Trump rally in Tulsa, a day after Juneteenth, awakens memories of 1921 racist massacre

The Greenwood section of Tulsa, Okla., is seen in flames during in 1921 during one of the worst acts of anti-Black racism in American history. (Creative Commons), CC BY-SA

Russell Cobb, University of Alberta

For only the second time in a century, the world’s attention is focused on Tulsa, Okla. You would be forgiven for thinking Tulsa is a sleepy town “where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain,” in the words of the musical Oklahoma!.

But Tulsa was the site of one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history, and a long, arduous process of reconciliation over the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 was jarred by President Donald Trump’s decision to hold his first campaign rally there since the COVID-19 pandemic began.

The city is on edge. Emotions are raw. There’s anxiety about a spike in coronavirus cases, but lurking even deeper in the collective psyche is a fear that history could repeat itself. Tens of thousands of Trump supporters will gather close to a neighbourhood still reckoning with a white invasion that claimed hundreds of Black lives.

In this June 15, 2020, photo, people walk past a Black Wall Street mural in the Greenwood district in Tulsa, Okla. Dozens of blocks of Black-owned businesses were destroyed by a white mob in deadly race riots nearly a century ago. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

A Trump rally near a site of a race massacre during a global pandemic already sounded like a recipe for a dangerous social experiment. But then there was the matter of timing. The rally was to be held on Juneteenth (June 19), a holiday commemorating the day slaves in the western portion of the Confederacy finally gained their freedom.
Normally, Juneteenth in Tulsa is one big party, the rare event that brings white and Black Oklahomans together. But fears about spreading COVID-19 led organizers to cancel the event. Then came the protests over the murder of George Floyd. During those demonstrations in Tulsa, a truck ran through a blockade of traffic, causing one demonstrator to fall from a bridge. He is paralyzed from the waist down.

COVID-19 cases surging

To make a bad situation even worse, the city is witnessing a surge in coronavirus cases. Local health officials have acknowledged that the increase in new cases, mixed with close to 20,000 people packed into an arena, is “a perfect storm” that could fuel a super-spreader event.

Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum speaks during a news conference at police headquarters. (Matt Barnard/Tulsa World via AP)

Some of Mayor G.T. Bynum’s biggest supporters began pleading with him to cancel the event. Bynum is of that rarest of species, a Republican who has staked part of his political legacy on combating racism. It was Bynum who shocked the white establishment by ordering an investigation into potential mass grave sites from the 1921 massacre, even as many Republicans accused him of opening old wounds.
Faced with the prospect of provoking a fight with Trump, however, Bynum equivocated.

Bynum found himself under attack from former friends and allies who urged him to do something. Then, on June 13, the Trump campaign announced that it would change the date of the rally to June 20 “out of respect” for Juneteenth. It was a small victory for protesters, but some were further enraged by Bynum’s moral equivalence between the protests over Floyd’s murder and a Trump campaign rally.

Reminiscent of another mayor

The mayor’s impotence has also brought back memories of 1921. The mayor then, T.D. Evans, found himself unable — or unwilling — to stand between an angry white mob ginned up over fears of a “Black uprising” and a Black community demanding racial equality.
Evans saw the rising influence of the Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma politics and quietly voiced his displeasure. As the Tulsa Tribune cultivated white paranoia about a Black invasion of white Tulsa, Evans, and many like him, did little. “Despite warnings from Blacks and whites that trouble was brewing,” Tulsa Word reporter Randy Krehbiel wrote in a book about the massacre, “(Evans) remained mostly silent.”

In this 1921 file image provided by the Greenwood Cultural Center, Mt. Zion Baptist Church burns after being torched by white mobs during the 1921 Tulsa massacre. (Greenwood Cultural Center via Tulsa World via AP)

One historical parallel with 1921 stands out above the rest: the power and influence of “fake news” to mobilize alienated voters.
While much has been made of a revolution of social media and YouTube to undercut the gatekeepers of traditional media, a false news article was the most proximate cause of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
The Tulsa Tribune published an article on May 30, 1921, with an unproven allegation that a Black man, Dick Rowland, had tried to rape a white woman in a downtown elevator. The dog-whistle came through loud and clear. No evidence was presented and charges were later dropped. But the news was enough to set off calls for a lynching of Rowland.

