The story of the last known Tulsa race massacre survivors has always been a race against time. A race to preserve and uplift the history of the brutal moment, a race to give the last living survivors the time and platform to tell their story, and most important of all, a race to allow survivors to see a semblance of compensation for the trauma they experienced.
The reality of the Oklahoma supreme court’s decision last month to uphold a Tulsa county district court judge’s decision to dismiss their lawsuit is that survivors have likely had their last chances for reparations denied. The reparations conversation around the Tulsa massacre has always been convoluted by an indignant air by the courts and state legislators of “why should we have to pay for this” and even more of an: “Isn’t acknowledging it happened enough?” When we consider the estimated 300 Black people who died from the violence and the challenges faced by families in the years after to fight for justice or compensation, acknowledgment – particularly with just two survivors left – feels like pennies in comparison. It’s difficult for any descendants to be made whole when parts of their family tree were wiped out so swiftly. But the Tulsa race massacre is a reminder that while there isn’t a magic number that can quantify Black pain, there are real economic reverberations that Black trauma can have across generations.
