OPINION: Biden needs to follow through on promised support for Tulsa survivors

In 2021, in the midst of America’s so-called racial reckoning, the world descended on Tulsa, where a century earlier a heavily armed White mob wiped out the thriving Black community of Greenwood — burning and looting homes and businesses and killing hundreds of citizens. President Biden visited the site, the first sitting president to do so, and in his speech pointedly called what happened a “massacre.” “The only way to build a common ground is to truly repair and to rebuild,” he said. “I come here to help fill the silence, because in silence, wounds deepen.”

Last month, Oklahoma once again deepened the wounds of the Tulsa victims. In an 8-1 ruling, the state’s Supreme Court dismissed the last remaining survivors’ lawsuit against city officials. Biden, who had spoken of repair and filling silence, made no comment.

But 109-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle and 110-year-old Viola Fletcher did. “It seems that the only ‘justice’ permitted for Black Americans are sympathetic words and supposed promises that white Americans, our government, and our justice system will ‘do better,’” their statement said. “But the lip-service continues and tangible justice is consistently denied.”

The Tulsa race massacre is more than a state or local issue. It is a “crime in America” issue — among the worst domestic terrorist attacks in U.S. history. Damario Solomon-Simmons, a lawyer for the survivors and representative of the Justice for Greenwood organization, calls Tulsa “the largest crime scene in America.” He and the survivors were hopeful after meeting with Biden in 2021 — but today, the president’s silence is a pain point. “No one from the White House has reached out to at least express condolences,” he told me. “That’s the bare minimum.”

As their earthly time is running out, the survivors have one last ask for repair. “We ask that the United States Department of Justice intervene and open an investigation into the Massacre and do what Oklahoma has never done. It is not too late to do the right thing.”

For decades, the massacre was omitted from Oklahoma history books and public memory. In reporting in and about Tulsa, I learned that beyond reparations for lost property and harm, the plaintiffs and their supporters have long sought to open processes of discovery that would add to the collective understanding of what happened during those dark days. But Tulsa, and now the Supreme Court of Oklahoma, continue to stand in the way.

The implications of the survivors’ appeal for a federal investigation into the massacre are significant and should be taken seriously by Biden as well as whoever else seeks the presidency in November. As the campaign heats up and candidates jockey for Black votes, the very least the Biden-Harris administration could do is announce support for a federal investigation into the Tulsa massacre.

Cornell William Brooks, a former Justice Department civil rights lawyer and former head of the NAACP, told me the there have been many instances where the DOJ has stepped in when states have declined, or not completed, investigations of racialized murder. None, though, has been on the scale of Tulsa.

One was the case of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers who were murdered in Mississippi in 1964. The Justice Department started an investigation into their murders under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007, which states that governmental justice entities should “expeditiously investigate unsolved civil rights murders,” and “provide all the resources necessary to ensure timely and thorough investigations in the cases involved.” Brooks also cited federal investigations into the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

In a recent paper titled “Normalizing Reparations,” Brooks and Harvard colleague Linda Bilmes argue that the federal government has a “policy norm” of providing “reparatory compensation” to various groups of people for all manner of harm. Such restitution “is a widely accepted, utilized, and institutionalized practice of federal government with centuries of precedent,” they write.

Talking with me, Brooks pointed out that the practice has long been used to compensate victims of racial violence from various identity groups. “The Department of Justice basically oversaw the investigation and reparations schemes for Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II,” he said, adding that the Justice Department also presided over reparations programs for Jewish people subject to the horrors of the Holocaust. The federal American Indian Trust Fund was set up to compensate the descendants of Indigenous people who lost their land rights in the 1800s.

Terrorism victims also have gotten some forms of repair and justice. Family members of the Iran hostage crisis, the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 families received compensation for harm.

Why have Black victims of Tulsa’s mass racial terrorism been denied the same justice for decades?

Time has run out for empty rhetoric and moral navel-gazing about a need for “national conversations” about race. Norms, precedents and tangible, functional systemic delivery systems of investigation and repair already exist in America. They should be deployed for the victims of Tulsa and their descendants.

Karen Attiah is a columnist for the Washington Post and writes a weekly newsletter. She writes on international affairs, culture and social issues. Previously, she reported from Curacao, Ghana and Nigeria.

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