Tulsa mayor unveils staggering $100M reparations plan for black descendants of 1921 massacre

Daily Mail​

2 days ago

The first black mayor of Tulsa, Oklahoma has unveiled an ambitious reparations plan that would see more than $100 million invested in the descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Mayor Monroe Nichols announced on Sunday that the city is opening a $105 million charitable trust comprising private funds to address issues including housing, scholarships, land acquisition and economic development for north Tulsans.
Of that money, $24 million will go toward housing and home ownership for the descendants of the attack that killed as many as 300 black people and razed 35 blocks, according to Public Radio Tulsa.
Another $21 million will fund land acquisition, scholarship funding and economic development for the blighted north Tulsa community, and a whopping $60 million will go toward cultural preservation to improve buildings in the once prosperous Greenwood neighborhood.
'For 104 years, the Tulsa Race Massacre has been a stain on our city's history,' Nichols said at an event commemorating Race Massacre Observance Day.
'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.'
But the proposal will not include direct cash payments to the last known survivors, Leslie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, who are 110 and 111 years old.
They had been fighting for reparations for years, and earlier this year their attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons argued that any reparations plan should include direct payments to the two survivors as well as a victim's compensation fund for outstanding claims.
However, a lawsuit Solomon-Simmons - who also founded the group Justice for Greenwood - was struck down in 2023 by an Oklahoma judge who declared the claimants 'don't have unlimited rights to compensation.'
The ruling was then upheld by the Oklahoma Supreme Court last year, dampening racial justice advocates' hopes that the city would ever make financial amends.
But after taking office earlier this year, Nichols said he reviewed previous proposals from local community organizations like Justice for Greenwood.
He then discussed his plan with the Tulsa City Council and descendants of the massacre victims.
'What we wanted to do was find a way in which we could take in a number of these recommendations, so that it's reflective of the descendant community, of the folks that brought forth some recommendations,' Nichols said as he also vowed to continue to search for mass graves believed to contain victims of the massacre and release 45,000 previously classified city records.
No part of his plan would require city council approval, the mayor noted, and any fundraising would be conducted by an executive director whose salary will be paid for by private funding.
A Board of Trustees would also determine how to distribute the funds.
Still, the city council would have to authorize the transfer of any city property to the trust, something the mayor said was highly likely.
He explained that one of the points that really stuck with him in these discussions was the destruction of not just what Greenwood was - with its restaurants, theaters, hotels, banks and grocery stores - but what it could have been.
'The Greenwood District at its height was a center of commerce,' he told the Associated Press. '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.'
'You would have had the center of oil wealth here and the center of black wealth here at the same time,' he added in his remarks to the Times. 'That would have made us an economic juggernaut and would have probably made the city double in size.'
Many at Sunday's event said they supported the plan, even though it does not include cash payments to the two elderly survivors of the attack.
Chief Egunwale Amusan, a survivor descendant, for example, said the he has worked for half his life to get reparations.
'If [my grandfather] had been here today, it probably would have been the most restorative day of his life,' he told Public Radio Tulsa.
Jacqueline Weary, a granddaughter of massacre survivor John R. Emerson, Sr., who owned a hotel and cab company in Greenwood that were destroyed, meanwhile, 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.'
The violence in 1921 erupted after a white woman told police that a black man had grabbed her arm in an elevator in a downtown Tulsa commercial building on May 30, 1921.
The following day, police arrested the man, who the Tulsa Tribune reported had tried to assault the woman. White people surrounded the courthouse, demanding the man be handed over.
World War One veterans were among black men who went to the courthouse to face the mob. A white man tried to disarm a black veteran and a shot rang out, touching off further violence.
White people then looted and burned buildings and dragged the black people from their beds and beat them, according to historical accounts.
The white people were deputized by authorities and instructed to shoot the black residents.
No one was ever charged in the violence, which the federal government now classifies as a 'coordinated military-style attack' by white citizens, and not the work of an unruly mob.