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

The Oklahoma Supreme Court has rejected a lawsuit filed by two people who survived a racist massacre and are demanding justice in the face of its consequences.

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

The lawsuit filed by Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 110 – who were toddlers at the time of the Tulsa massacre – continued even after the death of Fletcher’s brother, Hughes Van Ellis, who was also a plaintiff before his death at age 102 in last year.

On May 31, 1921, in the vibrant Greenwood neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street,” an armed white mob, called by law enforcement officers, shot at black Americans on the street at random.

According to eyewitness accounts and limited press reports of the attack, planes dropped burning rags soaked in turpentine and dynamite, and the bodies of the Black victims were thrown into the Arkansas River or into mass graves. 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 truck with a mounted machine gun 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 city’s persistent racial disparities, economic inequality and trauma among survivors and their descendants.

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

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

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

“And even assuming as true the plaintiffs’ contention that the lingering economic and social consequences of the massacre continue to some extent to threaten the comfort and tranquility of the Greenwood and North Tulsa communities, those lingering consequences more than (100) years later, on their own, do not constitute a public nuisance within the court’s meaning of that term,” the judges wrote.

“The ongoing scourges allegedly prevalent in the Greenwood community resulting from the massacre are indicative of social inequalities passed down from generation to generation that can only be addressed by policymakers, not the courts,” they added.

In 2021, on the centennial of the attack, Tulsa Mayor G. T. Bynum issued an apology on behalf of the city, while millions of dollars were raised to commemorate the massacre and open a community center.

The plaintiffs also accused city officials of appropriating their photos to promote the centenary of the massacre.

“They didn’t respect anything,” said civil rights attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons Independent last year. “They commercially exploited the massacre to create a tourist district, raised over $30 million that benefits the white power elite here in Tulsa. That’s what this is all about.”

The plaintiffs said they will appeal to the state Supreme Court after a judge dismissed their complaint last year.

“We will not go quietly,” the survivors said in a statement read by Solomon-Simmons at the time. “We will fight until our dying breath. Like many black Americans, we carry the burden of intergenerational racial trauma, day in and day out.”

The state Supreme Court heard arguments in the appeal on April 2.

In a joint statement before the hearing, Randle and Fletcher said: “We are grateful that their tired bodies survived long enough to witness America and Oklahoma provide survivors of racial massacre access to the legal system.”

The plaintiff’s lawyers wrote in a statement to Independent on Wednesday that they should have the right to a trial.

“However, the Court held that Mother Randle and Mother Fletcher had asked the Court to decide a ‘political’ issue that was beyond the Court’s purview,” they said. “Incredibly, during the Supreme Court’s lengthy oral argument on the appeal, not a single member of the nine-member Court asked a question about the theory of this political issue. It is not a political issue simply because the lawsuit seeks redress for wrongful acts committed by white mobs against black people—the court system is precisely the place where such wrongs are to be redressed.”

Lawyers said they were calling on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate the massacre, which “remains a living memory” for the plaintiffs, who celebrate their 110th birthday this year. “Time is of the essence to begin this investigation,” they wrote.