A historic quest for justice by the last two known centenarian survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre ended on Wednesday when the Oklahoma Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of a lawsuit that sought reparations.
The decision may well be the final legal stop for Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 110, who were young children at the time. After years of mostly silence, they began publicly recounting details of one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history, including testifying before a congressional committee.
Ms. Fletcher and Ms. Randle argued that the destruction of Greenwood, a neighborhood of Tulsa that was then known as Black Wall Street, and the massacre of up to 300 African Americans by a white mob amounted to an ongoing public nuisance that still hangs over the neighborhood more than a century later.
The ruling concludes the lawsuit that Ms. Randle and Ms. Fletcher filed in 2020. Last year, another survivor of the massacre, Hughes Van Ellis, the younger brother of Ms. Fletcher, died at 102. Because the plaintiffs sued under state law and not federal law, they cannot appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Oklahoma justices ruled that the plaintiffs’ grievances, including any lingering economic and social impact of the massacre, though legitimate, “do not fall within the scope of our state’s public nuisance statute.”
“The continuing blight alleged within the Greenwood community born out of the Massacre implicates generational-societal inequities that can only be resolved by policymakers — not the courts,” the ruling states.
Damario Solomon-Simmons, the lead lawyer for the massacre survivors, said what happened in the spring of 1921 was essentially a “state-sponsored atrocity” and that ending the case without a trial is a blow to the notion of racial justice. The legal team plans to file a petition asking the court to reconsider its decision. It also has called on the U.S. Department of Justice to open an investigation into the massacre.
“Once again the Oklahoma court system has failed the survivors. We think the decision is wrong and the reasoning is wrong,” he said.
Mr. Solomon-Simmons said Ms. Randle and Ms. Fletcher were deeply disappointed by the ruling and want the legal team to keep fighting. “They are literally living in hopes of seeing justice.”
Tulsa officials said in a statement that they have been working on economic development plans and remain “committed to working with residents and providing resources to support the North Tulsa and Greenwood communities.”
In the early part of the 20th century, Greenwood was a cultural and economic success story. On May 31, 1921, a white mob gathered outside a county courthouse in Tulsa where a young Black man was being held over allegations that he had assaulted a young white woman.
White men deputized by the civil officials assaulted the neighborhood from the ground and the sky. Within two days, Greenwood was no more: 35 city blocks were reduced to heaping ashes, up to 300 of its citizens were dead and thousands were left homeless. The attack erased generational wealth that had been built at a time of great racial oppression.
No person or entity was ever held responsible, no survivors were compensated for their losses, and the story was buried. It would be decades before the massacre was talked about openly. Yvonne Kauger, one of the nine Oklahoma Supreme Court justices, noted in an earlier hearing that she did not learn about the massacre in high school.
The lawsuit, filed under Oklahoma’s public nuisance law, contended that the massacre’s impact continues to be felt acutely today. Mr. Solomon-Simmons said the city’s enduring racial disparities, economic inequalities, and trauma among survivors and their descendants are evidence of the massacre’s long reach.
State and local officials have argued that while the massacre was horrific, they should not be held accountable for events that happened over two days in 1921.
The lawsuit, a rare effort to make the government accountable for the massacre, named the Tulsa County sheriff, county commissioners and the Oklahoma Military Department, which administers the Oklahoma Army and Air National Guard, as defendants.
Judge Caroline Wall, a district court judge, who had ruled in May 2022 that the case could proceed, dismissed it in July 2023 on procedural grounds. Lawyers for the city argued that “simply being connected to a historical event does not provide a person with unlimited rights to seek compensation from any project in any way related to that historical event.”
The following month, the Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal of the lower court’s dismissal. On April 2, Mr. Solomon-Simmons stood before the nine justices and asked that the case be allowed to proceed. Ms. Fletcher and Ms. Randle attended the proceeding.
“On the one side, you have 109-year-old plaintiffs who are the last two survivors of the massacre,” he said. “On the other side, you have the perpetrators of the massacre who for 103 years have escaped any liability and who deny to this day that they caused the destruction which these survivors witnessed with their own eyes.”
Lawyers representing the defendants argued that the two survivors lacked standing to sue and that in 1921 when the massacre occurred, governmental agencies involved were shielded from liability by sovereign immunity.
In a joint statement issued before the April 2 hearing, Ms. Randle and Ms. Fletcher said, “We are grateful that our now-weary bodies have held on long enough to witness an America, and an Oklahoma that provides race massacre survivors with the opportunity to access the legal system.”
“Many have come before us who have knocked and banged on the courthouse doors, only to be turned around.”
In an interview with The New York Times before her legal team filed one of its final court motions last year, Ms. Randle said justice was overdue.
“I would like to see justice,” she said from her Tulsa residence in November. “It’s past time. I would like to see this all cleared up and we go down the right road. But I do not know if I will ever see that.”
Source Agencies