Hundreds killed

A mob formed around the Tulsa courthouse. The Tribune had been stoking fears of a “Black uprising” for months, running stories of race mixing, jazz and interracial dancing at Black road houses.
A few Blacks armed themselves and tried to stop the lynching. The sight of armed Blacks made the white mob direct its fury at a bigger target — the Black section of town, Greenwood.
By the dawn of June 1, 1921, Greenwood lay in ruins, with hundreds dead and thousands interned in camps. The devastation did not come as a surprise to those who had watched the rise of xenophobia during the First World War and the second coming of the KKK, an organization that received a boost after the screening of the racist film The Birth of a Nation in 1915 at the White House.

Trump reaches into his suit jacket to read remarks following the events in Charlottesville, Va. He defended white supremacists following a Unite the Right rally that turned violent. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Tulsa, and the nation, had been primed for racial violence by a white supremacist media and presidential administration. Many well-intentioned people stood idly by, hoping the trouble would soon blow over. It did not.
Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. During the spring of 1921, Tulsa got the tragedy. With Trump rallying tens of thousands of his supporters near Greenwood amid a deadly pandemic, the best we can hope for this time around is farce.
Russell Cobb, Associate Professor of Latin American Studies, University of Alberta
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

24 more graves excavated, including those of children, in Tulsa Race Massacre probe

Forensic scientists have uncovered 24 additional unmarked graves in an Oklahoma cemetery, three of them containing child-sized coffins, as part an effort to identify victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, officials said.

The unmarked burial sites were discovered in Tulsa's Oaklawn Cemetery after excavations resumed there on Oct. 26, according to city officials who authorized the investigation.

The latest discovery was made Tuesday in the graveyard just southeast of downtown Tulsa, officials said.

"Three additional child-sized burials were discovered...in the southern block (of the cemetery)," the city said in a news release.


State archaeologist Kary Stackelbeck makes notes at an excavation site at Oaklawn Cemetery while searching for victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Friday, Oct. 28, 2022 in Tulsa, Okla.© City of Tulsa via AP

Twenty-one other burial sites were unearthed in the western section of the cemetery since the new excavation got underway last week, according to the city's statement.

Four of the graves are being excavated by hand to determine if the remains should be exhumed for further analysis.

Remains from one of the graves were found in a simple coffin and exhumed on Tuesday to be analyzed in an on-site lab.


Crews work on an excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery searching for victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre on Oct. 27, 2022, in Tulsa, Okla.© City of Tulsa via AP

"Experts continue to be narrowly focused on which graves will be exhumed and have determined that no child-sized burial will be," the city's statement reads.

This is the second excavation to occur at the cemetery. An excavation last year uncovered 19 unmarked burial sites, officials said.

Historians suspect that 75 to 300 people, most of them Black, were killed in the Tulsa Race Massacre, which the Oklahoma Historical Society calls "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history." The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 deaths.MORE: Tulsa Massacre 100 years later: Black Wall Street reimagined as Black tech hub

Following World War I, Tulsa was known for its affluent African American residents and black-owned businesses in an area called the Greenwood District, which was also referred to as "Black Wall Street."

White mobs attacked Black residents in the neighborhood and burned down more than 1,000 homes and businesses during two days of riots that broke out between May 31 and June 1, 1921, prompted by allegations that a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner assaulted a white female elevator operator.MORE: 100 years later, Tulsa Race Massacre survivors appeal to lawmakers: 'I hear the screams'

In 2018, Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum announced the city would reexamine the unmarked graves identified in a 2001 state commissioned report. In addition to Oaklawn Cemetery, the city has designated three other potential areas to excavate, including a park in northwest Tulsa near the Arkansas River and the Rolling Oaks Memorial Gardens cemetery.

Tulsa race massacre

Hundreds were killed in the Tulsa race massacre. Are we already forgetting them?

On the 102nd anniversary of the killings, efforts for justice in Greenwood are buried under hollow symbolism

After white rioters torched Black businesses in the Greenwood district, authorities detained thousands of Black people. 

Photograph: Science History Images/Alamy

Victor Luckerson

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 31 May 2023 

This year, on the 102nd anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, television crews won’t descend upon Greenwood, the neighborhood where as many as 300 Black people were murdered by a white mob in 1921. Thousands of protesters won’t march through the streets chanting “justice for Greenwood”, as they did following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Joe Biden won’t be on hand to declare Greenwood a symbol of the “American spirit”, as he did on the centennial of the race massacre in 2021.

