Woman, 105, leads lawsuit seeking reparations for 1921 Tulsa massacre
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| District | Justice | Born | Joined | Chief Justice | Term ends | Appointed by | Law school |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | M. John Kane IV, Chief Justice | April 8, 1962 (age 62) | September 17, 2019 | 2023–present | 2026 | Kevin Stitt (R) | Oklahoma |
| 2 | Dustin Rowe | September 23, 1975 (age 48) | November 20, 2019 | – | 2028 | Kevin Stitt (R) | Oklahoma |
| 3 | Noma Gurich | September 26, 1952 (age 71) | January 7, 2011 | 2019–2020 | 2024 | Brad Henry (D) | Oklahoma |
| 4 | Yvonne Kauger | August 3, 1937 (age 87) | March 11, 1984 | 1997–1998 | 2024 | George Nigh (D) | Oklahoma City |
| 5 | James R. Winchester | March 23, 1952 (age 72) | January 4, 2000 | 2007–2008 | 2028 | Frank Keating (R) | Oklahoma City |
| 6 | Dana Kuehn (Prob had relatives participate) | January 1, 1971 (age 53) | July 26, 2021 | – | 2028 | Kevin Stitt (R) | Tulsa |
| 7 | James E. Edmondson (The only one to say yes) | March 7, 1945 (age 79) | December 3, 2003 | 2009–2010 | 2024 | Brad Henry (D) | Georgetown |
| 8 | Doug Combs | October 17, 1951 (age 72) | November 5, 2010 | 2017–2018 | 2028 | Brad Henry (D) | Oklahoma City |
| 9 | Richard Darby | January 1, 1958 (age 66) | April 5, 2018 | 2021–2023 | 2026 | Mary Fallin (R) | Oklahoma |
But these are white people enslaved by other white people, right? And who created them? And why?
Survivor of Tulsa Race Massacre, 'Mother Randle,' marks 110th birthday
Lessie Benningfield Randle, one of the two last known living survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, celebrated her 110th birthday on Nov. 10.
The Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed Black lives and wealth. What's owed to survivors' descendants?
No restitution was ever made to those who lost loved ones or property in the 1921 massacre that razed the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood.
In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, conversations in some government and corporate spaces turned to the stark and persistent racial wealth gap in America.
One hundred and sixty years after Emancipation, and more than six decades after the end of legal segregation, the median Black household still has only 15% as much wealth as the median white household, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances — $44,900 versus $285,000.
The history of Tulsa, Oklahoma, exemplifies how Black prosperity has been built up and torn down over a century of racial violence and discrimination.
Today, Tulsa’s original Black neighborhood — known as Greenwood — has a small cluster of shops and empty storefronts, a history museum, some vacant land and parking lots. It’s sandwiched between railroad tracks and a freeway overpass.
It’s a far cry from 100 years ago, when Greenwood was known as America’s “Black Wall Street.”
Don Thompson — a local photojournalist who has documented Greenwood during his lifetime in the photo collection, “Hush, Somebody’s Calling My Name” — showed me around the neighborhood.
“There was a shoe shine parlor right here at this corner,” he said, pointing to a storefront at the intersection of North Greenwood Avenue and East Archer Street, in the heart of what’s known as Deep Greenwood. “A billiard hall, where the parking lot is located, a barber shop, a hotel...”
Thompson said that in the early 1900s, boosted by Oklahoma’s oil boom — some of it found on land owned by Black Oklahomans and Black members of Oklahoma’s Native American tribes — Greenwood was packed with Black-owned stores, workshops, oilfield suppliers, hotels, theaters, lawyers’ and doctors’ offices.
“There were over 600 businesses, extending 35 blocks north from here,” Thompson said. “You can see where they have put little plaques on the concrete: This is Nails Brothers Shoes, destroyed in the 1921 massacre,” he read, pointing to a series of metal plaques along the sidewalk, marking where stores, offices and other businesses were once located.
The plaques, along with murals and historical markers in the area, memorialize the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, when an armed white mob — supported and provided with arms by city and state officials — invaded Greenwood to loot and burn, and killed hundreds.
Karlos Hill is a professor of African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and has documented this history in his book, “The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History.”
“A 40-block area destroyed,” Hill said. “Homes, businesses, churches, schools, hospitals, clinics — all of that in flames. 11,000 people made homeless. Millions of dollars in destruction that was never repaired and never repaid.”
Children pose for a photo in front of a mural marking Black Wall Street in Tulsa's Greenwood District. The area was home to over 600 businesses.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
“White business owners who experienced destruction and vandalism received restitution at the time,” he added. “No Black business, no Black person who lost a home or a loved one, received any.”
Until the Massacre of 1921, said Hill, for Black Americans who traveled to Greenwood to do business, take a vacation, and see performers like Count Basie play at local theaters, Tulsa’s Black Wall Street was “a promised land, where Black people can build business, own property, exist in American society in an economically advantageous position. Greenwood suggested that Black communities across the country could have this level of success and prosperity.”
But that prosperity, and the intergenerational wealth it could have built, are now gone.
There are a number of reasons: the Massacre; redlining by banks and insurance companies; housing segregation.
Today, only half as many Black Tulsans own homes as white Tulsans, according to a report on the racial wealth gap in Tulsa from the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. Back in 1920, the Black homeownership rate was equal to that of whites.
