State Supreme Court dismisses Tulsa Race Massacre survivors’ pursuit of reparations

The Oklahoma Supreme Court has ended a legal journey for the remaining two survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Fletcher, 110, sought reparations for the social and economic impacts of the massacre, which was one of the deadliest and most devastating acts of anti-Black violence in the nation’s history. According to the Tulsa Historical Society, up to 300 people were killed, and a 2018 article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology estimates the Greenwood District of Tulsa, which was colloquially known as Black Wall Street, lost up to $200 million in today’s dollars worth of property. Randle, Fletcher, and Fletcher’s younger brother Hughes Van Ellis, who died last year at 102, sought reparations in the form of nuisance abatement from the City of Tulsa for “unlawful acts and omissions that began with the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 and continue to this day.” On Wednesday, the State Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiffs’ grievances do not fall within the scope of Oklahoma’s public nuisance laws. The Court’s ruling explained that a nuisance exists when an unlawful act or omitted duty “injures or endangers the comfort, repose, health or safety of others,”...