By The New York Times (U.S.) | Created at 2024-10-01 01:13:32 | Updated at 2024-10-07 16:30:07
6 days ago
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Federal civil rights investigators will review the events surrounding the race massacre for a public report under the department’s Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act.
Audra D.S. Burch writes about race and identity and has previously reported extensively from Tulsa on the 1921 race massacre.
Sept. 30, 2024, 7:26 p.m. ET
More than a century ago, Greenwood, a prosperous Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Okla., was destroyed by a white mob — killing up to 300 people — in one of the worst episodes of mass racial terror in U.S. history.
No person or entity was ever held accountable for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. For decades, survivors and their descendants, community activists and lawyers have fought for both legal and financial justice. Most recently, a reparations case filed by the last known survivors was dismissed by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in June without a trial.
Now, for the first time, the Justice Department is conducting a review of the massacre. The department’s Civil Rights Division’s Cold Case Unit will investigate under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. The act allows the department to investigate civil rights crimes resulting in death that occurred on or before Dec. 31, 1979.
Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said that a public report should be completed by the end of the year.
“We have no expectation that there are living perpetrators who could be criminally prosecuted by us or by the state. Although a commission, historians, lawyers and others have conducted prior examinations of the Tulsa Massacre, we, the Justice Department, never have,” she said.
“When we have finished our federal review, we will issue a report analyzing the massacre in light of both modern and then-existing civil rights law,” she later added.