Black unemployment and poverty are much higher, while life expectancy is five years lower, according to reports from Human Rights Watch and the City of Tulsa.
Kristi Williams is a descendant of Massacre survivors and believes the government has an obligation to redress racial violence of the past with compensation today.
“We do need economic reparations,” said Williams. “That’s the only way we’re going to close the gap. People will say, ‘Well, what is reparations?’ Reparations is cash. Reparations is land.”
Williams and other advocates are lobbying for millions in public funds for Black Tulsans.
“We requested $25 million for housing for descendants,” Williams said. “What we need is rooftops — that would help us get grocery stores back, and other things that we need to have a viable community.”
The housing reparations proposal was introduced in Tulsa City Council last year. At town meetings, some critics said that using taxpayer money to compensate descendants isn’t fair to today’s Tulsa residents, who had nothing to do with the Massacre 100 years ago.
Legal efforts to obtain compensation for survivors have been rejected by the Oklahoma Supreme Court.
And the local plan for compensation — if it ever passes — will likely face similar challenges in state court and the Republican-controlled legislature.
Tulsa's new Black mayor proposes $100M trust to 'repair' impact of 1921 Race Massacre
The plan by Mayor Monroe Nichols, the first Black mayor of Oklahoma's second-largest city, was announced Sunday.
www.nbcnews.com
ulsa's new Black mayor proposes $100M trust to 'repair' impact of 1921 Race Massacre
The plan by Mayor Monroe Nichols, the first Black mayor of Oklahoma's second-largest city, was announced Sunday.
Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols at Greenwood Cultural Center in Tulsa, Okla. on Sunday.Joey Johnson / AP
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By The Associated Press
TULSA, Okla. — Tulsa's new mayor on Sunday proposed a $100 million private trust as part of a reparations plan to give descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre scholarships and housing help in a city-backed bid to make amends for one of the worst racial attacks in U.S. history.
The plan by Mayor Monroe Nichols, the first Black mayor of Oklahoma's second-largest city, would not provide direct cash payments to descendants or the last two centenarian survivors of the attack that killed as many as 300 Black people. He made the announcement at the Greenwood Cultural Center, located in the once-thriving district of North Tulsa that was destroyed by a white mob.
Nichols said he does not use the term reparations, which he calls politically charged, characterizing his sweeping plan instead as a "road to repair."
"For 104 years, the Tulsa Race Massacre has been a stain on our city's history," Nichols said Sunday after receiving a standing ovation from several hundred people. "The massacre was hidden from history books, only to be followed by the intentional acts of redlining, a highway built to choke off economic vitality and the perpetual underinvestment of local, state and federal governments.
"Now it's time to take the next big steps to restore."
Nichols said the proposal wouldn't require city council approval, although the council would need to authorize the transfer of any city property to the trust, something he said was highly likely.
The private charitable trust would be created with a goal to secure $105 million in assets, with most of the funding either secured or committed by June 1, 2026. Although details would be developed over the next year by an executive director and a board of managers, the plan calls for the bulk of the funding, $60 million, to go toward improving buildings and revitalizing the city's north side.
"The Greenwood District at its height was a center of commerce," Nichols said in a telephone interview. "So what was lost was not just something from North Tulsa or the Black community. It actually robbed Tulsa of an economic future that would have rivaled anywhere else in the world."
Nichols' proposal follows an executive order he signed earlier this year recognizing June 1 as Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day, an official city holiday. Events Sunday in the Greenwood District included a picnic for families, worship services and an evening candlelight vigil.
Nichols also realizes the current national political climate, particularly President Trump's sweeping assault on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, poses challenging political crosswinds.
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"The fact that this lines up with a broader national conversation is a tough environment," Nichols admitted, "but it doesn't change the work we have to do."
Jacqueline Weary, is a granddaughter of massacre survivor John R. Emerson, Sr., who owned a hotel and cab company in Greenwood that were destroyed. She acknowledged the political difficulty of giving cash payments to descendants. But at the same time, she wondered how much of her family's wealth was lost in the violence.
"If Greenwood was still there, my grandfather would still have his hotel," said Weary, 65. "It rightfully was our inheritance, and it was literally taken away."
Tulsa is not the first U.S. city to explore reparations. The Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, was the first U.S. city to make reparations available to its Black residents for past discrimination, offering qualifying households $25,000 for home repairs, down payments on property, and interest or late penalties on property in the city. The funding for the program came from taxes on the sale of recreational marijuana.
Other communities and organizations that have considered providing reparations range from the state of California to cities including Amherst, Massachusetts; Providence, Rhode Island; Asheville, North Carolina; and Iowa City, Iowa; religious denominations like the Episcopal Church; and prominent colleges like Georgetown University in Washington.
In Tulsa, there are only two living survivors of the Race Massacre, both of whom are 110 years old: Leslie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher. The women, both of whom were in attendance on Sunday, received direct financial compensation from both a Tulsa-based nonprofit and a New York-based philanthropic organization, but have not received any recompense from the city or state.
Damario Solomon-Simmons, an attorney for the survivors and the founder of the Justice for Greenwood Foundation, said earlier this year that any reparations plan should include direct payments to Randle and Fletcher and a victims' compensation fund for outstanding claims.
A lawsuit filed by Solomon-Simmons on behalf of the survivors was rejected by the Oklahoma Supreme Court last year, dampening racial justice advocates' hopes that the city would ever make financial amends.
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