Showing — of — entries · sorted by name. Click any row to open the source scan and full entry.
Compiled and published in the spring of 1921 — months before the Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed the Greenwood district that May. Names marked “(c)” were designated as Colored in the original publication.
Entries were extracted by automated OCR and named-entity recognition; expect some alignment errors. This explorer is meant as a way to engage more deeply with this artifact, not replace the source. Always consult the source page scan for authoritative readings.
Showing — of — entries · sorted by name. Click any row to open the source scan and full entry.
This tool lets you browse structured data extracted from the 1921 Tulsa City Directory, published by Polk-Hoffhine Directory Co. in the spring of 1921 — months before the Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed the Greenwood district that May 31 and June 1.
Polk-Hoffhine Directory Co. published the Tulsa city directory annually in the early 20th century. The 1921 edition catalogues residents, businesses, and addresses on the eve of one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history. Page scans courtesy of the Tulsa City–County Library.
Entries were extracted from those scans using an LLM-enhanced OCR and named-entity-recognition pipeline. Each entry links back to the cropped source-scan region it was derived from.
The directory marked Black Tulsans with a parenthesized “(c)” — short for “colored” — alongside their name. Names without this designation were assumed white. The notation is preserved here as it appears in the original; it is a record of how Jim Crow classification was built into the everyday infrastructure of the city, not an endorsement of it.
Roughly 5,529 entries in the 1921 edition carry the “(c)” designation. Many of them lived and worked in Greenwood — the prosperous Black district destroyed weeks after the directory went to press.
The Greenwood facet flags entries whose street address geocodes inside the 1921 burned-area polygon mapped by The New York Times’s “What the Tulsa Race Massacre Destroyed” (2021). The set combines two passes through this directory: the alphabetical “(c)” section (people listed with names) and the separate street-and-avenue directory (people listed by address and occupant). It is a structural proxy, not a complete roster — historical street names that no longer exist on modern maps will be undercounted, and any geocoding error propagates here.
There may be OCR, entity-extraction, and entry-alignment errors throughout this data. Always consult the original source page as the authoritative record; this explorer is a way to engage with the directory more deeply, not a replacement for it. Data has not been reviewed for 100% accuracy.
City directories systematically under-counted: domestic workers without recorded employers, transient laborers, children, many wives without separate listings, and people deliberately omitted by the canvassers. The absence of a name here does not mean the person was not in Tulsa.
Polk-Hoffhine printed an ABBREVIATIONS page at the front of the volume; the list below mirrors it. Any underlined abbreviation in an entry shows its expansion on hover, focus, or tap. A few notable items: engr means engraver, not engineer (eng means “engine or engineer”); gen means general (the adjective), not the rank; vet means “veterinary”.
These mark household status, not tenure: h doesn’t certify ownership and r doesn’t certify renting. An adult child living with parents is also r. h appears in the data but isn’t in the directory’s printed key.