Justice Department launches first federal review of 1921 Tulsa race massacre

By Reuters and Michelle Garcia

The U.S. Justice Department has launched a review and evaluation of the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke said.

The massacre started on May 31, 1921, when white attackers killed as many as 300 people, most of them Black, in Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood neighborhood, which had gained the nickname “Black Wall Street.”

In announcing the review Monday, Clarke said the Justice Department aims to finalize it by the end of the year.

“When we have finished our federal review, we will issue a report analyzing the massacre in light of both modern and then-existing civil rights law,” said Clarke, who oversees the Justice Department’s civil rights enforcement efforts.

The review will be conducted under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows the Justice Department to investigate death-resulting civil rights crimes that occurred on or before Dec. 31, 1979.

The massacre started after a Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman.

In addition to the deaths of hundreds of people, more than 35 square blocks were destroyed, annihilating houses and businesses. Experts say the cost of the destruction, resulting in a loss of generational wealth for Black families in Tulsa at the time, has been underestimated.

More than a century after the massacre, only two people survive, Viola Fletcher and Lessie Benningfield Randle. Along with Hugh Van Ellis, who died a year ago at 102, the women were part of a lawsuit seeking reparations for the race riot. In July, an Oklahoma judge dismissed their case.

“We have no expectation that there are living perpetrators who could be criminally prosecuted by us or by the state,” Clarke said. “Although a commission, historians, lawyers and others have conducted prior examinations of the Tulsa Massacre, we, the Justice Department, never have.”

Clarke said the department is examining available documents, witness accounts, scholarly and historical research and other information related to the massacre.

“We only know about 10% of what actually happened,” Damario Solomon Simmons, an attorney representing the remaining survivors and descendants of the massacre, told NBC affiliate KJRH. “Who actually participated, those are things we don’t have the capacity as private attorneys to get some of that information that we hope the federal government can help fill in some of those gaps.”