Despite the pop culture awareness delivered by HBO’s Watchmen and Lovecraft Country, Greenwood risks going it alone once again. All too often, that’s been the normal state of play in the neighborhood known across the United States as “Black Wall Street”.

A man raises a fist after a soil dedication ceremony on the centennial of the massacre. Photograph: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

When I first arrived in Tulsa in 2018, on the 97th anniversary of the race massacre, Greenwood felt diminished. A lively Black district once filled with regal homes, raucous nightclubs and stately churches had been reduced to a block and half of humble storefronts and a community center in need of refurbishment. What’s worse, much of the land previously occupied by Black people had been replaced by white-controlled enterprises: high-rise apartments, a large college campus for Oklahoma State University, and even a sports stadium. On my first night in Greenwood, more people on the block were trying to catch the opening inning of a minor league baseball game than acknowledging the lives of people who had been slain on the land where that stadium now sits.


Greenwood is full of these kinds of chilling contradictions. Sidewalk plaques commemorating businesses burned down during the massacre now serve as welcome mats for glittering new office buildings. The highway that bisected the neighborhood in 1967, destroying dozens of homes and businesses, has been “beautified” with a mural, attracting Instagram likes rather than material gains for Greenwood’s progeny. The neighborhood’s historical fame has become a kind of albatross slung over Black Tulsans’ necks, as efforts at building concrete pathways toward justice are buried under hollow symbolism.


‘I work with the dead. But this can help the living’: the anthropologist investigating the Tulsa race massacre

It’s easy for visitors – and visiting journalists – to become distracted by the symbols, beautiful as some of them are. But after my first trip to the neighborhood, I realized the only way to really understand Greenwood was to become part of it. So I moved to Tulsa a few days after my 30th birthday and rented a house a half-mile walk from the neighborhood. I began excavating Greenwood’s past, analyzing land transactions and lawsuits filed in the aftermath of the race massacre and conducting oral history interviews with people whose families were devastated by the attack. I spoke to families who have called the place home for generations. I also sought to chronicle Greenwood’s present, covering protests, court hearings and debates on the floor of the Oklahoma state legislature, all mechanisms for restoring justice to a community that’s been deprived of it for so long.


01:09'Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around': reverend sings with Tulsa race massacre survivors – video

Three years after the murder of George Floyd, police violence remains one of the most urgent concerns for Black Tulsans. Tiffany Crutcher, a descendant of race massacre survivors, has been an ardent police reform activist ever since her twin brother, Terence, was killed while unarmed by a Tulsa police officer in 2016. Following Terence’s death, she moved back home to Tulsa to pursue activism, spending years trying to needle the Tulsa city council and the city’s Republican mayor, GT Bynum, into taking police oversight seriously.

The summer of 2020 seemed to offer a breakthrough; as the nation reeled from Floyd’s murder at the hands of police in Minneapolis, local protests in Tulsa brought thousands into the streets, blocking highway traffic and forcing a negotiation with the mayor. In those heady, turbulent days, Bynum promised to take on the police union, notorious for eschewing oversight and citizen intervention at all costs. But the season of change was short-lived in Tulsa, as elsewhere; Bynum ultimately walked back his plan to institute an independent monitor to oversee the police, instead supporting a “liaison” who would lack any disciplinary power.

Terence Crutcher, right, with his twin sister, Tiffany. Photograph: AP

Crutcher has watched this retrenchment with concern, but she remains undeterred. She now heads the Terence Crutcher Foundation, a local non-profit she launched a year after her brother was killed. Her work has shifted from trying to convince city leaders of the value of her agenda to taking it to the people themselves. “It looks like knocking on doors and listening to neighbors to understand what’s important to them,” she says of her advocacy. “I think it looks like bringing them along in this fight to advance policy, and giving them ownership for their own communities.” The foundation recently purchased a 65,000-square-foot shopping center just north of Greenwood, which it hopes to fill with small businesses and non-profits that can help transform Black Tulsa’s economic fortunes.

Another descendant of massacre survivors, Regina Goodwin, is determined to restore Greenwood’s physical landscape by removing the I-244 overpass from the neighborhood. As a child, Goodwin saw her family’s Greenwood Avenue office building destroyed to make room for the highway; a few years later, her home was bulldozed during urban renewal programs. Now Goodwin, a state legislator representing the Greenwood district, is calling for freeing up about 30 acres of land in and around the neighborhood for commercial and residential development benefiting the community’s historic residents.

