Ogletree seeks reparations for survivors of deadly 1921 Tulsa race riot
Wednesday, February 16, 2005 at 10:47PM
TheSpook
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]
Article originally appeared on (http://brownwatch.com/).
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