america do not want to give black people the same rights as white folks and what i mean by that is it s simply easy to do the mathematical calculations and use the law to repay what was taken. wow. it s fascinating here in tulsa, i have to tell you, because essentially descendents of what happened here 100 years ago today still co-exist. you re living alongside the great grandchildren of people who committed these atrocities. it s interesting how state sponsored violence carries ris through the decades. we ll be talking about those more. i want to thank you both. you ll have to come back. i think your take on financial segregation is quite fascinating. the amazing da mario simmons will be back on another show. we have much more live from tulsa when we come back. think of what peanuts have given humanity!
hundreds of black-owned businesses and now there are less than two dozen and you try to be strong and push through it, but it s a lot. i know your special premieres tomorrow night. what can we expect to see? ? we try to tell the story of tulsa through a number of families that move us not just through the violence of those two terrible days in 1921, but also the violence that happened after boom couldn t make a claim because they had riot clauses saying you were responsible and the jim crow scriptures and the violence and gentrification and so the pain of those moments in 1921 have been replicated over and over in different way, but i would love for us to take a listen to what they had to say. repair me. repair me as a person. repair me as a citizen, whatever it takes and whatever it looks like. we re talking about going on four generations of tragedy. houses destroyed and businesses destroyed and yeah, we re resilient and we rebuild.
anomaly. having worked on capitol hill for several years, working on policy, what role does the federal government play in righting some of these past wrongs? what should we be doing to encourage the federal government to correct these conditions? that s a great question. first we have to start with acknowledgment. so often when you hear from the survivors themselves here in tulsa, they just want to be seen, heard, to really see justice. uncle red testified on capitol hill a little over a week ago. he said, one, we are one. he said i want to see justice before i leave this earth like so many of the other survivors. we have an obligation in this country to right the wrongs of this country. if tulsa was an anomaly to your point, then we wouldn t have seen 1919. there wouldn t have needed to be a kerner commission. we are seeing the perpetuation of this harm through police departments that feel entitled to harm and cause violence on black bodies. really, i think it starts with
we have thousands of documents and documentation of what was actually lost, how much it was valued, who actually is owed. if we cannot win such a clear-cut case here in tulsa, oklahoma, then where can we win in this nation? this is a must win, not only for my community and the survivors in tulsa but for the entire african-american community in the united states of america. so briefly tell us, where does the lawsuit stand? i know you accompanied mother fletcher and uncle her brother who s 100 years old, you accompanied them to capitol hill. where does the lawsuit stand here in tulsa and what has the federal government s response been? absolutely. good thing about a lawsuit, it s not termed a reparations lawsuit but essentially that s what it is. where it stands is we re utilizing it and a couple of years ago to successfully sue the johnson & johnson opioid companies. we feel good moving forward
that exists from that time period and it lists the first and the last names of people who were involved in the klan. it literally lists their address. it lists their occupation and let me tell you, when i looked at that occupation list i saw firefighter. i saw police officer. i saw school teacher. i saw superintendent of tulsa public schools, so that is how we know the city is responsible for the massacre because folks that were working for the city, for the government, they were the ones that were out there pillaging our community, massacring our people. when we initially launched the mass graves investigation, we had a lot of people reach out to us. we met with this older white gentleman. his daughter lives in california. he lives here in tulsa, and she pushed him and said dad, you have to go talk to them. you have to let them know what you know, and he met us in my