A legal team seeking #Justice4Greenwood just filed a complaint against the City of Tulsa, the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce and other defendants on behalf of the Black residents of North Tulsa, the descendants of the #TulsaMassacre and one of the last living survivors, Lessie Randle. pic.twitter.com/hR0doomqrb
— Eric J. Miller (@millerej_11) September 1, 2020

Survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and their descendants made waves yesterday when they announced a lawsuit against the City of Tulsa and other government entities in Oklahoma, seeking redress for the destruction of the Greenwood community. The lawsuit, filed by the legal team Justice for Greenwood Advocates, cites recent research from Human Rights Watch and helps bring to light the Tulsa government’s direct involvement in one of the worst incidents of racial violence in US history.

For generations, the massacre was absent from Oklahoma history books and the facts of the attack were deliberately covered up. The announcement of the lawsuit — which builds on the efforts of Black Tulsans to increase awareness of their plight and achieve justice —made international headlines, including coverage by the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Root.

A 105-year-old survivor of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre and some victims' descendants are demanding reparations, arguing that the city's current racial and economic disparities can be traced back to the violence in what was known as Black Wall Street. https://t.co/KC8ucTQ1Ud
— Sanjana Karanth (@sanjanakaranth) September 2, 2020

“The police chief deputized 500 men, all white, from the crowd that gathered as a potential lynch mob. These newly empowered men looted, burned, and killed with that police authority.” @merrillcollege #TulsaRaceMassacre #StopKillingUs #BlackLivesMatter https://t.co/bynXNEjpv8
— DeNeen Brown (@DeNeenLBrown) September 2, 2020

Damario Solomon Simmons, the lead attorney in the lawsuit, said that the race massacre “deprived Black Tulsans of their sense of security, hard-won economic power and vibrant community” — and that the government’s role in the destruction has created a public nuisance that has not abated.

“The nuisance has led to the devaluation of property in Greenwood and has resulted in significant racial disparities in every quality of life metric — life expectancy, health, unemployment, education level, and financial security,” he said. “The defendants in this case have continued the Massacre in slow motion for nearly a century.”

In May, Human Rights Watch released “The Case for Reparations in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” which details the destruction that left hundreds of people, the vast majority of them Black, dead and more than 1,200 black-owned houses burned down in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, then known as “Black Wall Street.” Human Rights Watch also described some of the subsequent policies and structural racism that prevented Greenwood and the broader North Tulsa community from thriving.

"Our years of research in Tulsa reveal a city whose Black community is still reeling from the devastation of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and suffering under pervasive racial discrimination that continues to this day," Human Rights Watch’s Nicole Austin-Hillery said yesterday.

Read the Human Rights Watch report > > >