by Randy Krehbiel Published Jul 10, 2023
Attorneys will appeal the dismissal of a lawsuit connected to Tulsa’s 1921 Race Massacre and ask the U.S. Department of Justice to intervene, they said Monday.
“We will not go quietly,” said lead plaintiffs’ attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons, reading a statement attributed to the three last known survivors of the massacre. “We will fight until our last breath. Like so many Black Americans, we carry the weight of intergenerational racial trauma day in and day out.”
Solomon-Simmons later called on the Biden administration’s Department of Justice to investigate Tulsa.
Tulsa County District Judge Caroline Wall’s minute order dismissing with prejudice Randle, et al, v. City of Tulsa, et al, appeared on the Oklahoma State Courts Network website late Friday evening. The formal written order and any written opinion were not yet available Monday evening, and the defense attorneys said they have not received them.
During a Monday afternoon press conference at Vernon AME Church, Solomon-Simmons, the other attorneys and state Rep. Regina Goodwin voiced their outrage at what was described as Wall’s “backpeddling” after she allowed a pared-down form of the suit to continue last year.
In a press release earlier, Solomon-Simmons had called Friday’s ruling “perfunctory, unfounded, and nonsensical.”
Last year, the plaintiffs’ attorneys said Wall’s decision to grant in part and dismiss in part motions to dismiss meant the case would go to discovery, leading to either a trial or a settlement.
At least some of the defendants’ attorneys did not interpret the August 2022 decision that way. In court filings, they argued that it effectively closed any avenue of relief.
The suit was originally filed on Sept. 1, 2020, on behalf of Lessie Benningfield Randle as a 105-year-old survivor of the massacre and others, including direct and collateral descendants of people damaged by the massacre, Vernon AME Church and the Tulsa African Ancestral Society. Two other survivor plaintiffs, Viola Fletcher and Hughes Van Ellis, were added several months later.
Such suits have been attempted before, including a 1920s test case involving a white property owner, but none has succeeded. This one, however, took a different tack.
Although the survivors, now 109, 108 and 102 years old, became the face of the lawsuit, its scope was actually more far-reaching. Pursued under the state’s public nuisance law, it sought recourse not only for living survivors of the Race Massacre but for what it said has been a pattern of exploitation and abuse of the Greenwood area, which was all but destroyed in 1921.
This continuing pattern, the plaintiffs argued, fit the definition of an ongoing public nuisance and was therefore exempt from any statute of limitations, the reef upon which all other race massacre-based legal vessels of the past two decades have run aground.
Michael Swartz, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, said Monday that the entire country was watching the case and that “they are teaching this case in law schools.”
Solomon-Simmons said the decision was “a hurtful blow in our quest for justice, not just for Greenwood but for Black people throughout this country.”
Solomon-Simmons and his attorneys adapted arguments similar to those used by then-state Attorney General Mike Hunter to win an initial $465 million judgment against opioid manufacturer Johnson & Johnson.
When that decision was overturned by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in 2021, however, the Greenwood plaintiffs’ arguments had to be reworked. In her August 2022 decision, Wall dismissed most of the plaintiffs and their claims, saying the suit sought political, not legal remedies. She left only Randle, Fletcher and Ellis and the right to make a case for damages under the public nuisance ordinance.
At least some of the defendants’ attorneys, however, argued that because Wall had dismissed all ongoing public nuisance claims, Randle’s, Fletcher’s and Ellis’ were essentially rendered moot by a two-year statute of limitations that, because the three were minors in 1921, would have expired no later than 1940.
By Monday evening, it was unclear whether that was the basis for Wall’s dismissal.
In any event, the lawsuit — like those before it — is about bending the arc of public opinion as well as the law.
“No civil rights attorney accepts the first ‘no.’” said attorney Cordal Cephas. “If we accepted the first ‘no,’ we’d be attending segregated schools right now.”
Attorney Sara Elena Solfanelli said interest in the lawsuit has perhaps flagged somewhat since the Race Massacre Centennial two years ago. For that reason, she said, “it is so important that everybody keep watching.”
“Everybody was feeling very positive, thinking that this could be the case that makes a difference and make an impact, not just for Greenwood but for the entire country,” said Solfanelli.
“I implore you. Stay. Keep watching. Keep the pressure on. Pay attention. … The only way (the justice system) works is when everybody pays attention.”
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