Black Wallstreet: Ogletree Vows To Continue Lawsuit By DANIEL J. HEMEL Crimson Staff Writer Climenko Professor of Law Charles J. Ogletree vowed yesterday to forge ahead with a suit seeking reparations for survivors of the 1921 Tulsa, Okla., race riots, five days after a federal judge threw the suit out of court. In an interview with The Crimson yesterday, Ogletree—who assembled the Tulsa plaintiffs’ star-studded legal team—predicted that the survivors would prevail at the appellate court level. The ruling came less than two months before the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling striking down the racial segregation of schools in Brown v. Board of Education. “The lawyers in Brown had to fight a lot of battles and suffer a lot of losses before they could win,” Ogletree said. “We’re prepared to fight equally long... to insure that the injustices that occurred in Tulsa aren’t repeated and are redressed in the courts.” U.S. District Court Judge James O. Ellison ruled Friday that plaintiffs could not receive reparations from city and state governments because the suit came too long after the deadly riots. “It is unbelievable and unconscionable that anyone would suggest that the City of Tulsa and the State of Oklahoma are not guilty of dereliction of duty and complicity in the riot itself,” said John Hope Franklin, an eminent historian and a plaintiff in the case. “If [Ellison] thinks that a technicality is more important than justice, that’s his view of the law but it’s not my view of the law,” said Franklin, who received a doctorate in history from Harvard in 1941 and an honorary degree from the University 40 years later. According to a State of Oklahoma-sponsored commission’s 2001 report, the riots began on May 31, 1921, after a vigilante mob tried to lynch a black prisoner accused of raping a white woman. The Greenwood district—the “Black Wall Street” of Tulsa—was destroyed, and as many as 300 blacks died in what Ogletree described as “one of the worst episodes of domestic terrorism in our nation’s history.” While declaring that the riots constituted a “tragedy,” Ellison ruled that the statute of limitations on survivors’ claims has expired. Ellison recognized that the atmosphere of racism in Oklahoma after the riots prevented plaintiffs from winning damages in the 1920s, but he said that survivors could have filed suit in the 1960s, after the Jim Crow era ended. Ogletree characterized Ellison’s rationale as “absurd.” “The judge on the one hand got it—there was an atmosphere immediately after the riot that would make it preposterous to assume that our clients could have filed [suit in the 1920s],” said Michele A. Roberts, an attorney at the Washington, D.C.-based firm Shea & Gardner who served on the plaintiffs’ legal team along with Ogletree and Johnnie Cochran. “But [Ellison] forgot that the conspiracy of silence continued. It almost reads as if the judge is claiming that after the 1960s, there was virtual equality,” Roberts said. ‘NO SHOT AT JUSTICE’ Shortly after the riots, more than 100 black residents of Tulsa filed suits seeking reparations, but with the Ku Klux Klan in control of local courts, the riot survivors’ legal efforts failed, said Alfred L. Brophy, a law professor at the University of Alabama and expert witness in the case. One of the lawyers who sued for damages in the immediate aftermath of the riots was Franklin’s father. Speaking from his Durham, N.C., home yesterday, Franklin recalled the fear he felt as a six year-old boy living in Rentiesville, Okla., 60 miles south of Tulsa, at the time of the riots. His father, Buck Colbert Franklin, had travelled to Tulsa with the intention of moving the family to the city. Following the riots, Franklin’s father was detained for a week, and the family had no knowledge of his whereabouts. After Buck Colbert Franklin’s release, “he went back to the place where he thought he had a home only to discover that it had been flattened by looting and burning,” the 89 year-old historian said yesterday. “If you were a black and you tried to assert your rights, you were indicted or run out of town,” said Brophy, who received a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard in 2001. As recently as the early 1970s, a white National Guard officer faced death threats when he began investigating the 1921 riots, Brophy said. After the end of the Jim Crow era, “the courts were effectively open to black people in general, but they were not open to these riot victims,” Brophy said. “Those folks had no shot at justice.” Only after the state-sponsored commission’s 2001 report did survivors have a realistic chance at winning reparations, he said. Survivors approached Ogletree in 2002 after a lecture he presented at the University of Tulsa Law School and asked him to take on the case. “Here were people in wheelchairs, with all sorts of illnesses, who are clinging to life looking for someone to defend them,” Ogletree recalled. “Fifteen clients have already died in the one year since the lawsuit was filed. We don’t have any basis to delay the expeditious continuation of this case,” he said. Ogletree responded to the survivors’ stories by cobbling together a dazzling array of attorneys. “Now that I know and have met so many of the survivors and their descendants I’m even more committed to making sure that their interests are vindicated,” said Roberts, who the Washingtonian magazine named the top lawyer in the capital in April 2002. The Tulsa