More than a century after the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre claimed more than 300 Black lives and destroyed a thriving neighborhood, the city's mayor unveiled a landmark $105 million reparations package to address the lasting impacts of the devastating attack.
Announced on Sunday, the package is the first major initiative to meet the massacre — one of the deadliest acts of racial violence in U.S. history — with monetary commitments.
"We've worked to recognize and remember, but now it's time to take the next big steps to restore," said Monroe Nichols, Tulsa's first Black mayor.
Nichols' support establishes a private charitable trust, called the Greenwood Trust, which will work to secure $105 million over the course of the next year, before the 105th anniversary of the massacre.
The money from the trust will be divided into three main initiatives:
- $24 million will establish a housing fund to support homeownership and housing assistance for descendants
- $60 million will target cultural preservation, improving existing buildings and cleaning up the area
- $21 million will be designated for land acquisition and development, small business grants and scholarships
"Imagine if Greenwood would have continued to thrive uninterrupted," Nichols said to attendees at a Sunday's memorial celebration. "Imagine what that would have meant for our economy. Imagine what it would have meant for outcomes for our children."
On May 31 and June 1, 1921, as a targeted attack on its Black residents, white Tulsans burned the city's Greenwood neighborhood to the ground. Thirty-five blocks were left smoldering, and the north Tulsa city lost the successful restaurants, hotels, grocery stores and theatres that gave it the name Black Wall Street.
In January of this year, after a months-long investigation, the U.S. Department of Justice reported the massacre was not the result of uncontrolled mob violence, but a "coordinated, military-style attack." In its aftermath, the City of Tulsa resisted offers of meaningful help to the victims and "utterly failed to provide necessary aid or assistance," the report says.
The massacre's last two living survivors, who are 110 and 111 years old, have been seeking financial compensation for years. In 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed their lawsuit. On Sunday, Nichols thanked Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Ford Fletcher, calling them the "keepers of Greenwood."
Along with establishing the Greenwood Trust, the city released 45,000 pages of historical documents related to the massacre, as recommended by grassroots advocacy nonprofit Justice for Greenwood.
Nichols' administration has also dedicated $1 million of Tulsa's budget to continue the city's search for mass grave sites and continue efforts to identify Greenwood descendants.
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