It’s time — past time — that Tulsa’s historic Greenwood neighborhood be granted national monument status, said Tiffany Crutcher, a native of the Oklahoma city that more than a century ago was the site of a white supremacist massacre.
Her hope is that the district, known as “Black Wall Street,” will soon secure that history-honoring and legacy-preserving designation, as the country prepares to observe the 103rd anniversary of the attack on Friday.
The U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on National Parks held a hearing this month considering a bipartisan bill that would establish Greenwood as a protected landmark. Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who introduced the legislation last December with Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, testified.
Also on Capitol Hill fighting for Greenwood to receive monument status was Crutcher, whose great-grandmother escaped the assault in Tulsa. She trusts that the bill’s cross-aisle support bodes well for its passage. The House is expected to introduce companion legislation this year.
“I’m not just excited. I’m ecstatic,” Crutcher, the co-chair of a coalition that’s been pushing Congress and the White House on the issue for years, told Capital B. “If we get this monument designation, we will echo the voices of the survivors who are no longer with us and the voices of the ancestors who built Greenwood. We will never let anyone bury our story again.”
Over the course of about 24 hours starting on May 31, 1921, a white mob laid siege to Greenwood, burning the once-prosperous district to the ground. As many as 300 people were killed, and thousands more were left homeless. State and federal policymakers later described the slaughter as a “riot” in order to circumvent having to help revitalize the district, according to a 2021 Brookings Institution report.
For decades, a culture of silence surrounded the attack. Black Tulsans were afraid to bring up what had occurred, since no one had ever been held accountable for the killings. (Crutcher didn’t learn about the massacre until she went to college, when several people referred to her hometown as “Black Wall Street.” She finally asked her father, whose grandmother was the one who almost didn’t make it out of Greenwood, what they were talking about. The story shocked and angered her.) White Tulsans also avoided confronting the past, driven partly by a sense of shame.
Crutcher described Greenwood’s spectacular rise to affluence in the early 20th century as something like a love story — one of the greatest of all time.
“During Jim Crow, a community one generation removed from slavery developed one of the most prosperous neighborhoods in the country. It was an example of Black excellence,” she said. “They did that by caring for one another. They did that by fighting for one another. And that’s what true love is really about.”
The two remaining survivors of the attack — Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Ford Fletcher, 110 — have been locked in a yearslong struggle for reparations. Black Tulsans continue to suffer from a lack of economic power: Racial disparities in employment, education, and wealth have roots in the massacre, per a 2020 Human Rights Watch report.
Last month, the survivors entered the Oklahoma Supreme Court to appeal a judge’s 2023 dismissal of their lawsuit seeking restitution. They said in a joint statement that their “now-weary bodies have held on long enough to witness an America, and an Oklahoma, that provides race massacre survivors with the opportunity to access the legal system.” It’s unclear when the justices will come to a decision on the matter.
Hughes Van Ellis, Fletcher’s younger brother and another survivor, died of cancer last October at 102 years old. On the centennial of the assault, the World War II veteran testified to Congress, declaring that he didn’t want to “leave this earth” without obtaining justice.
An attorney for the survivors, Damario Solomon-Simmons, argued that Oklahoma won’t do the right thing without pressure from the White House and the U.S. Department of Justice.
“There’s never been a criminal investigation into the massacre, and the federal government has the ability to do that under the Emmett Till Cold Case Act of 2007,” he told Capital B last year, after a judge tossed out the case. “The federal government has a duty, while my clients are still alive, to come in and use its awesome powers to give this community some form of relief.”
Gaining monument status for Greenwood won’t win justice for the survivors or their descendants. But it would provide much-needed solace.
The country doesn’t need any more studies, Crutcher explained. It doesn’t need any more commissions. It needs healing.
“But we can’t get to that place of healing and reconciliation without first acknowledging the truth. And that looks like so many things: cash payments that can help close the racial wealth gap, scholarships for the descendants, land reclamation, memorials, and on and on,” she said. “I believe that if we want to be on the right side of history, then America — the city of Tulsa — needs to make it right.”
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