legal team included attorneys on a national advocacy group called the Reparations Coordinating Committee (RCC), which Ogletree co-chairs. Other Tulsa lawyers on the RCC include Cochran and Dennis Sweet, a Mississippi-based attorney who helped win a landmark $400 million verdict against the maker of the Fen-Phen diet pill. And Ogletree told The Crimson in April 2002 that the group was considering filing suits against universities with historic links to slaveholders—including Harvard and Brown. Ogletree said yesterday he was encouraged by an “extremely fruitful and productive” session in December with a Brown University commission that is probing the school’s past ties to the slave trade. Brown University President Ruth Simmons, the first black to lead an Ivy League school, announced the formation of the commission last spring. In a March 2002 New York Times op-ed, Ogletree alluded to the possibility of suing Harvard Law School for reparations based on the school’s past links to slaveholders According to Ogletree, Isaac Royall, who endowed Harvard’s first law professorship, financed his gift to the school by selling slaves in Antigua. “Institutions will either examine these matters on their own or have to respond to steps taken by others,” Ogletree said yesterday. He said he has not raised the question of slavery reparations with University President Lawrence H. Summers. When asked if and when he would approach the administrators on the issue, Ogletree declined to comment. Meanwhile, Brophy last night presented a proposal to the University of Alabama Faculty Senate calling on the Tuscaloosa-based institution to recognize the role slaves played in the school’s early years. “The University is deeply implicated in the maintenance and expansion of the institution of slavery,” Brophy said. Basil Manly, who was president of the university from 1837 to 1855, “was literally the man who swore in Jefferson Davis” as president of the Confederacy, Brophy said. He said the university does not recognize the presence of slaves’ cabins or unmarked graves on its campus. “The university needs a further study a la Brown of our connection to slavery and what we can do about this,” said Brophy. Brophy said that students and faculty have been receptive to his suggestions, but he has received a hostile response from some in the community-at-large. One e-mail to Brophy read: “Please take your fancy Harvard and Columbia degrees back to one of these institutions, where maybe someone will want to hear your complaints.” He said other e-mails have phrased criticisms less politely. “[Brophy] has to be extremely courageous to take on this issue in an environment where the hostility of the State of Alabama and the City of Tuscaloosa is palpable,” Ogletree said. ON THE HOME FRONT Ogletree spoke with The Crimson yesterday from Wayne State University in Detroit, where he addressed a symposium co-sponsored by the American Bar Association’s Commission on Brown v. Board of Education, which he chairs. His speech in Detroit came the same day that the National Urban League released its State of Black America report, which includes a chapter by Ogletree. “[T]he as-yet unfinished process of implementing Brown has turned out to be nearly as slow as the process of tearing down the Jim Crow system,” Ogletree wrote. The report concluded that significant obstacles still face black Americans who attempt to purchase homes. Fewer than 50 percent of blacks own their own homes, compared to more than 70 percent of whites. Blacks who apply for mortgages are twice as likely to be rejected as whites. According to the report, whites on average live six years longer than blacks. But blacks are substantially more likely to volunteer for military service, the report found. As the Brown anniversary approaches, “it’s important that organizations like the Urban League make sure that we temper our celebration of progress with a sensible and honest reflection in the areas where we’ve had failures,” Ogletree said. —Staff Writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.
reminds me of that Chappelle show where everyone got reparations. KFC and FUBU merged, cadillac sold all their cars. The best part though, was when they said, "contrary to market analysts predictions, watermelon sales have not gone up."
really?? Well hell...someone send me some money...I have Native American ancestors and I haven't seen a one cent of this supposed compensation.
Nor have I. Slavery ended over 140 years ago, but everyone has the right to tie up our courts with frivilous lawsuits. This is why I want tort reform, let the loser pay all court costs. DD
God never gives a thumbs up to slavery. Jesus Christ never gave a thumbs up to slavery. It was acknowledged as a construct of society in that day. Christ said the way to the Father was through him...by imitating him. Christ treated everyone, man/woman, slave/freeman, rich/poor with the same measure of love and respect. He affirmed people above social constructs. I don't think you can possibly arrive at the conclusion that God is cool with the degradation of human beings that is borne out of slavery. Not through any reading of the New Testament.
If I took your home and the homes of everyone related to you, and then I let all of you live in the basement of one of the houses, would you consider that compensation?
How about if I took you from your home and dumped you in a land that wasn't yours, would you feel you deserved compensation.
