Hundreds were killed during the mayhem fueled by J.B. Stradford, a Negro radical who learned his anti-white bigotry while in Canada. The trigger for the May 1921 spree of murder and destruction was an assault on a white 17-year orphan, Sarah Page, by a thug, "Diamond Dick" Rowland.
A swarm of well-armed black thugs stormed central Tulsa and shot a white onlooker. That touched off days of bedlam. Even black apologist W.E.B. DuBois (a communist activist and co-founder of the NAACP) admitted that it was blacks from the Greenwood neighborhood that began the riot. Mr. Beyrl Ford, noted Tulsa historian, has shattered the liberal-produced myths, embraced by blacks, about the rioting and the reaction. One debunked claim was that airplanes of that era dropped "bombs" on a black neighborhood in north Tulsa. That never happened, Orpha! The planes were simply observational to determine the extent of the damage.
At the time of the riot, Republican T. D. Evans was the city's mayor and, of course, Warren Harding was President. So even with good governance at the time, well, thugs will be thugs, even going back to the first quarter of the 20th Century.
As you may surmise, I've studied this extensively, carefully researching the material of the day and visiting the Greenwood Cultural Center, even engaging the staff in dialog, as clearly biased as they were.