OK: Lawsuit seeks reparations for 1921 race riot

[2dogs]

If I believed that "reparations" was a good policy (I don't) then certainly these folks would qualify- this was a forgotten tragedy.

Be that as it may, with Johnnie Cochran involved I have to say that any sympathy I may feel is somewhat muted.

Anyway, let's give everyone in the community an "assault" rifle to make sure it never happens again, and "move on".


http://www.sierratimes.com/03/02/25/arpubapok022503.htm

OK: Lawsuit seeks reparations for 1921 race riot
Associated Press
Published 02. 25. 03 at 18:46 Sierra Time

TULSA, Okla. - Black survivors and descendants of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot sued the state and the city Monday seeking reparations for lost loved ones, destroyed businesses and burned homes.

The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Tulsa alleges authorities did not stop and sometimes participated in the riot that left dozens dead, many more missing and hundreds of homes and businesses destroyed.



The Tulsa Reparations Council has assembled a star-studded legal team, including Johnnie Cochran and civil rights attorney Dennis Sweet, for the lawsuit seeking unspecified damages. All are working pro bono.

"We have an obligation to fight hard and leave no stone unturned to find justice," Cochran said. "It's been too long coming, so we must act urgently."

The lawsuit names Gov. Brad Henry and Tulsa police chief Dave Been, the city of Tulsa and its police department as defendants. More than 200 survivors and victim's descendants are plaintiffs.

City attorney Martha Rupp-Carter, Phil Bacharach and Charlie Price, spokesmen for Henry and Attorney General Drew Edmondson, respectively, all said they had not received the lawsuit and could not comment.

Police spokesman Sgt. Wayne Allen said only, "I doubt any of the current (police force) members authorized" any of the atrocities allegedly committed by authorities.

The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, which found similar allegations as in the lawsuit, recommended in February 2001 that survivors and victim's descendants be paid restitution for the May 31, 1921 riot.

Neither the city nor the state have provided any such money. Private organizations have given the more than 100 survivors about $300 apiece, but the plaintiffs said that was not enough.

"That won't pay for a new house or the property the city took from us," said Otis G. Clark, 100, who said white rioters killed his stepfather and his bulldog "Bob" and burned his family's home.

The riot, one of the nation's worst acts of racial violence, started after shots were exchanged between a white lynch mob and blacks trying to protect the intended target, a shoeshiner accused of assaulting a white woman. The shoeshiner was never prosecuted.

Greenwood, a thriving black community, was devastated and has never fully recovered, and investigators estimate that as many as 300 people, mostly blacks, died. About $2 million in property was damaged, the lawsuit says.

Few property owners were compensated because most insurance plans did not cover riot damage, and a host of lawsuits, filed by both blacks and whites after the riot, appear to have been unsuccessful.

"Tulsa gave us a check marked insufficient funds, but today we have some mighty debt collectors," said Tulsa lawyer James Goodwin, one of 16 plaintiffs' attorneys.

The lawsuit alleges that Tulsa police deputized a white mob, and National Guard troops used violence to quell what they perceived to be a "negro uprising."

Also, after the riot, the city of Tulsa enacted illegal zoning requirements preventing blacks from rebuilding their homes, the lawsuit claims. Survivors, like Clark, said the city took their property without due process.

Further, a state law limiting municipalities' liabilities is unconstitutional, the lawsuit claims.

"I would like to have some reparations if they're going to be giving some," said survivor Roanna McClure, 89, who waited out the riot in a neighbor's basement. "They set my grandma's house on fire."

The Legislature passed laws in 2001 aimed at revitalizing Greenwood, setting up a scholarship fund for college-bound descendants of riot victims and appropriating $1.5 million for a riot memorial.

The city is studying economic development opportunities for Greenwood and is providing in-kind services for the $20 million memorial, said Dwain Midget, assistant to the mayor.

 

[Carlos Cabeza]

Dogs, you always have all the dirt !!!! I am not familiar with what occurred that day but 80 years later we ask retribution ?????***!
That's way beyond most people's memory retention.

 

[CZ-75]

I'm seeking reparations from Italy for the times the Romans invaded what are now England and Germany.

