Ogletree seeks reparations for survivors of deadly 1921 Tulsa race riot

Harvard law professor and author Charles Ogletree Jr., a Stanford alumnus and former university trustee, sees himself as a student of history, he told members of the Black Pre-Law Society and others on Feb. 7. So Ogletree was stunned to learn in 2002 about a 1921 race riot in Tulsa, Okla., which, by some estimates, killed hundreds of African Americans and by all accounts decimated a prosperous African American business district known as "Black Wall Street" in less than a day. It was the worst act of domestic terrorism ever perpetuated within the borders of the United States, the legal scholar said. The district, called Greenwood, was home to black-owned banks, hotels and theaters and a black professional class, said Ogletree, who serves as counsel for the Reparations Coordinating Committee, which seeks reparations for the "contemporary victims of slavery and the century-long practice of de jure racial discrimination which followed slavery." For African Americans, Greenwood "was the mecca of all America," Ogletree said. "Hatred, bigotry and prejudice took it away in the blink of an eye," he said. The obscurity of the 1921 riot is no accident, but the result of a decades-long "conspiracy of silence" so effective that until recently a former Tulsa mayor was unaware of the riot's occurrence, Ogletree told the Kresge Auditorium audience. And from 1921 until 2001, when a 185-page report on the riot commissioned by the Oklahoma state legislature was published, there was a "pervasive sense" that African Americans were the cause, rather than the victims, of mob violence, he said. [more]