A hundred years have passed since a mob of white Americans – with the backing of local political figures and police – stormed into the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, also known as Black Wall Street, and massacred an estimated 300 African Americans while burning and looting the entire neighborhood. This crime, for which no one was convicted, was one of the most severe single instances of racial violence in the history of the United States, and is finally being openly discussed after decades of national silence.
With this renewed attention should come more than just news coverage and speeches. African Americans must be paid reparations – for the money and lives stolen by this country as a whole, for the crime of Tulsa and for the long list of violent acts that the United States was built upon. Reparations would not undo the injustices of the past – or the modern violence of budget cuts, housing discrimination, mass incarceration and mass policing – but it would at least signal a turning point, while greatly improving the lives of a people deeply wronged by a system that could hardly exist without them.
It is some form of progress that after so many years, the crime committed against the Black residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, is finally being recognized on such a grand scale. Media outlets across the political spectrum have dedicated airtime and headlines to the anniversary. President Biden proclaimed a national day of remembrance and laid out the details of his plan to close the racial wealth gap in the country – though his plans reek more of Nixonian fetishization of “Black Capitalism” than of reparations. And the city of Tulsa, which began its path towards reconciliation in 1997 with a commission dedicated to the atrocity, has commemorated the event with the Black Wall Street Legacy Festival. The commission, composed of historians and political representatives, recommended that the state of Oklahoma pay reparations in the form of scholarships and direct payments, but the descendants of Tulsa have still not received their due.
The justification for reparations here is clear: Black residents of the city were killed and had their homes and businesses burned to the ground, robbing many of their lives and their descendants of a chance at developing the long-term generational wealth of their white peers. According to a 2020 report by the Human Rights Watch, the poverty rate for Black Tulsans is more than double that of white residents. The report also stated:
The effects of the Greenwood massacre and subsequent discrimination continue to be felt in the present day. Black neighborhoods remain underdeveloped and under resourced. Mistrust of police is a legacy of the massacre. Aggressive policing in the present serves as a reminder and even an extension of the past.
If we can accept that the horrors of the Tulsa massacre – its estimated destruction of up to $200m in property, along with a morally unmeasurable loss of human life – is a wrong worth addressing, then we must accept that the terror of American chattel slavery must also be addressed. We must accept and make amends for similar events to Tulsa – like the Wilmington coup of 1898, in which between 60 to over 300 people were killed by a white militia who sought to overthrow the local government, or the 1985 Move bombing, in which the Philadelphia police department dropped a bomb on a residential home, killing 11 people, including five children, and destroying 61 homes in over two city blocks. We must accept that the war on drugs and Cointelpro – an illegal war waged on civil rights, anti-war and Black Power groups by the FBI – must also be brought into the light of day and corrected for. We must accept that the entire history of the United States has involved the violent extraction of wealth and labor from Black people. As a result of slavery and centuries of state-sanctioned violence and discrimination, the net worth of a typical white family is almost 10 times greater than that of a typical Black family. The United States must reckon with that history, and chart a new path – a path that begins with reparations.
The impact of reparations could be monumental. Direct payments could shrink the racial wealth gap overnight. Various forms of debt forgiveness could transform the everyday lives of Black people in the United States, and the establishment of Black-owned public land trusts could reshape entire cities that are in the midst of gentrifying and pushing out their Black residents. These reparations shouldn’t be individualized or focused on extracting money from white families, but on returning wealth stolen by government institutions, banks and other financial institutions whose early profits relied on slavery or racial discrimination.
Although a call for financial restitution may still seem extreme to many, it isn’t a new concept, and African Americans wouldn’t be the first to receive it. Many Indigenous tribes have received various forms of financial restitution, and Japanese Americans received $1.5bn in apology for their internment during the second world war. The United States also helped ensure reparations were paid to Jewish people by Germany after the Holocaust. Many white slaveholders received reparations after slavery was ended, and the New Deal essentially served as a form of reparations for generations of poor white Americans who had long served as the foot soldiers of American capital.
While these payments were hardly enough to make up for the crimes committed, they at least give credence to the argument that reparations isn’t some sort of unattainable pipe dream. The question is if we believe the United States owes African Americans their due, and any reasonable reader of American history would respond with an exasperated “yes, no shit”.
Numerous scholars have long discussed possible policy approaches. Rashawn Ray and Andre M Perry outlined a potential direction in a 2020 report for the Brookings Institution:
In short, a Black person who can trace their heritage to people enslaved in US states and territories should be eligible for financial compensation for slavery. Meanwhile, Black people who can show how they were excluded from various policies after emancipation should seek separate damages … To determine qualification, birth records can initially be used to determine if a person was classified as Black American. Economist Sandy Darity asserts that people should show a consistent pattern of identification. Census records can then be used to determine if a person has consistently identified as Black American. Finally, DNA testing can be used as a supplement to determine lineage.
The way we discuss and commemorate the Tulsa massacre makes it clear that we understand how monstrous this country has long been, and the real financial consequences of actions taken by both white government and white mob. There is no question that reparations must be paid; the questions of how, and how much, may be a more interesting place to start. Luckily for the US, the work of Black scholars like Ray and Perry and those who have long held the torch of Tulsa can give us guidance and light.
Akin Olla is a Nigerian American political strategist and organizer. He is the host of This is the Revolution podcast