Joe Biden silently prays during a moment of silence in Tulsa in 2021. 

Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

One idea being weighed is converting the property into a land trust owned by the community as a whole, so that previous patterns of gentrification aren’t repeated. “Everybody thinks it’s crazy,” Goodwin says. “This big piece of concrete, that’s all folks have known all their lives. But if you constructed it, you can deconstruct it.” Her plan gained a major boost in February, when the US Department of Transportation selected Greenwood as one of 49 communities that will receive federal grant funding to conduct a feasibility study on potentially removing the highway. On a personal level, Goodwin knows the pain Greenwood has endured, but she’s also become adept at using some of the tools that engineered Greenwood’s destruction to power its restoration.

In addition to the massacre descendants, three people remain who lived through the horror themselves, and they too seek justice. Since 2020, three survivors of the Tulsa race massacre have been seeking restitution through a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa, other government agencies, and the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce (massacre descendants were dismissed from the case last summer). The eldest of the survivors, Viola Ford Fletcher, marked her 109th birthday this May in a Tulsa county courtroom, where her attorneys were fending off a motion filed by the city to dismiss the case.

Hughes Van Ellis, left, a Tulsa race massacre survivor, and Viola Ford Fletcher, the eldest living survivor, testify on Capitol Hill in May 2021.

 Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

During the hearing, the lead attorney, Damario Solomon-Simmons, listed iconic Greenwood landmarks that had been destroyed during the race massacre, including the Stratford Hotel and the Dreamland Theater, and argued that the survivors had suffered through the destruction of many vital community institutions. “We just want the opportunity – they just want the opportunity – to have their day in court,” Solomon-Simmons said. “There were over 10,000 people who suffered during the massacre. They’re the three that’s left.” A decision on whether to dismiss the case or let it proceed to

99 years ago today, one of America’s worst acts of racial violence took place in Tulsa

It was covered up for decades.

By Emily Stewartemily.stewart@vox.com  May 31, 2020, 1:20pm EDT

A black couple walks across a street with smoke rising in the distance after the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

 Oklahoma Historical Society/Getty Images

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As protests erupt across the country in reaction to George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police, America is also marking the anniversary of one of its worst incidents of racial violence — and one that was covered up for decades.

May 31 and June 1 mark the 99th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, when a white mob descended on an affluent black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Greenwood District, which was known as “Black Wall Street,” was decimated in a matter of days. Roughly 1,200 homes were burned, 35 blocks burned, and an estimated 300 black people killed.

Buildings burning in the Greenwood District in Tulsa.

 Oklahoma Historical Society/Getty Images

Homes burning in an affluent black neighborhood of Tulsa. 

Oklahoma Historical Society/Getty Images

The massacre was largely brushed over for decades — records of it disappeared, and it wasn’t often talked about. When it was, it was dubbed the Tulsa race “riot” as a way to muddy the waters of what happened and make it seem that both sides were equally at fault. In the 1990s, Oklahoma put together a commission to try to find out what happened in the 1921 massacre, and in 2001, it released a report on its findings. From its prologue, written by then-state Rep. Don Ross:

A mob destroyed 35-square-blocks of the African American Community during the evening of May 31, through the afternoon of June 1, 1921. It was a tragic, infamous moment in Oklahoma and the nation’s history. The worse civil disturbance since the Civil War. In the aftermath of the death and destruction the people of our state suffered from a fatigue of faith — some still search for a statute of limitation on morality, attempting to forget the longevity of the residue of injustice that at best can leave little room for the healing of the heart. Perhaps this report, and subsequent humanitarian recovery events by the governments and the good people of the state will extract us from the guilt and confirm the commandment of a good and just God — leaving the deadly deeds of 1921 buried in the call for redemption, historical correctness, and repair.

Nearly two decades after the report was written, Tulsa continues to grapple with the massacre and to try to find out what happened. The location of the bodies of those killed during the incident is still unknown.

A wave of anti-black violence swept across the United States after the end of World War I. Black veterans who had served the country were met with disdain by racist whites, and racial tensions were high — as Olivia Waxman outlined in Time, black Americans who moved to cities in the North were met with prejudice, as were black sharecroppers in the South. In the summer of 1919, known as the Red Summer, racial violence targeting black people erupted across the US.

