An Oklahoma judge has thrown out a lawsuit that was seeking reparations for
the victims and descendants of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.
Now, look,
if ever there were a clear case in which reparations make sense, this is it.
And unfortunately, the way the judge handled this case, I do disagree with,
we'll get to that in just a moment, but first, what was the Tulsa Massacre?
Well, during the 1921 massacre, an angry White mob descended on the 35-block
Greenwood district, home to most of Tulsa's 10,000 Black residents.
Over one night, attackers burned and looted homes in the area,
killing hundreds of Black residents, destroying local businesses and taking
valuable goods, and that's according to a 2001 state commission report.
Multiple personal property cases after the massacre were also dismissed in 1937.
And the next video will give you even more detail into this
horrific part of our history.
Let's watch.
>> The residents of Greenwood try to defend their neighborhood,
but they don't have a chance.
The National Guard sprays the residents with machine gun fire, and it gets worse.
You have something new up in the air, and
it's airplanes start flying over Greenwood.
There is evidence and I believe this firmly, that at least on one of
the airplanes, a copilot is dropping sticks of dynamite down on Greenwood.
>> This airplanes was up, just raining down the bullets, and
I could see them, and I heard them, and I was so frightened.
>> Greenwood is left a smoldering ruin.
9000 people left homeless.
The dead uncounted estimates range from 75 to 300.
El Doris lived until 2010.
Her granddaughter, Joy McCondichie, keeps her story alive.
>> Now, there was a lawsuit filed in 2020 under an Oklahoma public nuisance law,
and that lawsuit argued that large swaths of Tulsa's Black community
suffers from the damage brought on by the massacre nearly a century later.
Now, there are, believe it or not, three remaining survivors of this massacre.
Their names are Lesie Benningfield, Viola Fletcher, and Hughes Van Ellis.
Their attorneys argue that the massacre contributed to generations of
economic instability for the city's Black community.
Though many Black families fled Tulsa after the attack,
those who remained were never compensated for their losses.
And so the suit was seeking very specific things, okay?
A detailed accounting of the property and wealth lost or
stolen as a result of the attack.
The construction of a hospital in North Tulsa.
And also the creation of a Tulsa Massacre victims compensation fund.
But, unfortunately, the judge in Oklahoma decided to throw out the case.
So Tulsa County District Court Judge Caroline Wall dismissed the case in
a written order after reviewing complaints from the city,
the regional Chamber of Commerce, and other local agencies.
They argued the plaintiff's request to compensate residents for
the destruction of the prominent Black neighborhood would impose a significant
burden on the government's financial stability.
I do want to just quickly also read a comment
that the attorney representing the Chamber of Commerce gave to
the Associated Press a few years ago after the lawsuit had been filed.
This is graphic four.
What happened in 1921 was a really bad deal, and
those people did not get a fair shake, but that was 100 years ago.
So, Cenk, I'm curious what you think, because I think there are some
legitimate questions about when these debates about reparation take place.
I think in this particular case, I mean,
you have very specific surviving victims of something horrific.
Their livelihoods, their lives were upended,
were destroyed as a result of this, I think they deserve reparations.
But the the defendants in this case, those arguing against
the reparations, argued, no, there was no guarantee.
Let me actually give you, in their motion to dismiss, this is graphic three,
lawyers for the state argued that the government cannot be held liable for
civil disobedience, riot, insurrection, or rebellion, or the failure to provide,
providing police, law enforcement, or fire protection, which wait, what?
That last part to me makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
>> Yeah, so, okay, first, overall,
reparations is an enormously difficult issue for reasons I'm going to explain.
This case, on the other hand, is not that difficult.
First of all, they're still alive, so this is not from 500 years ag.
And who are we going to trace back to what, right?
No, they're right there, and they're the victims of that massacre.
That's not that complicated.
So second of all, they're, well, it wasn't the government, it was just random riots.
Really? Where'd the planes come from?
>> Yeah, National Guard.
>> National Guard, sounds like the government, doesn't it?