 

[Delmar]

I want reparations for all the damage done in all the race riots in all of the cities. My mom wants reparations for the damage done to the carpeting when I was a kid and left the silly-putty where somebody stepped on it. I want reparations for all the hours wasted on trying to get on the net. GROW UP AND GET A JOB YOU BUNCH OF SPINELESS LEECHES!

 

[critter]

Yeah, BUT----the Johnny Cockroaches of the world would be outta work!

 

[Delmar]

should have stepped on him instead of the silly putty

 

[jimpeel]

If you want to find Johnny Cochran just follow the money.

 

[DeltaElite]

I'm gonna sue the Roman Empire for oppressing my English ancestors.

 

[Dorrin79]

Actually - I don't see what the problem is with this assuming

a) the Police Department and/or City Administration were guily of negligence or even Delict (!) in the unrest.

b) people were directly harmed by it

c) the statute of limitations has not expired.

It's not like this is slavery reparation nonsense. If people were directly harmed by government malfeasance they have a right to a redress of grievances, assuming the can prove it in court before a Jury. The only exception would be if the statute of limitations has passed.

Their children and grandchildren, however, do not have standing. that is the difference between this and slavery reparations.

Oh, and 2Dogs, I agree with your comment about arming them to prevent it from happening again. People like to conveniently ignore the fact that most early gun control measures were designed to keep minorities (especially blacks) from defending themselves.

 

[standingbear]

i want reparations too because..durn it,ill think of something

 

[Jim March]

Ya, this is NOT that crazy. And I'm not sure the damages shouldn't follow down the family; if family assets were illegally stripped by the government, those assets should be recoverable.

There's a lot of case law to that effect from American Indian issues.

Mind you, I'm not saying I particularly like Cochran per se, but...this one isn't that radical as it appears to have been gov't policies that were illegal even back then used to hose these people.

 

[rock jock]

Is there no one that cannot sue someone for taking their ancestor's land at some time?

 

[MPFreeman]

Los Angles Korean and White people should sue the state for the 1992 looters too?

Hmmm....

 

[Quartus]

MPFreeman, you ALMOST got it right. This is what would be fair:

The State of California, the county of Los Angeles, and and the City of Los Angeles (on behalf of their taxpaying citizens) should sue the residents of the neighborhoods where rioting took place, since they were either involved or did nothing to stop the trouble. There were major costs incurred by all three levels of government, and those costs should be borne by the rioters and those who enabled them.


Same for Atlanta, etc., where rioting took place after the Rodney King decision.


Oh, and since we're not worrying about the statute of limitations, let's go after the Watts riots of '65.


Works for me.

 

[Dorrin79]

Quartus:

The State of California, the county of Los Angeles, and and the City of Los Angeles (on behalf of their taxpaying citizens) should sue the residents of the neighborhoods where rioting took place, since they were either involved or did nothing to stop the trouble.

1) you can't sue someone for "not stopping a riot". That's ridiculous. Just like you can't sue me if you fall off a ladder in front of me and I don't help you.

2) An arguement could be made for the state attempting to recoup expenses from the actual rioters, which I think would be fine, or for other residents whose property was damaged to be recompensated by the rioters.


1 and 2 are very different things. Conflating them is dangerous.

Jim - I agree wholeheartedly that Cochrane is pretty distasteful. That has no bearing on the merits of the case, however.

 

[2dogs]

For anyone interested in the story, below you will find one version. Also see the link at the end for the definitive (I guess) findings. Maybe someone from Oklahoma on here has info?




http://www.cnn.com/US/9908/03/tulsa.riots.probe/

Tulsa panel seeks truth from 1921 race riot





TULSA, Oklahoma (CNN) -- Beulah Smith and Kenny Booker, two elderly Oklahomans, lived through one of the worst race riots in U.S. history, a rarely mentioned 1921 Tulsa blood bath that officially took dozens of African-American lives, but more likely claimed hundreds. Perhaps even thousands.

The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, formed two years ago to determine exactly what happened, will consider next week the controversial issue of what, if any, reparations should be paid to the known survivors of the riot, a group of less than 100 that includes Smith, now 92, and Booker, 86.

'The gun went off, the riot was on'
On the night of May 31, 1921, mobs called for the lynching of Dick Rowland, a black man who shined shoes, after hearing reports that on the previous day he had assaulted Sarah Page, a white woman, in the elevator she operated in a downtown building.