That is important context for the massacre in Tulsa in 1921, which was sparked when a black teenager named Dick Rowland was arrested for allegedly attacking a white female operator. A white mob gathered outside the courthouse where he was being held, and black men also gathered outside to try to protect him from being lynched.

According to a timeline from Tulsa World, things declined from there. White people broke into stores to take guns and ammunition, and there were reports of looting and haphazard shooting downtown. White mobs descended on Greenwood, and many residents of the district fled. Buildings were destroyed and set ablaze, homes and businesses were looted, and reports suggest police officers took part in the mayhem as well. The Oklahoma governor declared martial law and called in the National Guard. Many black people were arrested, but whites weren’t.

A group of National Guard Troops, carrying rifles with bayonets, escort unarmed black men after the Tulsa race massacre.

 Oklahoma Historical Society/Getty Images

A photographer walks among iron bed frames of a burned-out block after the Tulsa race massacre.

 Oklahoma Historical Society/Getty Images

After the violence ended, there was an effort to erase it. Records of it disappeared, and for decades, it wasn’t talked about much at all, nor did it appear in history books. White moved on with their lives, and blacks tried to put theirs back together. As the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum notes, no criminal act from the massacre “was then or ever has been prosecuted or punished by government at any level.”

That’s part of the reason there is probably a lot we will never know about it — exactly how many people were harmed or died, what happened to the survivors. There’s an ongoing effort to try to figure out even where the bodies of those killed are buried.

In recent decades, there have been efforts to reach out to survivors for their firsthand accounts of what happened. In 2018, Charles Blow at the New York Times spoke with Olivia Hooker, one of the last known survivors of the massacre. She described white men breaking into her family’s home, destroying her sister’s piano, pouring oil on her grandmother’s bed, and stuffing a dresser with ammunition. “I used to scream at night. I didn’t sleep. I had nightmares,” she said of the trauma she suffered.

In 1999, Brent Staples published a story in the New York Times on the unearthing of the truth about the massacre. It included multiple firsthand accounts, including from a man named Elwood Lett, who had recently died at the age of 82:

Five white men came to his family’s house but surprised them by allowing the grandfather to place his daughter and two grandchildren into a wagon so that they could leave town. ‘’I was happy to know they didn’t shoot him or kill him there at the house,’’ Lett recalled. ‘’He’s thinking, ‘They’re pretty nice people by letting us get in the wagon and go on about our business.’ . . . We hadn’t got to the town of Sperry before this white guy asked, ‘Where in the hell you going?’ — using the ‘N’ word. My grandfather said, ‘We’re heading out, we’re going out of town.’ And he said, ‘Not this day you’re not going out of town.’ Bam! . . . And he just tumbled. My mother let out a scream: ‘Oh, you have killed my father, you’ve killed him,’ and I thought he was going to do the same thing to my mother.’’

There have been calls from many corners for reparations for the victims of the attack. In his influential 2014 piece “The Case for Reparations,” writer Ta-Nehisi Coates cited the incident in his argument.

This year, the Tulsa massacre anniversary lands amid intense racial violence in the US

The 2020 anniversary of the Tulsa massacre arrives at a uniquely horrible moment that has acutely affected black Americans. George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed during an arrest on May 25 when a police officer pinned him by the neck with his knee for nearly nine minutes, even when he pleaded with him that he couldn’t breathe. Floyd’s death is the latest in a centuries-long history of anti-black violence.

Photograph of a black man lying on the ground beside train tracks during the Tulsa race massacre, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 1921.

 Oklahoma Historical Society/Getty Images

In the wake of Floyd’s killing, demonstrators across the country have taken to the streets to protest police violence and draw attention to the way black lives are undervalued and mistreated. Many of the protests have been peaceful, but some have turned violent, and when they turn violent, it is often black demonstrators who run the highest risk of being hurt. Businesses are being looted and burned, police and protesters are clashing, and some communities are being destroyed.

And beyond the protests, right now, people of color are also being disproportionately sickened and killed by the coronavirus crisis. They’ve also been hit harder by the economic crisis and lost their jobs at higher rates.

“Before COVID-19, America’s virus was racism,” Rev. Robert Turner told demonstrators at a protest in Tulsa on Saturday, according to Tulsa World. “We are sick and tired of this disease. We demand a vaccine. Social distancing can’t kill racism. A face mask can’t kill racism. Nothing but the truth can cure it.”

