Last month, Oklahoma reopened the wounds of the Tulsa victims when the state Supreme Court ruled 8-1 to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the last surviving residents against the city. Biden, who has spoken about repair and making up for silence, did not comment.
But that didn’t stop Recy Benningfield Rundle, 109, and Viola Fletcher, 110. “It seems the only ‘justice’ Black Americans are allowed is sympathetic words and promises that white Americans, our government and our justice system will ‘do better,'” their statement said. “Yet lip service continues and concrete justice is consistently denied.”
The Tulsa racial massacre isn’t just a state or local issue. It’s an “American crime” issue, one of the worst domestic terrorist attacks in U.S. history. Damario Solomon Simmons, a survivors’ attorney and president of the group Justice for Greenwood, calls Tulsa “America’s biggest crime scene.” He and the survivors had held out hope of meeting with Biden in 2021, but now the president’s silence is hurting. “Nobody from the White House has reached out to me, at least to offer condolences,” he told me. “That’s the bare minimum.”
With their time on the ground running out, the survivors are hoping to get their final wish: “We call on the U.S. Department of Justice to step in and open an investigation into the massacre and do something the state of Oklahoma has never done before. It’s not too late to do the right thing.”
For decades, the massacre has been omitted from Oklahoma’s history books and national memory. Through my reporting in Tulsa, I learned that plaintiffs and their supporters have long sought not only compensation for lost property and damages, but also the opening of discovery to help everyone understand what happened during that dark time. But Tulsa, and now the Oklahoma Supreme Court, have stood in the way.
The survivors’ call for a federal investigation into the massacre is significant, and it is not just Biden who is being called upon. So do other candidates seeking the presidential election in November. As the race heats up and candidates vie for the black vote, the least the Biden-Harris administration can do is voice its support for a federal investigation into the Tulsa massacre.
Cornell William Brooks, a former Justice Department civil rights lawyer and former head of the NAACP, told me there have been numerous cases in which the Justice Department has stepped in when states have refused or failed to complete investigations of racially motivated murders, but none on the scale of the Tulsa case.
The first is the case of three civil rights activists, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964. The Department of Justice began investigating their murders under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act of 2007. The act states that government law enforcement agencies should “expeditiously investigate unsolved civil rights murders” and “provide all necessary resources to ensure a prompt and thorough investigation of the cases involved.” Brooks also mentioned the federal investigations into the murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge.
In a recent paper titled “Normalizing Reparations,” Brooks and her Harvard colleague Linda Bilmes argue that the federal government has a “policy norm” of providing “reparations” to various groups of people for all kinds of harm. Such reparations, they write, “have centuries of precedent and are a widely accepted, widely used, and institutionalized federal practice.”
As I spoke with Brooks, he noted that the practice has long been used to compensate victims of racist violence by various identity groups. “The Department of Justice was basically overseeing the investigation and compensation program for Japanese Americans who were forced into internment camps during World War II,” he said, adding that the Justice Department also oversaw compensation programs for Jews subjected to the horrors of the Holocaust. The federal American Indian Trust Fund was established in the 1800s to compensate descendants of Native Americans who lost land rights.
Victims of terrorism have also received some form of relief and justice: the families of the victims of the Iran hostage crisis, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the 9/11 attacks have received compensation for their losses.
Why have the black victims of the massive racial terrorism in Tulsa been denied the same justice for decades?
The time for empty rhetoric and moral complacency about the need for a “national conversation” on race is over. America already has the norms, precedents, and concrete, functioning, systematic implementation systems for inquiry and repair that should be put to use on behalf of the victims of Tulsa and their descendants.
