Oklahoma top court rejects case by 'Black Wall Street' race massacre survivors

Oklahoma's highest court on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit by the last two known living survivors of the Tulsa race massacre in 1921 seeking reparations for the violence and destruction that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Black people.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld a judge's decision last year to dismiss the case, saying the state's public nuisance law could not be relied upon to address the lingering consequences of "unjust, violent, and tragic moments of our history."

It is estimated that as many as 300 people, most of them Black, died on May 31, 1921, when a large white mob overwhelmed Tulsa's Greenwood neighborhood, a prosperous community nicknamed "Black Wall Street."

Lawyers for Lessie Benningfield Randle, 109, and Viola Fletcher, 110, argued the city of Tulsa and others through the massacre created a public nuisance of racial disparities, economic inequalities and trauma that needed to be abated.