What we do and still don’t know about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre

NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!
Oklahoma's high court will consider a reparations case from 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre survivors

AYANNA ALEXANDER and SEAN MURPHY
Updated Wed, August 16, 2023 


 People raise up their arms during the dedication of a prayer wall outside of the historic Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church in the Greenwood neighborhood during the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, May 31, 2021, in Tulsa, Okla. he state of Oklahoma says it is unwilling to participate in settlement discussions with survivors who are seeking reparations for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and that a Tulsa County judge properly dismissed the case in July 2023. The Oklahoma attorney general's litigation division filed its response Monday, Aug. 14, 2023, with the Oklahoma Supreme Court. 

(AP Photo/John Locher, File)


OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The Oklahoma Supreme Court will consider a reparations case from survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre after a lower court judge dismissed it last month, giving hope to advocates for racial justice that government may make amends in one of the worst single acts of violence against Black people in U.S. history.

Tulsa County District Judge Caroline Wall dismissed the case on July 9. Survivors appealed and the state's high court agreed last week to consider whether that decision was proper and if the case should be returned to her court for further consideration.

In response to the appeal, the state told the court Monday that it won't consider a settlement with the survivors. The survivors want the state's high court to return the case to district court to determine exactly what occurred and what it would take to fix or abate what they allege is a continuing nuisance created by the massacre.

Just three survivors of the attack are known to still be living, all more than 100 years old. Lessie Benningfield Randle, Viola Fletcher and Hughes Van Ellis have sued for reparations from the city, state and others for the white mob's destruction of the once-thriving Black district known as Greenwood. Several other original plaintiffs who are descendants of survivors were dismissed from the case by the trial court judge last year.


“The survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre are heroes, and Oklahoma has had 102 years to do right by them,” their attorney, Damario Solomon-Simmons, said in a statement to The Associated Press. "The state’s efforts to gaslight the living survivors, whitewash history, and move the goal posts for everyone seeking justice in Oklahoma puts all of us in danger, and that is why we need the Oklahoma Supreme Court to apply the rule of law.”

The lawsuit was brought under Oklahoma's public nuisance law, saying actions of the white mob that killed hundreds of Black residents and destroyed what had been the nation’s most prosperous Black business district continue to affect the city's Black community. It alleges Tulsa’s long history of racial division and tension stemmed from the massacre.

But the state says that argument was properly dismissed by Judge Wall. The judge properly determined that the plaintiffs failed to outline a clearly identifiable claim for relief, Assistant Attorney General Kevin McClure wrote in the state's response to the appeal.

"All their allegations are premised on conflicting historical facts from over 100 years ago, wherein they have failed to properly allege how the Oklahoma Military Department created (or continues to be responsible for) an ongoing ‘public nuisance,’ McClure wrote.

McClure claims the state's National Guard was activated only to quell the disturbance and left Tulsa after the mission was accomplished. The survivors' lawsuit alleges National Guard members participated in the massacre, systematically rounding up African Americans and “going so far as to kill those who would not leave their homes.”

Solomon-Simmons said the state's response denies the need for restorative justice for Black victims.

"We have people that suffered the harm that are still living, and we had the perpetrators, the city, the state, the county chamber, they are still here also,” he said. “Yes, the bombings have stopped. The shooting has stopped. The burning has stopped. But the buildings that were destroyed, they were never rebuilt.”

The attorney general's office represents only the Oklahoma Military Department. Tulsa officials have declined to discuss the appeal, citing the ongoing litigation. A Tulsa Chamber of Commerce attorney previously said that the massacre was horrible, but the nuisance it caused was not ongoing.

In 2019, Oklahoma’s attorney general used the public nuisance law to force drugmaker Johnson & Johnson to pay the state $465 million in damages for the opioid crisis. The Oklahoma Supreme Court overturned that decision two years later.

Oklahoma bank and the Justice Department propose settlement of redlining allegations around Tulsa


The U.S. Department of Justice and a northeastern Oklahoma bank have announced a proposed agreement to settle claims that the bank discriminated in lending to Blacks and Hispanics in the Tulsa area.

Collinsville-based American Bank of Oklahoma used the illegal practice known as redlining in majority-Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in the Tulsa area, including the area of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, according to the Justice Department.

