Tulsa Massacre Survivors Are One Step Closer to Reparations

(Bloomberg) -- A lawsuit filed by the last three living survivors of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 will move forward, signaling a marked shift from years of silence regarding the attack.

An Oklahoma district court judge on Monday rejected the city's request to dismiss the suit in its entirety. Lawyers for the survivors say this will allow them to go through pretrial fact-finding and prove their case that the city perpetuated ongoing harm against survivors and other Black residents in exploiting the history of the massacre and failing to provide restorative efforts like rebuilding a hospital after the existing one was burned to the ground.

“The court's ruling is incredibly important,” Michael Swartz, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and partner at law-firm Schulte, Roth & Zabel, said in a statement. “It means that, after 100 years, the three living survivors of the Tulsa race massacre will finally have an opportunity to hold the institutions who instigated, facilitated and brutally implemented one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism in this country's history accountable for their actions and to seek to repair the continuing harm done to their once thriving community.”

The decision is the latest in a decades-long effort by survivors as well as their families and allies to seek reparations for the May 1921 attack by a White mob on the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, which was home to a thriving Black community and multiple Black-owned businesses. Plaintiffs, which included descendants of other survivors, first filed the lawsuit in Sept. 2020, on the grounds that the city of Tulsa and other defendants violated local public nuisance laws. An amended version of the suit was filed in March 2021.

A lawyer for the Tulsa Regional Chamber previously argued that the plaintiffs “did not suffer concrete, direct injury” as a result of the massacre. The survivors say that is not true.

Hughes Van Ellis, the youngest of the survivors at 101 years old, says he sleeps with a light on to this day and that the destruction caused by the massacre hindered his ability to get a quality education.

“I raised a family and I had to struggle all this many years, but I managed,” he said in an interview. “If I had a good education, it would have been easier for me.”

The massacre was “swept under the rug” by the city, he said, adding that survivors were often told not to talk about the events in which an estimated 300 Black people were killed.

President Joe Biden echoed that sentiment at a centennial commemoration last June, when he said “the history of what took place here was told in silence, cloaked in darkness.”