TOP COURT RULES NO REPARATIONS FOR TULSA SURVIVORS

You don’t deserve reparations just because you survived a racist atrocity, even if it was facilitated by the authorities - that’s the message of Oklahoma’s top court.

On 12th June, it ruled against three people - all in their hundreds - who lived to tell the tale of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

Viola Ford Fletcher (109), Lessie Benningfield Randle (110) and now-deceased Hughes Van Ellis (102) filed for compensation in 2020, but had their case thrown out by a lower court, which argued that “simply being connected to a historical event” confers no right to reparations.

And Oklahoma’s Supreme Court agrees - agrees that White-supremacist mobs rampaging with police help though your neighbourhood, killing your friends and neighbours, destroying their property and businesses and leaving some 10,000 of you homeless, is not a good reason to compensate the trauma you went through as a child.

Has America really moved forward in the last 103 years?