Redlining is an illegal practice in which lenders avoid providing credit to people because of their race, color or national origin.

The practice was used by the bank from 2017 through at least 2021, the Justice Department alleged.

The proposed consent agreement filed in federal court in Tulsa on Monday is pending court approval and calls for ABOK to provide $1.15 million in credit opportunities in neighborhoods of color in the Tulsa area.

“This agreement will help expand investment in Black communities and communities of color in Tulsa and increase opportunities for homeownership and financial stability," Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.

“Remedial provisions in the agreement will open up opportunities for building generational wealth while focusing on neighborhoods that bear the scars of the Tulsa Race Massacre,” Clarke said.

Lawsuit Filed Over "Improve Our Tulsa"

ABOK denied the allegations but said in a statement that it agreed to the proposal to avoid the cost and distraction of lengthy litigation.

Bank chief executive Joe Landon said in a statement that ABOK, with branches in Collinsville, Ramona, Muskogee, Disney and Skiatook, is a small community bank with $383 million in assets and lamented that the Justice Department referenced the 1921 Race Massacre.

“As Oklahomans, we carry a profound sense of sorrow for the tragic events of the Tulsa Race Massacre over a century ago,” Landon said.

The 1921 massacre left hundreds of Black residents dead when an angry white mob descended on a 35-block area known as Greenwood, looting, killing and burning it to the ground. Beyond those killed, thousands more were left homeless and living in a hastily constructed internment camp.

The three known living survivors of the massacre are appealing a ruling that dismissed their lawsuit seeking reparations from the city and other defendants for the destruction of the once-thriving Black district.

Landon said the bank will expand its deposit and lending products and add mortgage and refinancing options in Tulsa and open a new loan production office in a historically Black area of the city.

The Justice Department said the bank will also provide at least two mortgage loan officers for majority-Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, and host at least six consumer financial education seminars annually with translation and interpretation services in Spanish.

ABOK is also to hire a full-time director of community lending to oversee lending in neighborhoods of color in the Tulsa area.

Ken Miller, The Associated Press

SUPERSPREADERS COVID-TRUMPERS
Trump rally attendees dismiss heat and coronavirus concerns as they line up outside Tulsa arena

Temperatures in Tulsa have reached the 90s, and the Trump faithful are camped in an area with hardly a spot of shade

Published: June 19, 2020 By Associated Press

Trump supporters, including a man dressed in a suit representing a border wall even as the mercury hits 90° in Tulsa, line up outside outside the BOK Center arena on Thursday, two days ahead of the first Trump rally since early March. ASSOCIATED PRESS

TULSA, Okla. (AP) — Rick Frazier drove more than 750 miles from Ohio to be one of the first campers in line for President Donald Trump’s first rally in months, undeterred by a days-long wait in searing heat, the growing risk of the coronavirus in Oklahoma or a lukewarm reception from local officials.

The 64-year-old is among scores of supporters who have brought their vans, tents, campers and Trump flags to the parking lots and sidewalks outside the 19,000-seat BOK Center, and who say what matters most is being there to see the president take the stage on Saturday — and to be sure he knows they have his back.


“The big thing is to go in and support the president,” said Frazier, who arrived Tuesday for what will be his 21st Trump rally. Frazier said he feels safe, noting he and other campers are using hand sanitizer to prevent spread of COVID-19.

Tulsa’s mayor, G.T. Bynum, declared a civil emergency and set a curfew for the area around the BOK Center ahead of the rally Saturday night.

The state supreme on Friday afternoon rejected a last-ditch appeal to require that rally attendees adhere to CDC guidelines on face masks and social distancing. The Tulsa lawyer who brought the suit, according to the newspaper Tulsa World, said the goal was to limit the risk to local public health.

The court said the Tulsa residents who had asked that the thousands expected at the rally be required to take the precautions couldn’t establish that they had a clear legal right to the relief sought. In a concurring opinion, two justices wrote that the state’s reopening plan is “permissive, suggestive and discretionary.”

A local convenience-store chain has reportedly opted to close over concerns for employee health and safety rather than seek to capitalize on the influx of prospective shoppers.

The president issued this crackdown threat on Twitter to would-be demonstrators, even as campaign representative Marc Lotter was telling MSNBC that peaceful exercise of the First Amendment right to protest is welcome:

Trump rallies are known for an atmosphere akin to a political tailgate party and have always drawn diehard fans who often travel from event to event and sleep outside for days to secure a spot and pass time. Some are self-described “front-row Joes.” The groups gathering in Tulsa are taking that loyalty to a new level, though some called the coronavirus threat “an exaggeration.”

