Tulsa Race Massacre Survivors back in Court?

Justice delayed is justice denied.

The last two remaining Tulsa Race Massacre survivors have called for a US Department of Justice probe into a white mob k*lling about 300 Black people, rendering thousands homeless, and destroying $38 million (in 2023 dollars) worth of Black businesses and institutions in 1921 in Tulsa, a city in the US state of Oklahoma.

Viola Ford Fletcher, 110, and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, who were children at the time of the massacre, also condemned the Oklahoma Supreme Court for refusing to reconsider their case for reparations last month. Fletcher’s now-deceased 102-year-old brother, Hughes Van Ellis, was part of the lawsuit filed in 2020. Randle is seen in this photo.

However, in a new petition for rehearing, the women asked the court last week to reconsider its 8-1 decision on 12 June upholding a lower court’s ruling.

In their moving appeal, the survivors recalled what caused their trauma. ‘With our own eyes, and burned deeply into our memories, we watched white Americans destroy, kill and loot.’

The Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that ‘simply being connected to a historical event does not provide a person with unlimited rights to seek compensation’ under the city’s public nuisance statute.

The massacre is considered one of the worst racial crimes in the United States. On 31 May 1921, white supremacist mobs attacked and destroyed Tulsa’s ‘Black Wall Street,’ which contained 44 square blocks of Black institutions, including two Black hospitals. The thousands of our people rendered homeless were forced into internment camps that US National Guard troops oversaw.

Do you think the two surviving plaintiffs will be successful? And what does a ruling like this say about the state of race relations in the United States? Let us know in the comments.