The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot was America's bloodiest civil disturbance of the century. Leaving perhaps 150 dead, 30 city blocks burned to the ground and more than a thousand families homeless, the riot represented an unprecedented breakdown of the rule of law. It reduced the prosperous black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma, to rubble. In this text, Alfred Brophy draws on his own extensive research into contemporary accounts and court documents to chronicle this devastating riot, showing how and why the rule of law quickly eroded. Brophy offers a portrait of mob violence and racism run amok, both on the night of the riot and the morning after, when a co-ordinated sunrise attack, accompanied by airplanes, stormed through Greenwood, torching and looting the community. Equally important, he shows how the city government and police not only permitted the looting, shootings and burning of Greenwood, but actively participated in it.