New York — It was not until his first year in college that civil rights attorney Damario Solomon Simmons learned about the devastating massacre that had occurred in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
A professor of African American studies gave a lecture on what is known today as Tulsa Race Massacre – The days of 1921 when white mobs carried out a scorched earth campaign against the outnumbered black militia that protected the legendary Black Wall Street, a thriving black community.
“I actually told one of the teachers I was from Tulsa,” Solomon Simmons recalls. “That’s not true.” “And of course I was wrong.”
That day planted the seed for the then-aspiring lawyer, who went on to lead a campaign for reparations for living survivors of the massacre and their descendants. Nearly 105 years later, no one has been compensated for what was lost, and none of the perpetrators have been held accountable.
This struggle for reparations was the subject of Solomon Simons’s first book, Redeeming a Nation: A Century-Long Battle to Reclaim America’s Soul, which was intended as a blueprint for justice for the historical atrocities that black Americans endured but received no reparations for. The book hits shelves Tuesday.
After the massacre, fires destroyed more than 35 apartment buildings in the neighborhood known as Greenwood, an estimated 191 businesses were destroyed, and nearly 11,000 black residents were displaced. The state of Oklahoma announced that the death toll was only 36 people, although many historians and experts who studied the event estimate the death toll to be between 75 and 300 people.
Greenwood Company was founded in 1906 A bustling city within a citywith black-owned grocery stores, soda fountains, coffee shops, barbershops, movie theaters, music venues, cigar and billiard halls, tailors and dry cleaners, rooming houses and rental properties.
“If you can ignore Greenwood, who has been a beacon of black prosperity and progress in the history of this country, then you can ignore black people in general,” Solomon Simmons recently told The Associated Press. “I think that’s why people across the country are focused on the work that we’re doing, because they understand what it means for all of Black America.”
Solomon Simons’ book comes just months before the US celebration 250 years Since its founding in 1776. This was 89 years before the institution of chattel slavery – the holding of an enslaved person as the legal property of another person – was abolished. The civil rights lawyer questions the idea that Americans can truly celebrate the country’s achievements when it has yet to pay reparations, which historians say explains modern-day wealth disparities between blacks and whites.
“We can’t talk about what America was and what America will be without making sure these issues are discussed and we get reparative justice for both” slavery and the Tulsa massacre, Solomon-Simmons said.
In 343 pages, Solomon Simons does more than simply tell the history of the massacre or make a legal thriller out of his reparations campaign. For him, ensuring justice for the survivors and descendants of the massacre is also about healing a nation whose first promises of equality for all were empty.
“When I talk about repairing America’s soul, I don’t mean restoring something that was once perfect,” Solomon Simons wrote in the book. “America never had a soul…no moral center for recovery.”
He suggests that America’s soul cannot be repaired if it has to choose between rebuilding the nation or reforming black America. He says they must do both.
“The fight for justice in Greenwood is not about returning to a mythical past. It is about proving whether America can build the spirit at all through truth, through justice, and through reform.”
Reparations for slavery and other historical racial injustices that have been discussed in the United States since Reconstruction, through the Civil Rights Movement and throughout most of the 21st century. Jennifer L said: Morgan, a history professor at New York University, said such discussions are complicated by the question of exactly who pays reparations and exactly who receives the payments.
“I don’t think we’re talking about individuals who owe anyone else reparations,” Morgan said. “I think we’re talking about states, institutions, and the nation.” “America is still grappling with reparations because it is still grappling with the legacy of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and the violent exclusion of black people from the body politic.”
Some opponents of reparations say there are no living defendants or direct victims of enslavement, let alone people with verifiable claims of harm that can be brought to court.
Solomon Simons disagrees with this view.
“We know who committed the massacre — the perpetrators still live in Tulsa,” he said, referring to the city and the Chamber of Commerce, which prosecutors alleged had a hand in derailing Greenwood’s recovery.
There is one remaining survivor of the massacre involved in the damages suit: 111-year-old Lacey Benningfield Rundle.
“If we can’t get reparations for her while she’s alive, for the massacre, it’s going to be hard for us to get reparations for slavery, Jim Crow, redlining and all those things that we’re owed,” Solomon Simmons said.
In the book, Solomon Simons reflects on what led him to take up the reparations battle.
While in law school, he became acquainted with prominent civil rights lawyers working on the Reparations Coordinating Committee — the late Harvard professor Charles Ogletree Jr., who mentored Barack and Michelle Obama; and the late Johnnie Cochran, widely known for his defense of OJ Simpson during his trial for the murder of his ex-wife. Solomon Simons became law clerk to the committee.
After watching Ogletree argue a Tulsa damages case in federal court in 2004, Solomon Simons said practicing law was no longer just a credential for speaking, writing or teaching. It became a calling.
In 2020, Solomon Simmons led a lawsuit on behalf of 11 plaintiffs, including the last three known living survivors of the massacre, against the city of Tulsa and seven defendants. The lawsuit was the first of its kind in state court and the first to reach far enough to be seen by a judge. In 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit. In the final days of the Biden administration, the Department of Justice issued a report Saying that it decided that there was no longer any possibility of criminal prosecution over the massacre.
But the fight continues, Solomon Simmons says, to pay Randle and other descendants in cash, as well as to return land stolen after the massacre and during Tulsa’s urban renewal period.
In 2025, Monroe Nichols, the city’s first black mayor, endorsed a broad proposal called the Greenwood Project, which called for financially compensating Randle, funding a scholarship program for descendants of victims, and designating June 1 as the day of observance of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Solomon Simmons also runs the nonprofit Justice for Greenwood, which he founded a year before the community marks the 100th anniversary of the massacre in 2021.
“One thing I’ve learned from this work, and as a lawyer in general, is that people want justice,” he said. “People want reparations, but people (also) want recognition. They want people to see them. They want people to understand that something happened to them and their families, and they want an apology.”
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Aaron Morrison is the AP’s race and ethnicity news editor.