'This isn't over': Demand for national reparations intensifies after dismissal of Tulsa lawsuit

The three remaining survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — all over 100 years old — are vowing to continue the years-long fight for restitution after an Oklahoma judge late last week dismissed their lawsuit seeking reparations for the ongoing harm caused by a hate-filled, violent rampage that destroyed their once thriving majority Black community a century ago.

“We will not go quietly. We will continue to fight until our last breaths,” Hughes “Uncle Red” Van Ellis, 102, Viola Fletcher, 109, and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 108, said in a joint statement Monday.

'This isn't over'

A team of attorneys for the three survivors say an appeal on their clients’ behalf is imminent, since they do not believe the law was applied justly.

“This isn't over, we're not done,” Sara Solfanelli of Schulte Roth & Zabel, an attorney with the plaintiffs' legal team, told Yahoo News. “This should not have been dismissed at this stage.”

Damario Solomon-Simmons, a civil rights attorney for the survivors, called the decision by Judge Caroline Wall “disrespectful” after it was dropped without notice on Friday evening.

“I think the community and our clients deserve a lot better,” Solomon-Simmons told Yahoo News.

Solomon-Simmons and Solfanelli are a part of a team of more than two dozen lawyers who, in 2020, sued under Oklahoma’s public nuisance law, claiming that the destruction caused by the mob over 100 years ago continues to affect the Greenwood community today. The lawsuit wanted the defendants, including the city of Tulsa and six other local entities, to acknowledge that the massacre took place and to set up a fund for the survivors and descendants of the deadly attack, who continue to live with its damaging effects.

Many supporters saw this Oklahoma suit as a potential blueprint for reparation efforts around the country thanks to its sound legal footing, but the latest ruling, which dismissed the case with prejudice, meaning that the case cannot be filed again, is seen as a stinging setback.

The national battle for reparations continues

Since the denial of reparations for the three survivors of the massacre, experts and advocates say the push for national reparations is more important than ever before.

“I’m not throwing up my hands,” Dr. Ron Daniels, the president of the National Reparations Commission, an assembly of reparations supporters, told Yahoo News. “It demonstrates the utter necessity to continue to fight and the need for federal reparations.”

The fight to secure reparations for African Americans whose ancestors suffered the harms of slavery has been ongoing for decades. In 2020, the murder of George Floyd renewed the impetus for reparations, but federal legislation in Congress remains stagnant.

Starting in 1989, and every year since then through 2017, the late Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., introduced House Resolution 40, a house bill that was reintroduced by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, in 2021, to create a national commission to study and develop reparations. “HR 40 is 38 years on the books waiting for someone to say yes,” Sheila Jackson Lee said at a conference in Evanston, Ill., last year.

In May, Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., proposed another piece of legislation to demand federal reparations of up to $14 trillion for those who are descendants of African slaves. "The United States has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people," Bush said, adding that the future of the United States depends on its repayment.

According to a 2023 national University of Massachusetts Amherst poll, roughly 7 in 10 Americans believe that reparations are not owed to descendants of those enslaved in the U.S.

“Opponents of reparations claim that incidents occurred too far in the past and there are no direct claimants,” Rashawn Ray, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, told Yahoo News. “Well, in the case of the Tulsa Race Massacre, there are people still living who were survivors. If anyone has a claim for reparations, it is the survivors from Tulsa who had houses and businesses burned down and loved ones killed.”

Yahoo News spoke to five experts on what the Tulsa lawsuit dismissal means for the national fight for reparations:

William A. Darity Jr., Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at Duke University, and author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century

“Piecemeal, uncoordinated efforts to achieve reparations at the local and state levels or through the courts invariably will be insufficient for genuine redress for Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States. African American reparations is necessarily a federal project.

Many Americans are under the mistaken belief that Black reparations must be paid by, de facto, taking dollars out of white people’s pockets and putting them into black people’s pockets. No serious national reparations plan would involve that type of financing mechanism. … An expenditure of $14 trillion, sufficient to eliminate the black-white wealth gap, could be financed without raising taxes and without triggering significant inflation.”

Raff Donelson, associate professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law

“As for the national fight for reparations, I don't think this particular setback affects the movement very much. Most of that fight is for legislation to address the plight of the descendants of enslaved persons, not for courts to swoop in and save the day. The fact that this Oklahoma court blocked a seemingly meritorious case from advancing is of little consequence.”

Rashawn Ray, sociology professor at the University of Maryland

“Black bodies not only were used as free labor, but the values of their bodies were used to obtain bank bonds and loans. As the state-sanctioning entity, the U.S. federal government is responsible. As I have also written, federal land is the answer. The government owns roughly 25% of land in the U.S. In line with 40 acres and a mule, this land can be sold, leased or have equity used to compensate descendants of enslaved Black Americans.”

Jovan Lewis, associate professor of geography at UC Berkeley and author of Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa

“I think that this particular failure in gaining reparations in Tulsa shows the importance of being able to closely and accurately trace the ongoing harms faced by Black Americans by a state or the federal government. This is what we were able to do on the California Reparations Task Force. Reparations claims and cases that can provide this evidence will have a greater chance of success.”

Tatishe M. Nteta, professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and director of the UMass Poll

“The movement itself over the course of the last three or four years has been resuscitated, and you're seeing that on the ground in these small localities. … The central explanation based on polling [as to why Black Americans haven’t received reparations] was that there was a belief that at least the descendants of slaves were not deserving of the cash payments associated with reparations.”