Showing — of — entries · sorted by name. Click any row to open the source scan and full entry.
Compiled in 1922 — the year after the Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed the Greenwood district in May 1921. Names marked “(c)” continued to be designated as "Colored" in the directory.
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 1922 Tulsa City Directory, compiled by Polk-Hoffhine Directory Co. one year after the Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed the Greenwood district in May 1921.
Polk-Hoffhine Directory Co. published the Tulsa city directory annually in the early 20th century. The 1922 edition catalogues residents, businesses, and addresses in the immediate aftermath of one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history — many of the people listed with a “(c)” designation had lost homes, businesses, or family members in the Massacre weeks before this volume went to press. 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 5,941 entries in the 1922 edition carry the “(c)” designation.
The 1922 schema is meaningfully different from 1921. The directory is explicitly partitioned into eight named sections (Alphabetical, Street & Avenue, Classified Business, Index to Advertisements, Miscellaneous Information, Blocks & Halls, Churches, Schools & Commercial Bodies), with subsections within each. The residency code (r/h/b/rms/rear) is its own address type column rather than buried in the address text. There is no Greenwood-burned-area overlay for this volume — that mapping was done for the 1921 edition only.
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.