The Story of Black Wall Street #017: Reparations Then, Reparations Now
This year I've been reporting on a reparations settlement achieved decades ago in Florida at the same time a new quest for economic justice was unfolding in Tulsa
Welcome to the sixteenth edition of Run It Back, my biweekly newsletter about neglected black history. For the foreseeable future the newsletter will be focused on Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, which I’m currently writing a book about for Random House.
A Quick Note
Since this story is about a major new freelance piece of mine, it’s worth pointing out I have a redesigned professional website. There you can see all the major articles I’ve written for various outlets over the last year, as well as some of the articles tied my current work that I wrote as a staffer at The Ringer and Time. Check it out at vicluckerson.com
Your Regularly Scheduled Run It Back
Nearly every Wednesday, at 4:30 p.m., Rev. Robert Turner stands at the corner of Second Street and Cincinnati and Avenue with a simple message. The bullhorn he carries with him was a gift from a member at his church, Vernon AME. The picket sign he wields is often buttressed by similar signs surrounding him. His has become a collective effort, even on the days when it feels like he’s standing all alone, casting a single voice into a maelstrom. “Reparations is due not tomorrow, not next week, not next year,” he says as he casts his bullhorn toward the gleaming windows of City Hall. “Reparations is due now.”
On July 15, when Turner arrived downtown for his weekly demonstration, about one hundred mostly white people were already protesting in front of City Hall in opposition to mask ordinance the city council was expected to consider that day. As Turner began speaking into his bullhorn, he was drowned out by chants of "U-S-A" and indiscriminate screaming. Women grabbed his arm, sizing him up in a way that he later said gave him a small inkling of how it would have felt to be a slave on an auction block. At one point someone poured water on him. Others mocked him by waving dollar bills and credit cards in front of his face. The entire exchange was captured on video. Watching it just an hour after it happened I sensed the atmosphere I had felt near the June 20 Trump rally, where there was a lot of anger and hate condensed into a very tight space. "It was the most paralyzing moment I've ever had,” Turner told me later.
But he kept moving, eventually. The next week, approximately 50 people, wearing masks and supporting Turner’s effort, marched with him from City Hall to Vernon AME, the only structure still standing in Greenwood that predates the 1921 race massacre. On the way the pastor served as an impassioned walking tour guide of a century’s worth of injustice. He stopped at a sidewalk plaque marking the former office of H.A. Guess, a black Tulsa attorney and Vernon trustee member whose building was burned down during the massacre. He noted how the highway had bisected the neighborhood and ruined its chances of revitalization in the 1960’s as we walked under the roaring underpass. And he noted how the ever-more-encroaching hotels, gelato shops, and advertising agencies were planting white businesses on what used to be black-owned land.
After the march, Turner placed his picket sign and bullhorn in their rightful places behind the large wooden desk in his office. He smiled as he thought of the contrast between what had transpired that day compared to the week before. “It gives me hope for America. It gives me hope for Tulsa,” he said. “The words of Margaret Mead are true: It doesn't take a whole lot of folks to change the word, just a dedicated few.”
Rev. Robert Turner and other protesters march from City Hall to Vernon AME in support of reparations for Tulsa massacre survivors and descendants. Photo courtesy Joseph Rushmore.
For the last year I’ve been plugging away at a story about a race massacre that did not take place in Tulsa. In Rosewood, Florida, in 1923, at least six blacks were killed and several dozen forced from their homes by an armed white mob that had initially been formed to seek out an alleged black rapist (never found or proven to exist). The mob became a revenge brigade after two of their own were killed in an attempt to forcibly enter a black family’s home. Nine survivors of that awful attack were awarded $150,000 reparations by the Florida legislature in 1994, and for some of their descendants, the generational impacts of that money are still quite apparent. The feature is in the Sept. 21/Sept. 28 issue of Time magazine and available for free online. I hope you’ll take some time to read it when you get a chance.
