Oklahoma court rejects Tulsa race massacre lawsuit that would force city to compensate victims

The Oklahoma Supreme Court has rejected a decades-in-the-making lawsuit filed by two survivors of a racist massacre seeking justice in its aftermath.

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

The lawsuit filed by Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 110 – who were toddlers at the time of the attack – continued even after the death of Fletcher’s brother, Hughes Van Ellis, who died last year at the age of 102.

On May 31, 1921, on Tulsa’s bustling “Black Wall Street” in Greenwood, an armed white mob designated by law enforcement indiscriminately shot black Americans in the street.

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

The mob set fire to and looted homes and businesses, including restaurants, hotels, theaters and a newspaper office. A machine gun truck fired at Mount Zion Baptist Church before it was burned to the ground.

No one was ever charged with a crime.

The lawsuit over Oklahoma’s public nuisance law argues that the effects of the massacre are still felt decades later in the form of persistent racial disparities, economic inequality in the city and trauma among survivors and their descendants.

In the state Supreme Court’s decision, the justices noted that “plaintiffs’ complaints have merit” but “do not fall within the scope of our state’s public nuisance statute.”

The lawsuit demanded, among other things, a detailed accounting of property and property lost or stolen during the massacre, the construction of a hospital in north Tulsa and the creation of a fund to compensate victims.

The lawsuit names the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Office, Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, County Commissioners and the Oklahoma Military Department as defendants.

The plaintiffs said they would appeal to the state Supreme Court after a judge dismissed the case last year.

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

This is a developing story