For those that are unaware the residents did fight when the mobs came, there were a lot of WW1 veterans living in the area and people were armed with Winchester repeating rifles. The main thing that folks don't understand is that the whole thing was instigated by the Tulsa newspaper media outlet. They manufactured a story to agitate the white folks into action so they'd have a story to report on.
The whole thing was started when a YT woman (Sara Page) claimed a black breh (dikk Rowland) assaulted her by grabbing her arm, then she changed it to he stepped on her foot but it was clarified that he accidentally stepped on her foot going to an elevator and grabbed her arm to catch himself from falling. AND she declined to press charges which caused them to drop the case, but white dudes heard about it and wanted to teach him a lesson so the newspaper ran a story about the incident headlined "To Lynch Negro Tonight"
So while breh was waiting in jail to be released there were rumors that a mob was gonna lynch him so military brehs went to guard the jail to prevent mob action, the sheriff told them all to leave because he assured them breh was protected so they left, but then later on the mob actually did come and the military brehs and regular black townspeople were there. So at that point there was a white guy that approached one of the vets and demanded that he hand over his service pistol and of course throwing out slurs, the breh said hell naw and then the white dude tried to attack and disarm him and breh shot him dead, and that's literally how it popped off.
There was an account of a black woman that witnessed the aftermath and said that the news didn't actually report the accurate totals of casualties though because they had closed unidentified caskets that were supposedly dumped in the river that were labeled Negro on them but had white folks in them so when the tally was done it would look lopsided.