Tens of millions of dollars will go toward repairing harms from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
That’s according to Mayor Monroe Nichols. Tulsa's first Black mayor said Sunday the city is opening a $105 million charitable trust aimed at things like housing, scholarships, land acquisition and economic development for north Tulsans. The trust will be comprised of private money that will be raised over the next 12 months, Nichols said.
As many as 300 people were killed and dozens of homes and businesses leveled in the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when a white mob razed the city’s prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood in north Tulsa. Today, north Tulsa is hampered by blight, poverty and racial inequality.
Nichols announced the creation of the trust at an event on Sunday, which the city has designated as Race Massacre Observance Day.
“There is not one Tulsan, no matter their skin color, who wouldn’t be better off today had the massacre not happened,” Nichols said.
The mayor’s announcement follows city officials’ creation of the Beyond Apology Commission to explore reparations for descendants of massacre survivors and people who live in the area today.
The trust will put:
- $24 million toward housing and homeownership for descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
- $60 million toward cultural preservation aimed at improving buildings, reducing blight and implementing parts of the Kirkpatrick Heights-Greenwood Master Plan
- $21 million toward a legacy fund for land acquisition, scholarship funding and economic development
Chief Egunwale Amusan, a survivor descendant and member of the activist group Justice For Greenwood, said he’s striven for reparations like the ones the mayor outlined for half his life.
“If (my grandfather) had been here today, it probably would have been the most restorative day of his life,” Amusan said.
Justice For Greenwood has most notably supported an unsuccessful lawsuit from the remaining massacre survivors Viola Ford Fletcher and Lessie Benningfield Randle against the city of Tulsa and other public entities for damages related to the massacre.
While the city did not commit to cash payments for the survivors, some supporters of the lawsuit were happy nonetheless.
“I understand if reparations is cash and land, but I also understand that it’s multi-faceted, and we need to have all those things,” said Beyond Apology commissioner and survivor descendant Kristi Williams.
Nichols did however announce the release of 45,000 previously classified city records on the race massacre at the recommendation of Justice For Greenwood.
“What we wanted to do was find a way in which we could take in a number of those recommendations so that it’s reflective of the descendant community, of those folks that brought forth some recommendations,” said Nichols.
Nichols has also committed to continuing the search for mass graves believed to contain victims of the massacre.
He said the work related to the race massacre is ultimately about putting aside divisions and working toward reconciliation.
“We gather together to speak with one voice that hate — even aged 104 years — will never win,” Nichols said.