I am a pragmatic person by nature, and so it’s a bit ironic that I’ve thrust myself into a life writing about historical racial traumas and how they weave themselves into the present day. There’s no reason to relitigate the past if you don’t have any optimism that doing so can bring about a better future. So I’m always on the lookout for that hope. Reporting this feature, I found it quite energizing to travel to Florida and sit with the kin of Rosewood survivor Willie Evans, all of whom value education and many of whom used Rosewood scholarships to further their dreams (a photo of four of them—Benea Denson, Keri Miller, Ebony Pickett and Raghan Pickett —is in the Time piece). I smiled inwardly at how much the quirks of Mary Hall Daniels’ dream home in Hilliard, Florida reminded me of my own grandmother’s in Montgomery, Alabama--both women were born in 1920 in the Deep South, loved watching daytime courtroom shows on tiny kitchen television sets, and were proud owners of closets full of elegant Sunday service fits. In particular, wading through the legal files stacked up in the weathered boxes of Martha Barnett’s office was a revelation. I held reparations checks made out to Minnie Lee Langley and Wilson Hall from the state of Florida in my own fingers. The idea that our nation, so obsessed with bulldozing into the future, could actually reach back and attempt to rectify past wrongs felt more achievable to me than it ever had before.
I went to Florida in February, when the coronavirus was a looming but still vague threat. During my reporting, I watched the air deflate from the nascent reparations movement as the economy collapsed the next month. People like Florida state senator Randolph Bracy, who wants reparations for descendants of a Rosewood-like attack in Ocoee, Florida, did the math that demanding government payments to Black people, plus a cascading national recession, plus already-skeptical white voters, equaled a political non-starter. Better luck next year. In one early version of my Time story, I wondered whether coronavirus would smother reparations’ political momentum the way the 9/11 attacks did in 2001.
Then George Floyd was killed and the entire globe rose up in defiance against police violence. That spark of anger spread to seemingly every institution that undergirds our society. And with the harsh light of inquiry shining so bright, bold and sweeping action suddenly made way more sense to way more people. Reparations went from appearing dead in the water to peak political viability in a matter of weeks.
Carlous Hall, a descendant of Roosewood massacre survivor Mary Hall Daniels, in the home she bought with her reparations settlement, along with his wife Latasha and his two sons Carlton and Carlous Jr. Photo courtesy Rahim Fortune.
Now cities are actually pledging to enact reparations--or more specifically, to enact studies to consider how they may implement reparations in the future. If Rosewood offers any important lessons, it’s that a specific person who was harmed needs to receive a specific and tangible form of redress in order to achieve the goal of repair. That is a long, complicated, and contentious process, as my reporting attempts to thoroughly explain. Hopefully, understanding that people successfully waded through all the messy mechanics in the past will give current leaders the motivation to follow through on direct action. Museums, memorials, and resonant quotes in magazine articles are nice, but they are not redress.
As reparations bounced up and down in relevance this year like a political pinball, Rev. Turner was out there in front of City Hall each week demanding justice for Tulsa’s race massacre descendants. Earlier this month, he joined the reparations fight more directly, when Vernon AME became a plaintiff in a reparations lawsuit against the city of Tulsa. This is at least the third concerted effort by massacre victims to be made whole, after a wave of individual lawsuits in 1923 and a major suit on behalf of more than one hundred living survivors in 2003. Today, there are two known survivors left--a third, Hal Singer, died shortly before the suit was filed. The political winds will continue to shift, I’m sure. The names seeking justice on a court docket change from generation to generation. But I believe as the story of Tulsa’s darkest moment reaches more and more people in the coming years, there will always be someone standing in front of City Hall with that bullhorn, demanding justice.
This past Wednesday, after Turner led a group of about 10 protesters and journalists on the march to Greenwood, I asked him if the ritual felt different now that he was directly involved in a legal action. Was this physical act still necessary? He gave me that same knowing smile. “God hasn’t told me to stop yet.”
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