More than a century ago, Greenwood, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., was destroyed by a white mob — killing up to 300 people — in one of the worst episodes of mass racial terror in U.S. history.
No person or entity was ever held accountable for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. For decades, survivors and their descendants, community activists and lawyers have fought for both legal and financial justice. Most recently, a reparations case filed by the last known survivors was dismissed by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in June without a trial.
Now, for the first time, the Justice Department is conducting a review of the massacre. The department’s Civil Rights Division’s Cold Case Unit will investigate under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. The act allows the department to investigate civil rights crimes resulting in death that occurred on or before Dec. 31, 1979.
Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said that a public report should be completed by the end of the year.
“We have no expectation that there are living perpetrators who could be criminally prosecuted by us or by the state. Although a commission, historians, lawyers and others have conducted prior examinations of the Tulsa Massacre, we, the Justice Department, never have,” she said.
“When we have finished our federal review, we will issue a report analyzing the massacre in light of both modern and then-existing civil rights law,” she later added.
Damario Solomon-Simmons, the lead lawyer representing massacre survivors Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 110, said that a federal public accounting was overdue.
“We feel very very strongly that if you cannot recognize what happened to Mother Fletcher and Mother Randle as children, then no one is safe in America,” he said. “If you can be bombed and no one investigates it or holds anyone accountable, then none of us are safe.”
Greenwood was a culturally and economically thriving neighborhood that came to be known as Black Wall Street. On May 31, 1921, a white mob gathered outside a Tulsa County courthouse, where a young Black man had been accused of assaulting a young white woman. (He would later be cleared.) When the white mob confronted a group of Black men, shots were fired and a fight broke out.
The white mob descended on Greenwood. The neighborhood was burned and looted and within two days, the place was in ruins. No survivors were compensated for their losses, and the story was buried. The massacre wouldn’t be spoken about openly for decades.
Almost a century later, Ms. Randle and Ms. Fletcher filed a lawsuit against the City of Tulsa and other governmental agencies. In 2023, another survivor of the massacre, Hughes Van Ellis, the younger brother of Ms. Fletcher, died at 102. Because the plaintiffs sued under state law and not federal law, they could not appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. And in recent years, Tulsa has excavated sections of a city cemetery in search of the graves of massacre victims.
Over time, Mr. Solomon-Simmons has pushed for a federal review, meeting with President Biden, Vice President Harris and Ms. Clarke. He said he hoped the federal team discovers more facts about what happened in the summer of 1921.
“We want to know more about the massacre. We only know about 10 percent of what actually happened and who actually participated,” he said, adding, “we hope the federal government can help fill in some of those gaps.”
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