About This Case Study

In 1921, a deputized white mob destroyed thirty-five blocks of Tulsa's Greenwood District — Black Wall Street — killing as many as three hundred people. No one was prosecuted, insurance claims were denied, and no compensation was ever paid. This case study works with what happened when remedy finally began to move, a century late. The sequence is the evidence: a state commission investigated and, in 2001, recommended reparations — including direct payments — that the legislature declined to fund. A federal suit built on the commission's findings was dismissed in the mid-2000s on statute-of-limitations grounds. A public-nuisance suit brought by the last survivors was dismissed by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in 2024. The Justice Department then conducted its first federal review, reporting in January 2025 that the attack was coordinated and systematic — and that with no living perpetrators, no prosecution is possible. And on June 1, 2025, the massacre's 104th anniversary, Tulsa's first Black mayor announced the Road to Repair: a $105 million Greenwood Trust ($24 million housing, $60 million cultural preservation, $21 million education and economic development), with funding targeted by June 1, 2026. Each milestone arrived only after the one before it failed. That is the puzzle this case study reads: what the shape of the sequence teaches about how repair moves — and what finally moved was a city trust of investment funds, not the direct payments every earlier framework had demanded.

Evaluation needs a yardstick, and this case supplies three. The first is the 2001 commission's own recommendations: direct payments to survivors and descendants, scholarships, economic development for Greenwood, and a memorial. The second is the demand set maintained by Justice for Greenwood, the survivors' legal and descendant organization: a hospital for North Tulsa, contracting preferences, tax immunity, and a criminal investigation. The third is the federal standard argued by the scholars William Darity and Kirsten Mullen: reparations are a national obligation, sized to close the Black–white wealth gap and paid directly to eligible recipients — a standard on which local, piecemeal programs cannot qualify as reparations at all. The analytical move is to read the Road to Repair as an instrument: to ask what work the plan actually does, for whom, and against which yardstick. You will build the timeline to the most recent milestone you can verify, extract the three yardsticks, and then evaluate — asking what a city can repair, what only a nation can, and what the plan's design choices mean for what counts as repair.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• The City of Tulsa's Road to Repair pages, including the Greenwood Trust's structure and status. Visit the plan.
• The Equal Justice Initiative's report on the announcement. Read the report.
• Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (2001) — you will need the recommendations section. Read the report (PDF).
• Justice for Greenwood's organizational materials and demands. Visit the site.
• The Justice Department's January 2025 announcement and report. Read the announcement.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on currency: This case study reads a live process. The Trust's funding deadline — June 1, 2026 — has passed as of this writing, and establishing what happened is part of the exercise, not something the exercise tells you. Record the date of every figure and status you cite, and the date you accessed each source; your timeline should end with a milestone the materials here cannot contain.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Think of a harm in a community you know that was never repaired. What, concretely, would repair have looked like — and who would have had to provide it?
• When repair comes a century late, who is it for — the dead, the survivors, the descendants, the city's conscience? Can one instrument serve them all?

The Exercise

Phase 1: The Timeline (15–18 minutes)

Build the remedy timeline as a dated sequence in your notes, using the materials above:

1. The commission era. The 1997 authorization, the 2001 report, its recommendations — list them — and the legislature's response. What was recommended, and what was funded?
2. The courts. The federal suit of the mid-2000s and the public-nuisance suit dismissed in 2024. For each: the legal theory, the ground of dismissal, and what the dismissal left intact.
3. The federal review. The Justice Department's January 2025 report: what it establishes, and what it says about the possibility of prosecution.
4. The city's plan. The June 1, 2025 announcement: the Trust's three funds and their amounts, the funding deadline, the records release, the continuing graves investigation.
5. The present. Add the final entry yourself: the most recent development you can verify by your own searching — the Trust's funding status, a new identification, a program launched — with its date and source. This entry is required; the case is live.

As you build, note what each milestone responded to: the pattern here is that each new attempt followed the failure of the one before. Mark the failures explicitly — they are part of the timeline, not gaps in it.

