What the mayor wants to do are needed in the City. But the mayor should not call them reparations because they are not.
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The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre killed at least 300 people, injured over 800 and reduced one of the most prosperous Black neighborhoods in America to smoldering ash. Monroe Nichols, the first Black mayor of Tulsa, recently announced a project named Road to Repair that he hopes will make a dent in the enduring disparities caused by the massacre. Let’s talk about what he is trying to do…and why it is not enough.
The mayor announced that he was opening a $105 million charitable trust that is to be used for housing, scholarships, land acquisition and economic development for north Tulsans. The trust will be made up of private money that will be raised over the next year.
To be sure, something needs to be done for Black people who live in Tulsa. The city is one of the most segregated in the country, and it has a crime rate so high that is has become a fixture on the A&E show The First 48.
Much of this stems from the aftermath of the massacre. The Greenwood district, and North Tulsa as a whole, was a thriving neighborhood filled with Black owned businesses, homes and schools. Black people who lived in there were enjoying the proceeds of the oil that was found nearby. But all that was destroyed in two days when, what a federal report called “a coordinated, military-style attack” not the work of an uncontrolled mob descended on the city. This brings us to why this is insufficient.
For decades survivors and descendants of Greenwood residents have demanded that something be done about what happened to them. In 2021, the city FINALLY apologized for its role in the massacre. And he last two known survivors, Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Ford Fletcher, tried to get reparations through the courts, but the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed their case last June.
So, this is the mayor’s attempt to address the city’s biggest sin. But this is ain’t it.
The survivors, the actual people who are still living with scars they received at the hands of evil white folks who destroyed Greenwood, get no money. Nothing. Nor will they get land or homes to make up for what they lost in the attack. The survivors are well into the twilight of their lives, and they deserve top notch medical care. That is the least that the city could provide for free, but this plan would not address that either. What the mayor announced are things that Black people need in that city, but they are not what he claims they are.
Reparations are supposed to make amends for wrongs that were committed. The way this is usually done is through financial payments and other forms of assistance to those who have been wronged. This is not that.
These are vague attempts to make the city better using the word reparations. Scholarships and land investments are needed, but will they make right the wrong that was done to the Black people of Greenwood? Or are these merely things that will make white people feel better about what happened without really forcing them to address what happened in the Summer of 1921?
These are not reparations. The survivors and Black people of Tulsa deserve better than this.
Straight From 
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