OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The Oklahoma Supreme Court has rejected a request to reconsider its ruling to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the last two known living survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Without comment, seven members of the court on Tuesday turned away the request by 110-year-old Viola Fletcher and 109-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle to rehear its June ruling that upheld a decision by a district court judge in Tulsato dismiss the case.
Justice James Edmondson would have reheard the case and Justice Richard Darby did not vote.
Fletcher and Randle survived the massacre that is considered one of the worst single acts of violenceagainst Black people in U.S. history.
Concerning the original case with Judge Caroline Wall in 2023, the following - not from this article - is rather revealing:
Identifying as a Constitutional Conservative, Judge Wall has openly conveyed her commitment to “Exercising justice through Judeo-Christian values,” as stated on her campaign page. However, her principles and ideology have faced close scrutiny in light of her ruling to dismiss the lawsuit regarding the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Many have raised concerns regarding her pledges to “ensure people’s rights to swift justice” and “protect the rights of victims and juries,” given that these promises do not seem to align with her decision to deny the survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre their opportunity for a day in court.
While Judge Caroline Wall’s social media presence appears to be minimal, she does maintain a Twitter account under the handle @realJudgeWall. Notably, Wall follows only three individuals on Twitter, one of them being Donald Trump.
And despite the (then) three centenarians in the original 2023 case attending all hearings, the Judge Caroline Wall was very peculiar in how she conveyed the verdict:
Judge Caroline Wall is also facing scrutiny for the manner in which the dismissal was communicated, or rather, the lack thereof. Attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons revealed that he learned of the dismissal through the news and did not receive formal documentation until after the press conference.
Fast-forwarding to today, I guess it was just convenient in the latest developments to just quietly dismiss the appeal attempt. i.e. since a Trump-inspired judge with Judeo-Christian values saw fit to deny justice to survivors of that horrible attack.
That raw Judeo-Christian hatred is palpable. You can feel it.
What a disappointment.
Could have done the right thing one last time for people who actually experienced it.
Instead, it’ll remain a black mark on the state and now doubly so. We’ll have to wait for the epilogue 100 years from now.
But I suppose you couldn’t have expected much more from a folk who takes pride in stealing land, and doubling down by cheating when doing so.
This is just a slap in the face. But, what can I say, we live in a country that would rather try to pretend racism doesn’t exist, instead of fix any of the systemic issues.
Those systemic issues are there by design. And it’s a design they want.
The system is not broken. It’s working perfectly for the people it was meant to work for. That just isn’t most of us.
Without comment… Cowards.
This is one for the “There’s no systemic racism in America!” crowd
the world would be a better place without OK
Can’t this be taken to US Supreme court? Obviously OK does not want to convict themselves of wrong doing.
I mean, yeah. This is the right decision. There is not a remedy at law for the court to render a decision on.
Why not damages?
You don’t even get to damage because there isn’t a cause of action. The underlying lawsuit was brought under a public nuisance statute that doesn’t apply. This isn’t a matter for the courts, at least until the legislature creates a legal theory.
That’s incredibly old.
You mean the survivors… yeah 100 is incredible!
Yeah I mean the women, they’re incredibly old. I don’t mean it’s incredibly old news, if I meant that I would have said “that was an incredibly long time ago”. I’m not American, I don’t actually know anything about the incident in question.
It was a long time ago. 1921. These people have lived long lives with no justice.
And yet, they still refuse to even consider taking any kind of responsibility
Honestly, I don’t know anything about the incident, I’m not American. So I can’t comment. On the face of it, you’d think enough time had passed for there to be an official apology or something. I don’t actually know who “they” would be in this instance.
So this summary I’m going to give really does not do justice to the whole situation, but I’m going to try to be brief-yet-informative:
In 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma, a black teenager, Dick Rowland, was arrested for ‘assaulting’ a white woman (most reports say he likely just tripped and accidentally touched her as he fell; she declined to give a statement). At the time, the black community in Tulsa was one of the most financially successful in the country, colloquially called “Black Wall Street.” Meanwhile, the KKK and racism in general were at a historic high across the entire country, not just the South. As news spread over the arrest, a large group of white people (some of whom had been deputized earlier that day for this exact purpose) arrived at the jail to lynch Rowland as well as a smaller group of black people who arrived to defend him from what was certainly going to be his death. Some sources disagree on how EXACTLY the violence started but the general consensus is that the police convinced the black group to go home but someone in the white mob tried to disarm them before they left, possibly even trying to wrestle away someone’s gun. A shot was fired, and then many, many shots. Over the next 16(ish) hours, white mob violence burned down 35 square blocks of Black Wall Street (at least 1250 homes), somewhere between 50-300 people died, many hundreds more were injured, and not a single criminal charge was brought to anyone. Also insurance companies refused to compensate the black families because obviously
Fast forward to 1996, and the city of Tulsa formed a committee to investigate the Massacre (only 75 years late). The committee found that the city was at least partially responsible and should (among other things) pay reparations to the few remaining geriatric survivors who would have been mere children at the time. The city refused to do follow their advice (even though they were the ones who MADE the committee in the first place) so a lawsuit was attempted. It was thrown out because the statute of limitations (which was only 2 years for a civil rights claim) had long since passed. Although the city DID give out some medals to the survivors as if they were fucking Olympic athletes or something and not the victims of a state-supported hate crime/murder spree
It’s another example in a very, VERY long list of American hypocrisy, broken promises, and racism that we refuse to even acknowledge on an official level. It’s kinda similar to modern-day Japan denying that they committed any war crimes during World War 2 despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary
