Race Riot Survivors Take Case To Supreme Court

By Abdur-Rahman MuhammadSpecial to the NNPA from Afro newspapers WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Braving frigid temperatures earlier this month, five survivors of the 1921 Tulsa ”race riot,” in which a White mob burned and looted their community, took to the steps of the Supreme Court to bring national attention to their case for reparations. ”The Tulsa race riot was one of the greatest travesties in our country’s history, but very few people know about it,” said the group’s lead attorney, Charles Ogletree, a professor of law at Harvard University. A lawsuit was filed against Oklahoma and the city of Tulsa for failing to enact the recommendation of a state commission that reparations be paid to the community, the living survivors and their descendants. The venerable residents of Tulsa, whose Greenwood community was once known as ”the Black Wall Street,” have petitioned the court to review decisions by a federal district court and the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals last year that dismissed their lawsuit on the grounds that a two-year statute of limitation had long ago expired. Conceding the intense racial hostility of the period that precluded any legal action at the time, the courts nevertheless decided that 80 years was simply too long ago for them to grant relief. In March 2004, U.S. District Court Judge James O. Ellison acknowledged that African-Americans were deserving of a delay in the statute of limitations. But even then, he fixed the 1960s as the cut off point. The appeals court, which affirmed the lower court’s ruling, maintained the suit should have been brought no later than the 1980s. Lawyers for the survivors say that it was not until the release of an important commission report in February 2001 that the facts of the case could be established and thus the clock should have begun ticking at that point. Selena Mendy Singleton, executive vice president of the TransAfrica Forum, said, ”The Supreme Court must rule in favor of these victims. The people of Rosewood, Fla. got reparations; the victims of the Holocaust got reparations; and the Japanese victims of the American internment in the 1940s were paid reparations. The people of Tulsa are due.” In addition to the five survivors, accompanying Ogletree to the nation’s capital was a cadre of law students from both Howard and Harvard universities, who also lent support to the effort. Later in the afternoon, Ogletree had the opportunity to highlight the importance of the case and to discuss the rich history of Tulsa’s Black community. During a lecture at Howard University, Ogletree said that before the riot of 1921, ”this [Greenwood] was a place where the dollar circulated 35 times. It was a community that was self-sufficient … a 22-square-block Black Metropolis.” He also said ”from 1921 until 2001 Blacks were blamed for the riot.” The Tulsa Race Riot Commission report in 2001 finally corrected the record, laying the foundation for this landmark lawsuit. On May 31, 1921, a White mob in the Greenwood section of Tulsa gathered to exact retribution on the Black community for its defense of Dick Rowland, an African-American rumored to have ”raped a white women.” In actuality, he accidentally stepped on her foot while exiting an elevator. The rape accusation was merely a pretext to punish the Black community for its prosperity and business success — and, according to some historians, to seize its land. At 5:08 A.M., the mob set out on a rampage of murder and destruction, savagely torching every building in Greenwood, leaving the Black Wall Street in a smoldering ruin. ”One hundred fifty drunken Whites were deputized” by city officials, Ogletree said, with the mandate to ”go get those Niggers.” Estimates have varied as to the exact number of casualties; at least 300 people are known to have perished, but some believe the number is as high as 3,000. Eight thousand people were displaced in this tragic episode that many have accurately described as a legal lynching. Initially, 150 survivors brought the suit in 2001. Of that figure, only 101 are still living, ranging in age from 89 to 105. The Tulsa Race Riot Commission report and the commission that produced it were in large part due to over 40 years of activism for reparations by Don Ross, who spent 20 of those years as a representative in the Oklahoma legislature. Passage of a bill Ross authored finally established the commission that made the recommendations the legislature declined to enact. Though Ross has been removed from the reparations struggle for the last few years, he recalled his visits as a youth to the home of historian John Hope Franklin, a Tulsa native. ”It was the first time I heard the word reparations used,” Ross said. ”I asked him, ‘Reparations? What is that?”’ Ross said Franklin’s response was brief: ”Money, Negro.”