Everyone's all over the map here on reparations. What I find strange about the suit is that it doesn't seem to be about stolen labor or slavery, but about genocide. I suppose they are alleging that their culture has been killed by the enslavement and transportation of their ancestors -- to the extent that they don't even know what part of Africa their ancestors came from. This strikes me as so bizarre (and without merit). Usually, when I use the word 'genocide' it actually involves killing people -- specifically, a systematic killing of a whole ethnic group. I do think the cultural damage wrought by the slave trade is real, but 'genocide' is just wholly the wrong word. The other thing that makes it bizarre is that most Americans, including me, aren't any better informed than these guys. I know my mother's side is French, but I can't trace it back further than my great-granparents. My father's side must have come to America at some point, but I don't know when or from what country. I don't even know what state my ancestors mostly inhabited before my grandmother moved to Texas. Such things are always changed and often forgotten. Descendants of slaves are not different from others in this regard.
I never have understood the whole reparations thing. I didn't do anything...and the people who want repartations weren't slaves. Why should I, a person who has never been involved with slavery, pay another person, who was never a slave, for slavery? It makes no sense. If the parties involved were still alive -- the slave owners and the actual slaves -- it would be another story. But since no one currently alive was involved, there's no reason for any money to exchange hands. I think slavery was a horrible thing, but I never have owned any slaves and I don't see any reason why I should pay someone who never was a slave. It's all insane!
No, but the Reservations were established at that time, and those who were forcibly moved there would not have considered it compensation. It's only been relatively recently that some tribes have been able to turn the treaties to their advantage and the majority of tribes still don't have gaming operations. The thing about reparations is asking how much of that money would still survive had compensation been given at the time. If every freed slave was given back pay, how much of that wealth would survive today? How much family and personal wealth has survived from that time at all? I know my family lost anything it might have had in the 1860s and built up since then during the Great Depression. Any wealth built up by anyone in my family came after 1940.
I think the problem is the focus on slavery. Sure the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, but there was still Jim Crow, which grew rapidly at the end of the 19th century. And reparations for Jim Crow ain't about anyone's great-great grandkids. Jim Crow doesn't end until the 1960s. Even then it was followed by years of de facto Jim Crow until the effects of the 1954 Brown decision (which delivers a fatal blow to state sanctioned Jim Crow) trickled into more regions. Many of the people who suffered under Jim Crow are still alive. (This doesn't include the children of late Jim Crow.) They deserve the reparations. Those people who had their businesses destroyed, property looted, educational opportunities pulled from under them, cheated out of money, unjustly imprisoned, husbands lynched and/or wives raped, etc.--all this with the participation of or under the oversight of state officials (such as police)--desereve recompense. Slavery is too easy a mark for people to dismiss and too difficult a case to make. That is why I feel reparations for slavery is foolhardy. Reparations for Jim Crow is easier to argue. Instead of arguing for something that "ended" 140 years ago, you argue over something that ened only 50 years ago. Something that affected you and not your grandfather.
Fantastic points. It's a cop-out to say, "Hey, slavery ended 140 years ago!" If slavery was the only barrier blacks had to success, reparations wouldn't be an issue. It's the 100 years FOLLOWING slavery that caused much of today's disparity. Due to national law and unrestricted corporate policies, African-Americans were *literally* second-class citizens until 40 years ago. Hell, blacks couldn't even vote until the 1960s. It's this reason that there are so few black government representatives, company owners and board members. America was built on the backs of African-Americans. Without free (and reduced cost) labor, we wouldn't be the super power we are now. Whites have enjoyed many of the fruits of this super-power status (accumulated wealth, etc.), but blacks have a 15-generation late start and are still dealing with the reverberations of Jim Crow (see employment, education and housing statistics). I don't know how I feel about reparations, but I know for damn sure that this issue isn't about something that happened 140 years ago.
let's say they grant these slave decendants the $1 billion, that would set the premise for the decendants of the slave owners to be indicted, no? i mean, if you get paid for the suffering of your ancestors, wouldn't it be only fitting that the slave owner's decendants be punished? man, somebody shoot these idiots.
That all may be true, but my family came over here AFTER slavery, worked up from being poor Polish or Irish immigrants, dealt with being second-class citizens, worked multiple jobs, and made a life here WITHOUT riding the backs of cheap slave labor. So I dont see how I should have to pay anything...and I am pretty sure reparations would have sort of impact on my paycheck. Screw that.
Does not the focus on reparations for slavery as being the source of the issues within the African-American community take away from the case that the 100 years or so after the Civil War were a much bigger factor in the current plight of African Americans? Do they not attempt to make that case because things like Affirmative Action, etc. were supposed to be the process used to make up for the more recent past (i.e. attempt to make the playing field more level for those alive today rather than making amends for the past directly)?
