More than 100 years after a white mob devastated the thriving Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has announced the first-ever federal investigation into the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, . Known as Greenwood was home to a prosperous Black community before it was violently attacked. Thirty five city blocks of Black-owned businesses, churches, hospitals and homes were bombed, burned and destroyed.
It’s estimated that up to 300 people were killed. Thousands were left homeless and generations of wealth destroyed in one of the worst instances of racial violence in U.S.
history. “We acknowledge descendants of the survivors, and the victims continue to bear the trauma of this act of racial terrorism,” Assistant U.S.
Attorney General Kristen Clarke said during her remarks according the AP. The DOJ’s move follows the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s June decision to filed by massacre survivors without taking it to trial. The federal review will be conducted by the Civil Rights Division’s Cold Case Unit, under the authority of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act.
This comes after a heartfelt plea in July from survivors Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 110. They called on the Biden administration to invoke the 2007 Act, which allows cold cases involving violent crimes against Black people committed before 1970 to be reopened. Damario Solomon-Simmons, the lead attorney for the Tulsa Race Massacre survivors.
