The Tulsa race massacre report

The report came more than 100 years after a June 1921 report by the justice department’s Bureau of Investigation, a precursor to the FBI, blamed the massacre on Black men and alleged that perpetrators did not violate any federal laws.

The Friday DoJ report, however, acknowledged that the attack by white citizens on Black residents “was so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence”.

“The Tulsa race massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general of the DoJ’s civil rights division, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of [the community of] Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings, and locked the survivors in internment camps.”

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This report lays bare new information and shows that the massacre was the result not of uncontrolled mob violence, but of a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood.”

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The DoJ’s findings acknowledged the role of Tulsa law enforcement in the massacre, including that of Tulsa police who “deputized hundreds of white residents, many of whom – immediately before being awarded a badge – had been drinking and agitating for [a lynching]”. According to the report, more than 500 men were deputized in less than 30 minutes.

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The review includes multiple acknowledgments of the extensive role of law enforcement and city officials encouraging white Tulsans to murder their Black neighbors.

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“As the fires consumed Greenwood, many Black families fled for their lives, leaving behind their homes and valuable items. White residents chased them across and beyond the city, taking into custody men, women, children, the elderly and the infirm, and looting the homes they left behind. The destruction of the district was total. The survivors were left with little to nothing.”

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Despite the report’s findings, Clarke noted that “there is no living perpetrator for the justice department to prosecute”. Last June, the Oklahoma supreme court threw out a lawsuit brought by Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, two Tulsa race massacre survivors, that sought to make the city of Tulsa pay restitution to survivors and their descendants. Randle and Fletcher, who are both 110, were children at the time of the massacre.

  Guardian

One hundred years after the fact.  Will we see Jack Smith's report on Trump crimes sooner than 100 years? And do Oklahoma schools permit the teaching of this incident?

February is Black History Month.