Temperatures in Tulsa have reached the 90s, and the Trump faithful are camped in an area with hardly a spot of shade. While Trump said Thursday he picked Oklahoma partly because “you’ve done so well with the COVID,” the city has seen record numbers of new coronavirus cases this week, and Tulsa Health Department Director Bruce Dart has pushed for a postponement of the event.

Trump said there had been “tremendous requests for tickets” and that there will be “a crowd like I guess nobody has seen before,” creating the kind of packed, indoor space that scientists say heighten the virus’s spread as compared with outdoor gatherings.

His rallies typically include a lot of shouting and chanting, and attendees often travel from long distances, prompting fears they could be infected and then spread it to people back home, or bring it from their hometowns and become vectors within the Tulsa arena. In an attempt to protect itself from lawsuits, Trump’s campaign added language to the event registration stating guests assumed risk for exposure to COVID-19.

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But meeting with Trump at the White House on Thursday, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt pledged the state is ready, noting its rate of positive COVID-19 tests is lower than many other states. As of this week, Tulsa County has displaced Oklahoma County as the state’s leading COVID-19 hot spot with 1,825 cases.

“It’s going to be safe,” said Stitt, a Trump-aligned Republican who was recommending dining in restaurants even as the World Health Organization made its pandemic declaration in March. “We have to learn how to be safe and how to move on.”

That has not reassured BOK Center management, who requested a written health and safety plan from the Trump campaign on Thursday. In a statement to Oklahoma City television station KFOR, rally organizers appeared unimpressed but said they would review the request.

The Trump campaign said Thursday that it takes “safety seriously,” noting that organizers are providing masks, hand sanitizers and doing temperature checks for all attendees.

“This will be a Trump rally, which means a big, boisterous, excited crowd,” the campaign said. “We don’t recall the media shaming [anti-racism] demonstrators about social distancing — in fact the media were cheering them on.”

Stitt, the governor, suggested in a Fox News interview that the campaign’s response was good enough for him:

Trump had originally been scheduled to speak on Friday. He changed the date amid an uproar that it would occur on Juneteenth, which marks the end of slavery in the U.S., and in a city where a 1921 white-on-black attack killed as many as 300 people. Black community leaders — some of whom characterized the originally targeted date as a slap in the face — said they still worry Saturday’s rally could spark violence.

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Trump has been on a hiatus from the rallies that have been a centerpiece of his campaign — and indeed, unusually, his entire presidency — halting them since March 2 because of the spreading virus, which has killed more than 118,000 people in the U.S. But he has been eager to return to the events, which allow him to rally his base and build the campaign database of supporters. (Campaign manager Brad Parscale has crowed that the Tulsa arena is significantly oversubscribed — going on to describe those requesting the free tickets as having participated in a campaign “data haul.”)

Saturday’s rally also could provide a bit of diversion from criticism over Trump’s handling of the pandemic and the protests following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Rainey Strader, 48, who traveled to Tulsa from Iowa with her husband and 75-year-old mother, said she brought a mask but isn’t sure if she will wear it once she gets inside the venue. Strader said she isn’t worried about COVID-19, which she considers to be “like the flu.”

“It’s just a new thing, and everybody’s worried,” said Strader, who was working a word-search puzzle while she waited Thursday with her mother as her husband slept in their van. “It’s exaggerated.”

Strader’s mother, Catherine Pahsetopah, said she’s also not sure whether she will wear her mask, despite being considered high-risk for COVID-19 because of her age and health problems. She said she’s seen presidents come and go — all the way “back to Eisenhower” — and Trump ranks among the best.

“He’s great. He’s wonderful,” Pahsetopah said, adding: “If John Kennedy knew what happened to the Democratic Party he wouldn’t want them” because of their support for “aborting the babies.”

Delmer Phillips, 41, of Tulsa, described himself and others who showed up early for the rally as “front-row Joes” who are excited to get a glimpse of the president. He said he won’t wear a mask this weekend because he believes he may have already had the virus and has built up immunity.

“I’m personally not so worried about it,” he said. “I believe in God, and I don’t live in fear.”

MarketWatch contributed to this report.