Victims of the Tulsa Race Massacre are one step closer to being compensated for the devastation and lingering effects of the deadly 1921 racial attack.
An Oklahoma judge has denied part of the most recent motion by the defendants to dismiss the reparations lawsuit, filed against the Board of County Commissioners, Tulsa Metropolitan Area Planning Commission and Tulsa County Sheriff.
Along with Tulsa, Oklahoma Military Department, Tulsa Chamber and the Tulsa Development Authority, they have fought paying reparations for decades. Defense attorneys tried to block the new case, filed in March 2021 from moving forward for over a year.
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The plaintiffs are 11 survivors and descendants of Black residents of the Tulsa community destroyed by fire and bloodshed in 1921. The three remaining survivors are now over a century old and are among 100 residents who have been seeking reparations since right after the riots. The cases have been suppressed by the Ku Klux Klan and the Jim Crow era, but those who remain are hopeful in light of the judge’s ruling Monday.
“I’ve never seen nothing like this happen,” said Hughes Van Ellis, 101, a survivor of the massacre. “That means it’s going to change things. It’s going to make people think … It’s going to change, it’s going to be better for everybody.”
The current lawsuit asks for a special fund for the victims and their descendants of racial riots dubbed the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which left 300 people dead and a thriving Black neighborhood incinerated. The devastation left tens of millions of damages in today’s money and evaporated generational wealth in the affluent community.
