The story of the last known Tulsa race massacre survivors has always been a race against time. A race to preserve and uplift the history of the brutal moment, a race to give the last living survivors the time and platform to tell their story, and most important of all, a race to allow survivors to see a semblance of compensation for the trauma they experienced.
The reality of the Oklahoma supreme court’s decision last month to uphold a Tulsa county district court judge’s decision to dismiss their lawsuit is that survivors have likely had their last chances for reparations denied. The reparations conversation around the Tulsa massacre has always been convoluted by an indignant air by the courts and state legislators of “why should we have to pay for this” and even more of an: “Isn’t acknowledging it happened enough?” When we consider the estimated 300 Black people who died from the violence and the challenges faced by families in the years after to fight for justice or compensation, acknowledgment – particularly with just two survivors left – feels like pennies in comparison. It’s difficult for any descendants to be made whole when parts of their family tree were wiped out so swiftly. But the Tulsa race massacre is a reminder that while there isn’t a magic number that can quantify Black pain, there are real economic reverberations that Black trauma can have across generations.
More broadly, today’s generation of Black Americans are experiencing financial pressures. A Pew Research Center report released in February on how Black people view financial success found that 64% of Black adults consider their personal financial situation as only fair or in poor shape.
In addition, the report found that about 65% of Black adults surveyed would not be able to sell their assets to cover three months of expenses if they lost their income, while 62% said they would not be able to borrow from family or friends.
Financial success for Black people, according to the survey, showed that 67% said being debt-free is essential to how they view financial success. Meanwhile, 49% said that owning a home was an essential part of financial success and 44% said being able to pass down financial assets was essential for them.
The fiery loss of businesses and homes at the hands of a white racist mob in 1921 in the Greenwood district, once considered to be the “Black Wall Street” of America, was not only about loss of life but also loss of Black wealth. Community members today are working to revitalize and reimagine the Greenwood district while honoring its historical significance, but Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, the last two known remaining survivors of the Tulsa race massacre, have waited decades for compensation. Hughes Van Ellis, another survivor who was part of the lawsuit, died last year at 102. They have lived long lives and gone on to have families. They moved forward with their lives because they had no choice, but they had to live with the memories of those violent nights and what happened to the community they had loved as young girls. Generations of Black Oklahomans lost out on homes and businesses that could’ve been potentially passed on and uplifted those coming behind to a new economic status of prosperity and opportunity.
In April, Tulsa city officials released the Tulsa Equality Indicators report, an annual look at inequality in economic opportunity, education, housing, justice, public health and services among Tulsa residents. The 2023 report showed that the median household income of white households was $62,411 compared with $39,779 made by Black households in Tulsa. In addition, 72.4% of south Tulsa residents had household earnings at or above the 200% poverty line while only 42% of north Tulsa residents met that indicator too. When it comes to homeownership, nearly 58% of white people owned their homes in the area while nearly 34% of Black people owned their homes.
The intersections of racial trauma and financial trauma in the case of the Tulsa race massacre are not new, but denying survivors accountability or compensation intensifies the pain of this historical incident. Part of healing financial trauma includes understanding where our psychology and emotions around money and wealth comes from, including how we feel when we have money, how we feel when we spend money and more importantly, how we feel when we do not have money or feel like we do not have enough of it. Even the way we think about bills, savings and making large purchases has a psychological component to it. But there’s also the more painful side of financial trauma whether it’s remembering when the lights went out when the electricity bill didn’t get paid, not being able to afford groceries or seeing an eviction notice on the door for unpaid rent or homes being foreclosed. In the case of the Tulsa massacre, it was generations of potential economic opportunity burned to the ground. It was dreams deferred. It was hope vanquished. It was a means of freedom robbed from under generations of Black people.
Society today often assumes a multimillion-dollar price point is supposed to be attached to affirming the impact of traumatic incidents. Attempts at reparations and other compensation for Black survivors over the years has taken various shapes. In 1974, survivors of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, where hundreds of Black men had penicillin withheld from them, were part of a class-action lawsuit that led to a $10m settlement and health and medical benefits for them and their families. In 2022, Los Angeles county officials returned Bruce’s Beach to descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce more than 100 years after the Manhattan Beach city council took it through eminent domain. Last summer, the family of Henrietta Lacks settled a federal lawsuit against Thermo Fisher Scientific decades after they took Lacks’s cells without her consent while she was a cancer patient and went on to create HeLa cells that are the backbone of biomedical innovations. The attempt at reparation for Randle, Fletcher and their families’ is about reckoning with the grief that comes with lost economic potential. As the last two known survivors – both 109 years old – settle into what will likely be the last years of their life, this is not only about acknowledgment of their pain, but about their hope to leave real dollars for the generations behind them to perhaps rebuild a legacy of business acumen and homeownership that was lost.
But wealth, regardless of the actual dollar amount or the physical tangibles acquired from it, is also about economic freedom. Generations of Black people have often had their lack of wealth weaponized against their freedom, independence and their ability to fight back against systemic, structural and institutional racism. The court’s decision to deny the Tulsa massacre survivors a path forward to be compensated for what they experienced compounds their own trauma and why the stakes are often high for Black people when they choose to go to use the court systems. The communal and financial means for Black people to fight injustice in court is no small feat, and in the aftermath of the violence many Black Tulsans tried to get economic relief from insurance companies and other legal avenues to no avail.
Black people have often had to rethink what their idea of the American dream looks like and what the most viable path to generational wealth should be. Even as social and cultural movements have tried to disentangle work and US capitalism, the truth is that economic freedom is still an important aspect of this. Having the financial means to stand up to injustice or say no to the status quo of systemic and institutional racism and oppression is an undeniable part of wealth.
As we look ahead to what’s next for Randall and Fletcher, all we can hope is that their descendants will have the opportunity in their next lifetimes to be made whole or at the very least experience a partial payment of justice still owed.
