Nearly 105 years after the Tulsa race massacre in Texas, civil rights lawyer Damario Solomon-Simmons is leading a reparations campaign for the survivors of the massacre and their descendants.
In 1921, crowds of white people later conducted a scorched-earth operation against an outnumbered black militia protecting the legendary Black Wall Street.
This struggle for compensation is the subject of Solomon-Simmons' first book, "Redeem a Nation:
If you look at the history of the United States and examine the founding sin of this country, which is the enslavement of Black people, you see that this problem has not been resolved. And then there is the Tulsa race massacre, which was the bloodiest and most destructive race massacre since slavery, and it has not been redressed. We cannot talk about what America is or what it will be without making sure that these issues are addressed and that we obtain restorative justice for both,” said Damario Solomon-Simmons, author of Redeem a Nation.
This work is intended as an action plan for justice in the face of the historical atrocities that African Americans have endured but for which they have never been compensated.
"America is still grappling with the issue of reparations because it is still grappling with the legacy of slavery, the legacy of racial discrimination, the legacy of Jim Crow laws, the legacy of the violent exclusion of Black people from political life that began after Reconstruction and continued well beyond the Civil Rights era," said Jennifer L. Morgan, a professor of history at New York University.
During the Tulsa massacre, more than 35 city blocks in the neighborhood known as Greenwood were razed by fires, approximately 191 businesses were destroyed, and some 11,000 Black residents were displaced.
"So I think if we consider reparations as something to be viewed in terms of collective rather than individual redress, by giving people who have been deprived of their rights access to education, vocational training, home loans, and support structures that can transform both individuals and communities, then it seems to me to be a constructive debate to have," explained Jennifer L. Morgan, a professor of history at New York University.
The state of Oklahoma declared the death toll to be only 36, although many historians and experts who have studied the event estimate the number of victims to be between 75 and 300.
