Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher are 109 years old. After Fletcher’s younger brother Hughes Van Ellis passed away last October at age 102, the two women became the last known survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a 1921 pogrom targeting a prosperous, heavily Black district of Tulsa, Oklahoma. To date, it remains among the deadliest and most destructive incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.

During the massacre, 35 blocks of Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood neighborhood, home to what was known as “Black Wall Street,” burned to the ground. Though there were no reliable records of deaths at the time, The New York Times reported that the attackers killed as many as 300 people, injured hundreds more, and left thousands homeless and later detained in internment camps. that  As recently as last September, searchers discovered more remains of massacre victims.

Only recently are the survivors getting a chance to present their cases for reparations. The two women, along with Van Ellis, have been tireless in their pursuit of formal redress for years. Their argument aims to show how other parties have gained from the “exploitation of the massacre” in the generations since. Last July, a judge dismissed their case; however, after a successful appeal, the Oklahoma Supreme Court decided last month to allow the two survivors to proceed with their lawsuit. They’ll reportedly have the opportunity to present oral arguments in early April.

Cities like Tulsa can build museums, commemorate days and streets in victims’ names, and even apologize for what happened in 1921. However, there is no true accountability without meaningful consequences, both for the perpetrators of atrocities and those who have benefited from their crimes. How do we get there? And why do two Black women need to wait so long for even the slightest chance at seeing that accountability administered?

It’s easy to see why Black people in favor of reparations have become discouraged. Ta-Nehisi Coates made his convincing case in The Atlantic nearly ten years ago, and though local and state efforts have slowly advanced, success has been more anecdotal than total. Policymakers and analysts tend to sound fantastic, in the pure sense of the word, when speaking about reparative measures to address the harms of systematic racism in the United States. 

Reparations aren’t unprecedented, locally or globally, nor are they all that rare. We’ve seen them distributed to other groups in the past, and justifiably so. Why not Black Americans? 

As part of the podcast “What is Owed?” GBH News reporter Saraya Wintersmith talks about reparations with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, founder of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University and the co-founder of The Emancipator. You can access the full audio of the episode below or wherever you find your podcasts.

Saraya Wintersmith: Why do you think that the government has been so resistant to offering reparations to Black people?

Dr. Kendi, wearing a brown blazer and white shirt, smiles while speaking into a mic.
Ibram X. Kendi speaks at a book talk hosted by The Emancipator and Harvard Book Store at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 21, 2023.

Ibram X. Kendi: There are those in positions of power in both political parties who are opposed to reparations, whether because of their own racist ideas that the cause of economic racial inequality is the result of some deficiencies that Black people hold or because [supporting reparations] would hurt them politically with centrist voters, or even some high-income Black voters. And so they don’t have the political will or courage to support reparations.

I think [there is] a widespread racist idea that Black people are lazy, that Black people don’t know how to save, and that Black people are the cause of their own economic plight.

When the government has sought to support Black communities, even in minor ways, that support wasn’t necessarily justice as much as it was handouts. Handouts being given to people who are “undeserving.”

And so you even have some Black people who are like, “I don’t want any handouts,” not knowing they have consumed racist propaganda to undermine efforts toward justice.

If some White Americans view reparations as a zero-sum game, others want to be anti-racist and move along the struggle for reparations. How are White people a part of this conversation? What’s their role?

I think that the role of a White American is, hopefully, to be honest about the past. [They should acknowledge] that slavery was literally a system of exploitation; the transfer of resources and wealth from enslaved people to enslavers. That Jim Crow, too, was literally a system that allowed for the hyper-exploitation of Black people in the transfer of wealth.

To support reparations today is to not only acknowledge that history but want to remedy it. It’s also to recognize that zero-sum ideas are false.

White Americans are not going to lose, and typically do not lose, when Black people gain. If anything, White Americans will gain from having a more equitable society.

When we talk about reparations, we are often talking about cash payments. But we’ve heard that the real goal of a reparations program could be repairing the country and healing centuries of harm. In your view, how important is the healing aspect of reparations?

I think it’s an important part because Black Americans have not just been subjected to all sorts of racist exploitation, we’ve also been faced with trauma as a result of this history of racism, dispossession, and extraction. Providing people with money is helpful, but it’s not total…in their healing.

What do you think should be the most essential part of developing a national plan to move toward healing?

Creating a Medicare for All program where everyone can access free healthcare… so there are no more trauma deserts. Secondly, creating an educational system where our children systematically begin learning about slavery and racism in kindergarten and continue to learn about it and what it means to be anti-racist in each grade…

Finally, by creating a society where people don’t have access to assault rifles, and where we don’t try to “reduce or eliminate crime” with more prisons and police—as much as we try to do this by thinking about the larger social conditions that lead to people engaging in harm and violence.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. “What is Owed?” is available on Apple, Spotify, and Amazon Music.

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Jamil Smith is the editor-in-chief of The Emancipator. An incisive opinion writer, television producer, and cultural critic, Smith has primarily covered the intersection of politics, culture, and identity during his decades in media. He also co-hosted “One Year Later,” a limited radio series for KCRW, as well as several podcasts. In 2019, the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists awarded Smith its prize for arts reporting for his Time cover story about the film “Black...