Global Courant
An Oklahoma judge has dismissed a lawsuit seeking reparations for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Judge Caroline Wall on Friday dismissed with prejudice the lawsuit that attempted to force the city and others to pay for the destruction of the once-thriving Black district known as Greenwood.
The order comes in a case of three survivors of the attack, all now over 100 years old and arraigned in 2020 in hopes of seeing what their lawyer called “justice in their lives.”
City of Tulsa spokesmen and an attorney for the survivors — Lessie Benningfield Randle, Viola Fletcher and Hughes Van Ellis — did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday.
Wall, a Tulsa County district court judge, wrote in a brief injunction that she dismissed the case based on arguments from the city, the regional chamber of commerce and other state and local government agencies. She had spoken out against the defendants’ motions to dismiss the case and had authorized the case to proceed last year.
Oklahoma local judicial elections are technically nonpartisan, but Wall has described himself as a “constitutional conservative” in previous campaign polls.
The lawsuit was filed under Oklahoma’s public nuisance law, which states that the actions of the white mob that killed hundreds of black residents and destroyed the nation’s most affluent black business district still affect the city today.
It alleged that Tulsa’s long history of racial division and tension stemmed from the massacre, which saw an angry white mob descend on a 35-block area, looting, killing and burning. In addition to the dead, thousands more were left homeless and lived in a hastily built internment camp.
The city and insurance companies never compensated victims for their losses, and the carnage ultimately resulted in racial and economic inequalities that still persist, the lawsuit argued. Among other things, it sought detailed accounts of the property and wealth lost or stolen in the massacre, the construction of a hospital in north Tulsa, and the creation of a victim compensation fund.
A lawyer from the Chamber of Commerce said earlier that the massacre was terrible, but that the nuisance did not last.
Fletcher, who is 109 and the oldest living survivor, will release a memoir next month about the life she led in the shadow of the carnage.
In 2019, the Oklahoma Attorney General used the public nuisance law to force opioid manufacturer Johnson & Johnson to pay the state $465 million in damages. The Oklahoma Supreme Court overturned that decision two years later.
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Bleiberg reported from Dallas and writer Michael Biesecker reported from Washington.