A local newspaper had printed a fabricated story that Rowland tried to rape Page. In an editorial, the same newspaper said a hanging was planned for that night.

As groups of both blacks and whites converged on the Tulsa courthouse, a white man in the crowd confronted an armed black man, a war veteran, who had joined with other blacks to protect Rowland.


A fabricated newspaper story triggered the violent riots that may have left hundreds, if not thousands, dead
Commission member Eddie Faye Gates told CNN what happened next. "This white man," she said, asked the black man, "'What are you doing with this gun?'"

"'I'm going to use it if I have to,'" the black man said, according to Gates, "and (the white man) said, 'No, you're not. Give it to me,' and he tried to take it. The gun went off, the white man was dead, the riot was on."

Truckloads of whites set fires and shot blacks on sight. When the smoke lifted the next day, more than 1,400 homes and businesses in Tulsa's Greenwood district, a prosperous area known as the "black Wall Street," lay in ruins.

Today, only a single block of the original buildings remains standing in the area.

The official death toll was below 100, most of them black, but there was always doubt about the actual number. Experts now estimate that at least 300 people, and perhaps as many as 3,000, died.

'We're in a heck of a lot of trouble'
Beulah Smith was 14 years old the night of the riot. A neighbor named Frenchie came pounding on her family's door in a Tulsa neighborhood known as "Little Africa" that also went up in flames.

"'Get your families out of here because they're killing ******* uptown,'" she remembers Frenchie saying. "We hid in the weeds in the hog pen," Smith told CNN.

People in a mob that came to Kenny Booker's house asked, "'******, do you have a gun?'" he told CNN.

Booker, then a teen-ager, hid with his family in their attic until the home was torched. "When we got downstairs, things were burning. My sister asked me, 'Kenny, is the world on fire?' I said, 'I don't know, but we're in a heck of a lot of trouble, baby.'"

Another riot survivor, Ruth Avery, who was 7 at the time, gives an account matched by others who told of bombs dropped from small airplanes passing overhead. The explosive devices may have been dynamite or Molotov cocktails -- gasoline-filled bottles set afire and thrown as grenades.

"They'd throw it down and when it'd hit, it would burst into flames," Avery said.


Only a single block remains of the 1,400 homes and businesses that made up the area known as the 'black Wall Street'
Unmarked graves
Many of the survivors "mentioned bodies were stacked like cord wood," says Richard Warner of the Tulsa Historical Society.

In its search for the facts, the commission has literally been trying to dig up the truth.

Two headstones at Tulsa's Oaklawn Cemetery indicate that riot victims are buried there. In an effort to determine how many, archeological experts in May used ground-piercing radar and other equipment to test the soil in a search for unmarked graves.

The test picked up indications that dozens, if not hundreds, of people may have been buried in an area just outside the cemetery.

Further tests will be conducted, but there are no plans to excavate the area.

The Tulsa commission is scheduled to release its final report on the riot in January. For many of the survivors, the issue is not money -- they want an apology.

"We were innocent," Booker said. "We didn't do anything to start this race riot."



http://www.ok-history.mus.ok.us/trrc/trrc.htm

 

[Delmar]

Dorrin79
I agree it sounds crazy, but it does seem that you can sue anyone for anything, real or imagined. And if they don't get you in criminal court, they hang you out to dry in civil court, and can keep doing it until you are down to your shorts. So much for no double jeopardy

 

[Dorrin79]

Delmar -

That's certainly true. And sad. I knew I should have gone to law school... not to be a lawyer, but just to prepare to defend myself against them!

 

[hops]

Just remember: The precedent for reperations has already been set. Germany paids tens of millions for it's crimes against humanity. Why should other oppressed / wronged peoples not also have that right to receive reperations from their opressors?

Closer to home: The U.S. did finally pay something to interned Japaneese-Americans. Again the precedent has been set.

Personally, I do not believe in reperations myself. Life sucks, quite often.

 

[jimpeel]

Huh???

Another riot survivor, Ruth Avery, who was 7 at the time, gives an account matched by others who told of bombs dropped from small airplanes passing overhead. The explosive devices may have been dynamite or Molotov cocktails -- gasoline-filled bottles set afire and thrown as grenades.

I have been aware of this riot for many years and this is the first that I have ever heard of aircraft being used during this riot. I think someone's imagination is running wild in this case.