06/04/2025
For 18 cataclysmic hours at the end of May 1921, white Tulsans attacked Greenwood, ”The Black Wall Street,” killing as many as 300 people, displacing 10,000. It’s the deadliest standalone racial terror attack in U.S. history.
On Sunday, Greenwood saw new headways toward reparations: the $105 million Road to Repair.
The plan comes after the DOJ issued a century-delayed report in January, entering the brutal facts of the massacre, plus state complicity, into formal records.
Lessie Benningfield Randle, 110, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 111, the two living Massacre survivors, said of the DOJ report: “We thank the Lord for keeping us alive to see the DOJ finally validate what we know first-hand to be true: that government institutions coordinated with white supremacists to destroy Greenwood through systematic mass murder, arson, censorship and disinformation.” But they’d hoped for more, saying the document “still falls heartbreakingly short.”
Survivors, advocates, and Tulsa mayor Monroe Nichols are nonetheless fashioning overdue recognition into turning point, marking June 1 as Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day, and proposing the Road to Repair: $105 million for housing, cultural preservation, land acquisition, and scholarships for survivors, descendants, and Greenwood as a whole.
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Lucid and damning, filled with myth-shattering disclosures—we’re mindful the DOJ report could become hard to access current or future federal administrations. We published it physically, in paperback, as a small step to ensure it’s available. To request copies for your class or community group, send us a message.
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Follow Greenwood’s fight and the plan: |
