Our Sunday Long Read comes to us from Jesse Washington of Andscape. A century after the Tulsa, Oklahoma Massacre of Black residents along Black Wall Street, then the most concentrated array of Black wealth in America, where the state and the country stepped in to literally bomb it to ashes from the air in order to destroy Black America over a lynching, the quest for justice continues. The last three survivors are over a hundred years old, descendants of the victims crave closure and reparations, and Republicans have decided to put an end to all of it in the era of "critical race theory".
As the centennial of the Tulsa Massacre approached last year, conditions seemed perfect for this haunted city to finally, meaningfully, move on.
Millions of people around the world were marching for racial justice after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Corporations and organizations were holding themselves accountable for systemic racism. The 100th anniversary of the 1921 massacre in the Greenwood neighborhood was drawing worldwide attention from news reports, documentaries and the HBO TV series Watchmen. Survivors testified before Congress, and a bill was introduced to help them secure reparations. Singer John Legend, voting rights activist Stacey Abrams and President Joe Biden were coming to Tulsa for an event billed as “Remember and Rise.”
A year later, the city and state are fighting a lawsuit seeking reparations. Only three survivors remain, and two of them are 107 years old. Scholarship money intended for descendants sits unused. Black people own little of the new development in Greenwood. Tulsa built a history center to commemorate the centennial, but a significant portion of the community says the center does little to compensate victims of the massacre and their descendants.
The Greenwood district and its Black Wall Street was perhaps the most prosperous African American neighborhood ever seen. It was turned into a graveyard May 31-June 1, 1921, when an orgy of racist violence killed at least 300 people and destroyed 1,256 homes, plus several hundred businesses, churches, a library and a hospital. Tulsa police and the National Guard refused to protect Greenwood, and some people deputized by the city and National Guard participated in the violence.
More than 4,000 Black survivors were detained afterward in internment camps. The Tulsa City Commission blamed the massacre on “armed negros who started this trouble and instigated it.” Tulsa passed zoning laws making it harder for Greenwood to rebuild, and the City Commission helped prevent insurance claims by Black property owners from being paid. For more than 70 years, the crime was deliberately covered up.
In recent years, the concept of reparations has moved from an academic discussion to serious consideration in at least 11 cities across the country. But Tulsa’s limited response to one of the worst mass murders in American history raises the question: What constitutes reparations for the city’s crimes against its Black citizens?
And if cash reparations can’t be paid in Tulsa, where can they be?
at we’re up against here, we’re talking about the most powerful, the most wealthy, the most well-connected folks in the city and the state,” said Damario Solomon-Simmons, who filed the reparations lawsuit on behalf of survivors and descendants.
“Now that they have taken over the 40 blocks of Greenwood that was Black-owned land, Black-owned businesses, Black-owned homes, Black-owned organizations, Greenwood is now half a block,” he said. “The rest is white-owned businesses, white- and city-owned land and state-owned land and county-owned land.
“They’re building Greenwood for themselves,” Solomon-Simmons said. “They own Greenwood.”
In 1997, the state legislature created the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Even in the ’90s, the massacre was still called a riot, the remnant of a strategy to avoid paying insurance claims and blame Black people for what happened.
In 2001, the commission released its report. It said the massacre began after a mob of white men gathered outside the city jail intending to lynch a Black teenager, and a group of armed Black citizens arrived to defend the teen. The report recommended that “reparations to the historic Greenwood community in real and tangible form would be good public policy and do much to repair the emotional and physical scars of this terrible incident.” It identified 118 survivors and at least 176 descendants of victims, and advised Oklahoma to provide direct payments, award 300 college scholarships per year, and create a Greenwood economic development zone and a memorial. “Reparations are the right thing to do,” the report said.
Hardly any of that happened. The inaction led to a 2003 federal lawsuit against Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma, filed on behalf of 200 survivors and descendants by a team of lawyers led by Johnnie Cochran and Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree. The lawsuit failed when judges ruled the statute of limitations had expired. In 2005, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.
Solomon-Simmons filed the current lawsuit on behalf of several survivors and descendants in state court in 2020. It argues that Oklahoma law permits claims past the statute of limitations if there is an “ongoing public nuisance.” This law is what led to a $465 million judgment against pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson for its role in the opioid crisis. Solomon-Simmons’ case says the massacre is responsible for current racial and economic disparities — the kind documented in a Human Rights Watch report — and therefore is an ongoing nuisance.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court overturned the Johnson & Johnson ruling in November 2021, saying the public nuisance law was wrongly interpreted. Solomon-Simmons told me the decision does not undermine his case, and he has filed those arguments with the judge.
Meanwhile, almost all the survivors have died.
The only ones still alive are Viola Fletcher and Lessie Benningfield Randle, both 107, and Fletcher’s brother Hughes Van Ellis, who is 101. In a 2021 interview with The Undefeated, Randle described what she saw that night: “They ran us from one place to the other, chased us like hounds chasing a rabbit. I saw people shoot people down on the street,” she said. “I saw people running, I saw bodies, I saw them kill the people and shoot people down.”
Now realize that in Republican state after Republican state that in 2022 teaching the history of the Tulsa Massacre and the discussion of reparations in a classroom is illegal, criminal, and grounds for firing, revocation of license, and other penalties.
Having teachers assign high school seniors to read this article would be illegal in more than a dozen states.
Black Lives, and Black History, Still Matter.
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