From a Department of Justice report on the Tulsa race massacre that was published in January, before President Biden left office, and conducted by its Cold Case Unit, Civil Rights Division.
Shortly after the massacre, Harry Daugherty, the U.S. attorney general, announced an “informal” investigation to determine whether any federal laws had been violated. The matter was assigned to the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation, a precursor to today’s FBI. Agent T. F. Weiss, acting under instruction from Agent James G. Findlay, sent a preliminary assessment to the bureau chief by telegram on June 2, 1921, the day after the massacre. The telegram said that “no Federal violation appears.” Weiss’s later report, from June 6, concluded that the incident had not been a “race riot,” as it was not, in his words, the “result of racial feeling, or agitators.” Instead, Weiss claimed that the incident began as just a “small” and “half-hearted” attempt to lynch an innocent man, and that the situation “spontaneously” grew out of control.
While he claimed that he had talked to more than one hundred witnesses, both black and white, Weiss summarized only five interviews, all with white men. Although Weiss admitted that these witnesses—whom, he stressed, “did not condone” the actions of the white mob—were all “a little prejudiced” against the black community, he did not include accounts from any individual black witnesses. Instead, his report cursorily stated that all black witnesses told the “same story” of “hearing shots, seeing houses set on fire, and fleeing for their lives, some of their members, who had guns, shooting as they fled.” Although only a day had passed since the witnesses’ experience of these events, the report noted that all the black witnesses had an “optimistic attitude” about their situation. In fact, Weiss asserted that by June 2, the day after the massacre, white and black residents of Tulsa were “mingling amicably on the streets of Tulsa,” a virtual impossibility, given that the city was under martial law and most black residents were in detention or performing manual labor.
