Reparations, African Americans: Tulsa Race Riot: Call for Reparations

This film tells the story of the survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and their quest to get justice (reparations). In part the film is about the struggle for the soul of America and the efforts to right a wrong that is long past due and get reparations for what they lost during the race riot of 1921.

Tralier for the film.

On the morning of June 1, 1921, a White mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing Blacks from Whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a Black community then celebrated as one of America's most prosperous. 34 square blocks of Tulsa's Greenwood community, known then as the Negro Wall Street of America, were reduced to smoldering rubble. The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, formed two years ago to determine exactly what happened, has recommended that restitution to the historic Greenwood Community would be good public policy and do much to repair the emotional as well as physical scars of this most terrible incident in our shared past.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot was the country's bloodiest civil disturbance of the century. Leaving perhaps 150 dead, 30 city blocks burned to the ground, and more than a thousand families homeless, the riot represented an unprecedented breakdown of the rule of law. It reduced the prosperous Black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma to rubble. Alfred Brophy draws on his own extensive research into contemporary accounts and court documents to chronicle this devastating riot, showing how and why the rule of law quickly eroded. Equally important, he shows how the city government and police not only permitted the looting, shootings, and burning of Greenwood, but actively participated in it. Reconstructing the Dreamland concludes with a discussion of reparations for victims of the riot. That case has implications for other reparations movements, including reparations for slavery.

James Hirsch focuses on the de facto apartheid that brought about the Greenwood riot and informed its eighty-year legacy, offering an unprecedented examination of how a calamity spawns bigotry and courage and how it has propelled one community's belated search for justice. Tulsa's establishment and many victims strove to forget the events of 1921, destroying records pertaining to the riot and refusing even to talk about it. This cover-up was carried through the ensuing half-century with surprising success. This book shows vividly, chillingly, how the culture of Jim Crow caused not only the grisly incidents of 1921 but also those of Rosewood, Selma, and Watts, as well as less widely known atrocities. It also addresses the cruel irony that underlies today's battles over affirmative action and reparations: that justice and reconciliation are often incompatible goals. Finally, Hirsch details how Tulsa may be overcoming its horrific legacy, as factions long sundered at last draw together.

Hearing before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, first session, on H.R. 1995, April 24, 2007. Tulsa-Greenwood Race Riots Claims Accountability Act of 2007 - Provides that any Greenwood, Oklahoma, claimant (a survivor or descendant of victims of the Tulsa, Oklahoma, Race Riot of 1921) who has not previously obtained a determination on the merits of a Greenwood claim may, in a civil action commenced within five years after enactment of this Act, obtain that determination.