmen. Historian Hannibal Johnson tells a slightly different story. Words were exchanged

between the large white group and the small black group. A white man tried to take a black man's

gun, the gun discharged, and chaos ensued from there.

The violence lasted.

One fact everyone agrees on, the black men from Greenwood are wildly outnumbered.

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