The New York Times is releasing data files associated with our story showing what was destroyed in the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Okla.
The files are:
- A 3-D model of Tulsa, Okla., before the massacre, including a detailed model of the 100 block of Greenwood Ave.
- Street grids and building footprints in Tulsa, Okla., before the massacre
- Tulsa city directory data, 1921
The New York Times used archival maps and photographs to create a detailed 3-D model of Tulsa, Okla., including the African-American neighborhood of Greenwood, before it was destroyed by the massacre. The 100 block of Greenwood includes additional geometry details based on photographic references. Buildings or parts of buildings without photographic reference are shown without details.
The 3-D model of Tulsa, Okla., was created using a series of both computerized and manual steps that transformed historical material into digital data. The main reference material includes archival maps from the Tulsa Historical Society as well as archival photographs from the historical society, McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The 3-D scene is uploaded as an FBX format, which can be imported into most 3-D editors. The geometry uses a single, basic material with no textures or lighting.
- tulsa-roads.geojson
- tulsa-rail-tracks.geojson
- tulsa-building-footprints.geojson
- tulsa-electric-lines.geojson
- tulsa-burned-area.geojson
The New York Times analyzed archival maps and used a process called georeferencing to align historic information with modern geography. The files include streets, railways, building footprints and the general area of burn from the massacre. The street grid was created by georeferencing a 1921 street map of Tulsa from the Library of Congress. The building footprints were based off of 1915 and 1920 Sanborn insurance maps from the Tulsa Historical Society and the Library of Congress. The burned area boundary is from the Oklahoma state commission report released in 2001: Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.
The New York Times extracted data from the Polk-Hoffhine Tulsa City Directory from 1921 to analyze and map businesses in Greenwood. The directory was obtained from the Tulsa City-County Library.
The dataset includes names and addresses of residents of color in Tulsa city, in 1921, by building. Data does not include every resident of color in Tulsa city.
The Times used the list of abbreviations from the city directory to fill out professions and businesses wherever applicable. Records with addresses from 802 Guthrie Av-South to 1600 Guthrie Av-South were changed to reflect the correct street name of Greenwood Avenue.
In general, we are making this data publicly available for broad, noncommercial public use, including by historians, researchers, policymakers and local news media. If you use this data, you must attribute it to “The New York Times” in any publication. If you use it in an online presentation, we would appreciate it if you would link to our story: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/24/us/tulsa-race-massacre.html. If you use this data, please let us know at [email protected]. See our LICENSE for the full terms of use for this data. This license is co-extensive with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license, and licensees should refer to that license (CC BY-NC) if they have questions about the scope of the license.
If you have any questions about the data or licensing conditions, please contact us at:
By Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Anjali Singhvi, Audra D.S. Burch, Troy Griggs, Mika Gröndahl, Lingdong Huang, Tim Wallace, Jeremy White and Josh Williams. Additional reporting, development and production by Matt Craig, Alain Delaquérière, Lazaro Gamio, Jon Huang, Blacki Migliozzi, Jugal Patel, Bedel Saget and Alison Saldanha.