Between May 31 and June 1, 1921, as many as 10,000 white residents of Tulsa, Oklahoma, launched a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood, a prosperous Black community remembered today as “Black Wall Street.”
An organized force led by police, National Guard troops, and veterans invaded Greenwood and murdered at least 300 Tulsans, burned and looted homes and churches, and locked the survivors in internment camps, a federal investigation found. At least 1,100 Black homes and 35 city blocks were completely destroyed.
On June 1, 2025, more than a century after one of the nation’s worst racial terror massacres, Tulsa announced that descendants of survivors of the massacre would be offered some form of reparations for the first time.
Monroe Nichols, the city’s first Black mayor, unveiled a $105 million reparations package at an event to commemorate the first Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day.
“For 104 years, the Tulsa Race Massacre has been a stain on our city’s history,” Mr. Nichols said. “The massacre was hidden from history books, only to be followed by the intentional acts of redlining, a highway built to choke off economic vitality and the perpetual underinvestment of local, state and federal governments.”
“Now it’s time to take the next big steps to restore.”
Called “Road to Repair,” the plan is designed to address economic, educational, and health disparities stemming from the massacre. The long-overdue effort is really about “what has been taken from a people, and how do we restore that as best we can in 2025, proving we’re much different than we were in 1921,” Mr. Nichols told The New York Times.
The plan is centered on the creation of a private charitable trust tasked with securing $105 million in assets by the 105th anniversary of the massacre next spring. The trust is meant to fund a $24 million housing fund for homeownership and housing assistance; a $60 million historic preservation fund for building improvements and cleaning up blight; and $21 million for land acquisition and development, small business grants, and scholarships, and to continue identifying victims of the massacre who were buried in mass graves.
The city also plans to release 45,000 pages of Greenwood property records and other historical documents related to the massacre.
“The Greenwood community has waited over a century for meaningful repair,” Tulsa City Council member Vanessa Hall-Harper told The Washington Post. “Our call for $24 million in housing reparations is a direct response to the generational theft of Black wealth that began in 1921 and continued through redlining, urban renewal and neglect.”
Survivors whose homes and businesses were looted and burned were not compensated for the total destruction of their vibrant, thriving community. Nor were they provided accountability or the means to recover and rebuild—as the mayor explained, no one was arrested and no insurance claims were paid.
“Every promise made by elected officials to help rebuild Greenwood at the time was broken,” Mr. Nichols said.
The reparations plan does not include direct cash payments to the two last known survivors of the massacre, Lessie Benningfield Randle, 110, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 111, who received financial gifts from private philanthropists but have never been compensated by the city or state.
Last summer, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit by the known survivors, who sued the city of Tulsa for covering up the attack, portraying Black victims as instigators of the violence, and profiting from the use of victims’ names and stories while survivors and their descendants continue to live in poverty.
Both Ms. Randle and Ms. Fletcher attended the Observance Day event.
Ms. Randle was accompanied by her granddaughter, LaDonna Penny, who told The New York Times she was ecstatic about the trust.
“Restoration and reparation,” she said. “That’s what happened today.”