Dropping dynamite and spraying bullets from airplanes?
No, it was definitely the government, okay?
And second of all, they're, then they say, well,
how could our municipality afford this?
Now, that's an interesting issue when you get to other parts of reparations, but
not in this case because, wait a minute, whenever the municipality does something
wrong, they reward the particular victim, right?
So, for example, in police abuse, we all pay for it.
>> That's right.
>> And we didn't sign up for it.
We hate it. We don't want the police to abuse
people for no reason.
And remember, they win the cases where it's false charges, usually they win.
The police do, and the municipality does.
Usually when the civilian wins, it's a really bad case.
And we have decided as a society, we're all gonna chip in to pay for
that because it's not right for a citizen to live through that, etc.
To me, I think the police should pay for it, but
that's a different conversation, okay?
So is there a precedent for paying people from the general fund of a city,
a state, or the federal government?
Absolutely there is.
Okay, so why is reparations complicated?
Because it depends on the timing, right?
How far back do you go?
How specific is it?
So, for example, San Francisco passed a law that I thought was absurd, and
it's now already, I think Gavin Newsom got rid of it, so it never went into effect.
And that's a rare thing, I agree with Gavin Newsom on where they were,
reparations for every Black person in the city of San Francisco,
and it was just so extreme.
You could buy a house for a dollar, and
everybody else from every other race had to pay for all of the reparations, etc.
No, if they put that into place, San Francisco wouldn't exist.
There'd be no non Black residents.
They would have to foot the bill, an unbelievable,
enormous bill they couldn't possibly pay for.
And where did the Black residents of San Francisco come from?
Where did the non black resident, no, that is totally unworkable, right?
In this case, in the case in Southern California we're going to tell you about,
reparations are perfectly workable.
>> Right. >> So it depends.
I know people hate to hear it depends, but one thing that is clear to me is
we should do just like South Africa did, truth and reconciliation.
And I hear I'm the exact opposite of the right wing when they say,
don't teach Tulsa in the schools.
No, I think everyone in high school should be taught what happened in the Tulsa,
Massacre.
>> Absolutely.
>> Because you got to know where we came from and what happened and why we're here.
If you don't, what's the point of teaching history.
>> Right, yeah, I mean, we're supposed to learn from history.
We're supposed to learn to avoid making the same mistakes.
But I do wanna now move on to a specific instance in which there were reparations,
and it made all the sense in the world.
So this has to do with Bruce's Beach in Los Angeles County and
around the same time as the Tulsa Massacre, basically,
land was taken from a Black family in Manhattan Beach,
California, using eminent domain.
So the involvement of the local government was much more pronounced in that
particular instance.
And so let's discuss it a little bit.
The property was owned and operated by Charles and Willa Bruce for
the benefit of the Black community during racial segregation, right?
So people wanted to go enjoy the beach.
But because of racial segregation,
Black people weren't given the same services that White people were given.
And so this family, right?
They wanted to create a business where Black people can go and change,
be able to prep themselves for the beach, just enjoy themselves,
and have the same services that White people would get.
And unfortunately, that made them a target, okay?
So let's watch this next video, and then I'll tell you what the aftermath was and
the reparations that took place many, many decades later.
>> They had the bathhouse here in the dining hall.
>> Dwayne shepherd is the family historian.
He says the LA County Lifeguard Headquarters now stands where Willa
built Bruce's Lodge.
It became a popular destination for
the Black community when segregation kept them off most beaches.
So people weren't supposed to cross this to go to the beach?
>> They had to walk a half mile in either direction before they could get into
the water.
>> Barricades were built, tires were slashed, and
one real estate agent even admitted he was trying to end the, quote, negro invasion.
>> There was a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan,
they started harassing my family around 1920.
They burned across they threw burning mattresses under the porch of one of
the buildings.
>> City leaders ultimately used eminent domain to shut down
the Bruce's thriving business and make way for a park.
It's a legal maneuver city and
county leaders now confirm was racially motivated.
