Legal team seeks justice for Greenwood

John Hope Franklin says he, along with his sister and mother, were "literally sitting on their bags" waiting for his father. Buck Franklin had gone to Tulsa to open a new law office. The family was to join him, but he never made it back to retrieve them. Not that day or the next or the next. It would be six months before they heard from him.

"My mother had heard there was a riot in Tulsa, and there were many casualties," remembers Franklin, who was 6 at the time. "She didn't know if he was living or dead."

In fact, it would be two years before Franklin would see his beloved father again. He was lucky. There were many families who lost loved ones, as well as homes and businesses, in the Tulsa riots of 1921.

The deadly riots occurred after Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoeshine man, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, a young White female elevator operator. A sensational news story in the Tulsa Tribune called for the lynching of Rowland, who had been jailed.

A mob of angry Whites, armed with guns and other weapons, headed to Greenwood, the all-Black section of town. Known as Black Wall Street, it was one of the most prosperous African American communities in the nation at the time, with more than 100 Black-owned businesses.

The mob ambushed the affluent community, setting fire to cars, homes, and businesses and shooting, lynching or beating any Black people who got in the way. By the end of the two-day riots, more than 1,200 homes had been burned down, more than 35 square blocks of property were demolished and as many as 300 people killed - an entire community totally destroyed.

"Everything had been burned to the ground," says Franklin, 88, who is the James B. Duke Professor of History Emeritus at Duke University.

For years, survivors of the riots sought to find an attorney to represent them, but no one would take the case. Now a team of prominent attorneys, including Johnnie Cochran and Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree, has filed a federal classaction lawsuit on behalf of the survivors and the riot descendants, including Franklin. They are hoping to set a precedent for other reparations cases.

"Many of them had a standard of living that was better than that of the average African American; that whole life was destroyed," says Leslie Mansfield, director of the legal clinic at the University of Tulsa College of Law, which is also working on the case. "This is an injustice, and it needs to be fixed."

In 1997, the Oklahoma legislature established a Tulsa Race Riot Commission to investigate the events of the riots. In February 2001 the commission completed its report, finding that the city encouraged the riots by handing out weapons, but instead of compensating survivors for their losses, the legislature awarded them with commemorative medals.

"That was the last straw - the unwillingness of the state legislature and city of Tulsa to recognize their culpability in the face of all the findings," says Franklin, who was a member of the commission.

The new legal team is asking that the recommendations adopted by the commission be fulfilled. They include: reparations for survivors and their descendants, a scholarship fund for Greenwood residents, a memorial and an economic development enterprise zone in the historic Greenwood district. The Oklahoma attorney general's office, however, has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, saying the statute of limitations ran out in 1923.

"The evidence is so clear. There were people who were sent here, organized by the government, to destroy the community," Mansfield says. "The city and state liability is incontrovertible."

Franklin just hopes the justice his father sought 80 years ago will finally be served:

"I'm not really interested in the money, that's for the lawyers to decide. I'm interested in those people who were there and suffered. This will determine if equity can be achieved in our lifetime, in our society."

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated May/Jun 2003
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