Lawsuit seeks redress for 1921 massacre of Tulsa’s Black district
Al JazeeraA 105-year-old survivor is the lead plaintiff seeking recompense for the ‘public nuisance’ the racist massacre created. It is estimated that up to 300 people were killed during the massacre Tulsa lawyer Damario Solomon-Simmons, who filed the lawsuit along with other members of the Justice for Greenwood Advocates, a team of civil and human rights lawyers, told reporters at a news conference last week that no one “to this day, has been held accountable … someone said recently that the folks that committed the massacre almost got away with it. “Thirty-five city blocks were looted systematically, then burned to a cinder,” the report stated, ” and the twelve thousand population thereof scattered like chaff before the wind.” The lawsuit names seven defendants said to have contributed to the “public nuisance and unjustly enriched themselves at the expense of the Black citizens of Tulsa and the survivors and descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre”. The plaintiffs want the defendants to “abate the public nuisance of racial disparities, economic inequalities, insecurity, and trauma their unlawful actions and omissions caused in 1921 and continue to cause 99 years after the massacre”. However, the historical record shows that a handful of Guardsmen protected the Tulsa armory and the weapons inside from more than 300 rioters,” The Oklahoma National Guard’s Office of Public Affairs said in a statement following the lawsuit.