Oklahoma Supreme Court tosses Tulsa race massacre lawsuit

Oklahoma’s highest court has rejected a decades-in-the-making lawsuit from a racist massacre’s two remaining survivors demanding justice in its ongoing aftermath.

More than 100 years after a white mob destroyed a bustling Black neighborhood, killed dozens of people and left hundreds of others homeless, the Oklahoma Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss the challenge.

The lawsuit from Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 110 – who were small children in the attack – continued on even after the death of Fletcher’s brother, Hughes Van Ellis, who died at 102 last year.

On May 31, 1921, in Tulsa’s thriving “Black Wall Street” of Greenwood, an armed white mob deputized by law enforcement fired indiscriminately on Black Americans in the street.

According to witness accounts and limited news coverage of the attack, planes dropped flaming turpentine-soaked rags and dynamite, and the bodies of Black victims were thrown into the Arkansas River or into mass graves. Survivors were rounded up at gunpoint and detained in internment camps.

The mob torched and looted homes and businesses, including restaurants, hotels, theaters, and a newspaper’s office. A truck mounted with a machine gun fired on Mount Zion Baptist Church before it was burned to the ground.

No one was ever charged with a crime.

A lawsuit, targeting Oklahoma’s public nuisance law, argued that the massacre’s impact continues to be felt decades later in the city’s enduring racial disparities, economic inequalities and in the trauma among survivors and their descendants.

In the state supreme court’s decision, justices noted that the plaintiffs’ “grievances are legitimate” but “they do not fall within the scope of our state’s public nuisance statute.”

The lawsuit sought a detailed accounting of the property and wealth lost or stolen in the massacre, the construction of a hospital in north Tulsa, and the creation of a victims’ compensation fund, among other demands.

The lawsuit named Tulsa County sheriff’s office, Tulsa’s chamber of commerce, county commissioners and the Oklahoma Military Department as defendants.

Plaintiffs vowed to appeal up to the state supreme court after a judge dismissed the complaint last year.

“We will not go quietly,” civil rights attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons said in 2023. “We will continue to fight until our last breath. Like so many Black Americans, we carry the weight of intergenerational racial trauma, day in and day out.”

This is a developing story

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