The Supreme Court of Oklahoma dismissed a lawsuit Wednesday by the last known survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, rejecting requests for reparations in response to one of the worst incidents of racist violence against Black people in U.S. history.
The court ruling comes four years after three survivors of the massacre — Lessie Benningfield Randle, Viola Fletcher and Hughes Van Ellis — filed a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa and several local and state agencies and officials. Van Ellis died last year.
The lawsuit claimed the city, the county, the Oklahoma National Guard and other officials caused a “public nuisance” in 1921, when they did not defend the Black community from a White mob that descended on the prosperous Greenwood neighborhood, known as Black Wall Street.
Tulsa officials argued that the plaintiffs sought damages for injuries committed outside the two-year statute of limitations.
The Tulsa district court where the suit was first filed ruled against the massacre survivors, who appealed. In its Wednesday decision upholding that ruling, the state Supreme Court wrote that requests by survivors to redress “harms flowing from the massacre” do not fall within the scope of the state’s “public nuisance” law.
“The continuing blight alleged within the Greenwood community born out of the Massacre implicates generational-societal inequities that can only be resolved by policymakers — not the courts,” the court wrote.
Attorneys for Fletcher and Randle said they plan to file a petition requesting that the court reconsider its decision. “The destruction of forty-square blocks of property on the night of May 31, 1921 through murder and arson clearly meets the definition of a public nuisance under Oklahoma law,” the legal team said in a statement.
Massacre survivors Randle and Fletcher are entitled to a trial, the attorneys said, adding that they would request that the U.S. Justice Department open an investigation into the massacre under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act.
“It is not a political question simply because the suit seeks to remedy wrongful acts perpetrated by a white mob against Black people,” the statement said, adding that “the court system is the very place where such harms are meant to be remedied.”
The massacre began on the evening of May 31, 1921, when a White mob descended on Greenwood, shooting Black people indiscriminately and burning more than 1,200 homes, a Black-owned hospital, and hundreds of Black-owned businesses, churches and schools. Some survivors reported seeing airplanes dropping turpentine bombs on houses.
The lawsuit filed by survivors argued that the city police department and the county sheriff’s office deputized and armed White Tulsans “to murder, loot, and burn the nearly 40 city blocks of the Greenwood District.”
The State National Guard participated “with this angry white mob in killing and looting and destroying the property of Black residents of Greenwood,” the lawsuit argued. “The city, sheriff, chamber, and county targeted Black community leaders and victims of the massacre for prosecution as instigators of the massacre — despite knowing who were truly responsible.”
On June 1, 1921, martial law was declared. Troops rounded up Black survivors at gunpoint and marched them to “internment camps” throughout the city. Survivors also recounted seeing Black bodies dumped into the Arkansas River and into mass graves. No White person was ever arrested or charged in the massacre.
In 2018, Tulsa reopened an investigation into whether there are mass graves from the massacre. In 2020, the scientists discovered a mass grave in the city-owned Oaklawn Cemetery. Scientists continue to examine remains that were exhumed, according to city officials, and test for DNA matches with any descendants.