>> So it was 1924 when the city of Manhattan Beach Council
used eminent domain to close down Charles and
Willa Bruce's business.
And so the property was later, by the way, they used eminent domain.
They're, we wanna build a park.
That's what we want to do. We want to build a park.
It just sat empty.
They did nothing with the land for literally decades.
So it's pretty clear that they just wanted to shut down this Black owned business.
And so it was eventually turned into a park in the 1960s, and
it was renamed Bruce's Beach in 2007.
Then in 2021, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously
to approve returning the county land to the heirs of Charles and Willa Bruce.
And so they did that.
They handed over the land back to the rightful owners, and
then the Bruce family decided to sell it back to the county to the tune of,
I believe, $20 million.
Cenk.
>> Yeah, so that one, again, is pretty clear.
That's the descendants, there's no question.
And I've known about this case a long time because that's actually one of my favorite
parts, to be honest.
And when I read the story behind it, my heart was broken.
And when I found that they were gonna actually compensate them, I was, yes,
finally, just a smidge of justice, right?
They had set up that business there.
The business was thriving.
>> It was, yeah.
>> And that is incredibly valuable real estate.
Conrad Hilton started his hotel chain right around the same time,
and in a similar area.
God knows what could happen, right?
If you let them actually thrive.
And instead, they viciously drove them out of the land.
And again, it wasn't that long ago, right?
And so in this case, super clear.
Definitely give it to them.
Now, some people are upset that they sold it back to the county for $20 million.
No, no that's their-.
>> That's their business business.
>> That's not your business, it's their business.
It was their land, their family, etc.
I know that land.
And they could have gotten 45 million, but there was gonna be a lot of lawsuits etc.
Anyways, God bless our hearts for fighting all the way through and
actually getting some justice here.
But again, back to the original issue of, what do we do in general?
I think if you've got specific ancestors like this and you tie it to a specific
piece of land, a specific massacre, etc, it makes tons of sense, right?
Look here, I'll give you a quick example from my past,
sorry that I use these obscure Turkish examples, but I'm trying to do that so
that it's not biased by what's happening in the American context, right?
So one of my ancestors from my dad's side was taken prisoner of war in a war between
the Ottoman Turks and the Mamluk Turks.
And this was a couple of hundred years ago.
And once you get taken as prisoner war, back then, you were basically a slave.
And now it's not the same thing as America because it wasn't based on race and
it wasn't necessarily permanent.
And my ancestor, after they kept him as a slave for X number of years,
they eventually let him go, right?
So definitely apples and oranges.
I just tell you that as, well, how do we get compensation for that?
No, that's just a war.
But they were wrong.
Can you see how this can get intense?
All the wars, all the slavery, all across the world, all of the wrongs,
all of the injustices, we have to try to fix things as much as
we can without getting so overwhelmed that we can't function, right?
And that it becomes hopeless.
And then people give up and go, then we shouldn't do anything.
That's why I'm positive that we should do reparations in specific cases.
Marianne Williamson has a great line about this, a debt is owed, right?
But most importantly, we have to teach the actual history of this country.
Lastly on that, guys, we took the labor of African Americans
in this country, just stole it for hundreds of years.
How much of a debt is owed for that?
So you can't make that up.
It's too big a number.
But at the same time,
you have to know that this country was built on the backs of Black people.
And so I don't think that Americans overall have
a deep enough appreciation for that, for, hey,
now we have this wild disparity in wealth.
Where did that wild disparity come from?
It didn't come from they're not working hard enough.
And this idiot Republican saying things like welfare queens.
No, it came from this history.
And if you don't teach that, you're not teaching real history, and
people don't know what actually happened.
And by the way, an important part of that is, and I would literally say this too,
guys, this isn't about people that live in this country today.
You, White person in Nebraska, you didn't do it, right?
I'm Turkish, I immigrated here when am eight, I didn't do it,
it's not about blaming people, it's about seeking justice and truth.
There's a giant difference.