Reparations have been a hotly debated topic amongst Black folks for several years now, and those who chronically engage in heated discourse about the subject have even spawned a community of social media users who go by the name ADOS or African Descendants of Slaves. Despite their enthusiasm for the United States to make amends for their long history of violence and disenfranchisement, these ADOS somehow still end up being much more aligned with right-wing politics than bleeding heart liberals who you might think of when it comes to such a subject. That said, it will be interesting to watch the discourse around the latest news coming out of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
According to ABCNews, Mayor Monroe Nichols has announced a $105 million plan called “The Road to Repair” which he hopes will begin to mend some of the pain, generational trauma, and economic damage done when 10,000 violent white racists descended upon Greenwood’s “Black Wall Street” and unleashed hell on Black bodies. A 2024 Department of Justice review concluded that 300 Black men, women, and children were killed over two days, where homes and businesses were burned and destroyed.
Mayor Nichols’ Greenwood Trust will serve as a charitable organization that will not be handing out checks, but instead, investing in education, affordable housing, cultural preservation, and other economic stimulus initiatives to help people get the resources they need to live well after their futures were stolen from them more than a century ago.
“While the City of Tulsa cannot undo the harm of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, it can choose a road to repair to invest in justice, opportunity, and dignity and begin to repair the harm to those who survived and were impacted by the Tulsa Race Massacre and the subsequent disinvestment of the historic Greenwood District and North Tulsa,” the mayor’s office said.
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