Judge Weighs Suit on Tulsa’s ’21 Riot

This city’s black community continues to suffer a sadness that descended after a race riot 83 years ago, civil rights advocates told a judge Friday, as survivors got their long-awaited chance to press for reparations.

U.S. Senior District Judge James Ellison will consider a foot-high pile of evidence in the coming weeks before determining whether a lawsuit seeking to hold the city and state responsible for the riot will be allowed to proceed to trial.

The case is seen as significant by those who back a national campaign to seek reparations for slavery, arguing that slavery and Jim Crow segregation have never been accounted for. A finding that the state or city was complicit in the riot could shape the legal strategies in the reparations movement, experts said.

No one disputes that racism was a prevailing sentiment among Tulsa whites in 1921. That May 31st, a white mob descended on the city’s jail intent on lynching a black teen who had been accused of assaulting a white woman -- charges that were later proved untrue. Challenged by a group of black men, the mob torched a 35-square-block area of Tulsa’s thriving Greenwood neighborhood, where most of the city’s blacks lived. By the next afternoon, as many as 300 people were dead.

The destruction of much of the black community was a “terrible event,” Deputy City Atty. Larry Simmons said during the hearing Friday. But he said that doesn’t mean the plaintiffs in the case -- 100 survivors and 300 descendants -- can sidestep the limits of the law.

Lawyers representing the state and city denied that the government was complicit in the riot, and argued that under state law, the statute of limitations for a civil action like the one Ellison is considering is two years, rendering debate over merits of the case moot.

“It is a lesson in tragedy,” Simmons said. “We should remember it, study it and learn from it. But if you are going to file a lawsuit, you are going to lose. We didn’t hide the riot. If people wanted to pursue their rights, they could have done it then.”

In an interview, Simmons conceded there was no evidence that any black family was compensated for property lost during the riot -- although hundreds of homes, schools, churches and businesses were destroyed. There is a record of one person winning compensation. The white owner of a pawnshop got about $3,000 after arguing that the Tulsa Police Department had removed all the guns from his store while deputizing whites during the rampage.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified financial damages and other provisions, including forcing the government to expunge records of official inquiries at the time -- one that blamed a “Negro uprising” and another that exonerated all whites.

Witnesses called by the plaintiffs Friday, including a historian and a psychiatrist, delivered a dissertation on the brutality of the South in the early 1920s. Their testimony was crafted largely to show that the riot was not a 16-hour uprising, as government lawyers assert, but a historic event that altered the black community in Tulsa.

Leon F. Litwack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of American history at UC Berkeley, testified that Tulsa’s riot occurred during perhaps the most repressive period of race relations in the nation’s history.

It was a time when slavery had ended, but the civil rights movement was not yet underway. And whites, Litwack said, had set up a social structure to keep blacks “in their place” by removing them from voting rolls, for example, and restricting their access to education.

Several elderly women held their hands over their ears as Litwack described how whites used lynchings not only to kill a person, but to terrify a community.

“Executions,” he said, “had become public theater.”

Blacks at the time also lived under the impression that if they “behaved themselves,” they would be left alone, testified Eric Caine, chairman of psychiatry at the University of Rochester, N.Y., and a specialist in the studies of geriatrics and grief.

That’s why the riot had such a “profound effect,” Caine said. “It just didn’t make sense” to the residents of Greenwood, he said. “It was above and beyond anything they could have imagined -- seeing your home burned down, seeing your parents dragged off, having to escape into the woods.”

Greenwood never fully recovered, the witnesses argued. When Caine testified that blacks were “walking on eggshells” after the riot, one woman in the crowded courtroom murmured: “That’s still going on.”