For groups: Assign each member one era — commission, courts, federal review, city plan — then assemble the full timeline together and search for the present-day entry as a group.

Phase 2: Three Yardsticks (12–15 minutes)

Extract the three evaluation frameworks into a grid. For each — the 2001 commission's recommendations, Justice for Greenwood's demands, and Darity and Mullen's federal standard as summarized in the opening — record its answers to four questions: what form does repair take, who receives it, who pays, and at what scale?

• From the commission report's recommendations section: list each recommended remedy and its intended recipients.
• From Justice for Greenwood's materials: list the demand set and note which demands are material, which are legal, and which are symbolic.
• From the federal standard: note what it requires — national responsibility, direct payment, the wealth gap as the measure — and what it therefore rules out.

Where a framework is silent on one of the four questions, record the silence; the gaps matter in Phase 3.

For groups: One pair per framework; reconvene and read the three grids side by side before anyone evaluates anything.

Phase 3: The Evaluation (12–15 minutes)

Now score the Greenwood Trust against each yardstick:

• Against the 2001 commission: which recommendations does the Trust satisfy, in whole or in part — and which, a quarter century later, does it still leave unmet?
• Against Justice for Greenwood's demands: which items does the plan address, and which does the organization's benchmark show missing?
• Against the federal standard: can a $105 million city trust qualify as reparations at all on Darity and Mullen's terms? What, on their argument, can a city simply not do — and is what a city can do therefore worth doing?
• The design choices: the plan's funds invest in housing, preservation, and education rather than making direct payments, and its own language is "repair" rather than "reparations." Treat both as design decisions — what do they gain, and what do they concede?

For groups: Run the three evaluations as three short rounds, with a different member presenting each; log where the yardsticks agree and where they return different verdicts on the same fact.

Phase 4: The Strain Test and the Verdict (10–12 minutes)

Every framework strains somewhere against this case. Work through:

• The strain test. Where does each yardstick strain against reality? Consider: the federal standard against a Congress that has never passed the reparations study bill — is local action better than no action, or does it relieve the pressure for national remedy? The movement benchmark against what a mayor legally controls. The commission's 2001 recipients against the passage of twenty-five years. Name what each framework cannot absorb.
• Read your timeline's shape once more: does the sequence — commission, courts, review, trust — read as progress, as substitution (each attempt standing in for the one that failed), or as both at once? Point to the milestone that decides it for you.
• The verdict. In one paragraph: is the Greenwood Trust reparations, a down payment, or a substitute? Commit to a verdict, name the yardstick it rests on, and state the one piece of evidence — a funding status, a program outcome, a policy change — that would change your mind.

For groups: Take verdicts individually first, then compare: where verdicts differ, trace the difference to the yardstick, not the facts — that traceability is the exercise working.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

The milestone that most changed my read of the timeline was __________. Against the yardstick I find most persuasive, the Trust is __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise, is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly which milestone, exactly which yardstick, and exactly where the case resists a settled verdict.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work the phases in order. The two artifacts to keep are your dated timeline — with its learner-added present-day entry — and your evaluation grid; together they are a record of how the remedy moved and how it measured against each standard, as of the date you did the work.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 splits by era; Phase 2 splits by framework; Phases 3 and 4 are collaborative, ending in individual verdicts compared. The closing reflection works well as individual writing after the session ends.

After the Case Study

• The federal standard in full: Darity, William A., Jr., and A. Kirsten Mullen. From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022 [2020]. Publisher page. The case, the precedents, and the program this exercise summarized; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The federal record: U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division. Report on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. January 2025. Announcement and report (DOJ). What a century-late review can establish and what criminal law cannot; it appears in the unit's Further Readings.
• The century underneath the timeline: Luckerson, Victor. Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street. New York: Random House, 2023. Publisher page. The multigenerational history — including the second destruction by urban renewal — that the remedy attempts answer to; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.