May 29, 2021

100 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre, two descendants told MSNBC how the horror of that event still haunts their lives.

Two descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre spoke poignantly about its lingering effects. Dr. Tiffany Crutcher, the twin sister of Terence Crutcher, an unarmed Black man shot and killed by Tulsa police, said she thinks often about what might have been had the massacre not “robbed us of our generational wealth.” She cited a woman whose great grandfather had “the nicest hotel, as a Black man, in the world.” She said, “He could have been Hilton. He could have been Marriott. He could have been the Hyatt.”

Crutcher blasted Mayor G.T. Bynum, a Republican. She said, “The mayor doesn’t get it,” meaning he doesn’t understand the current pain. “The mayor went on TV and said reparations would be divisive and why should people who wasn’t born back then have to pay for something that happened 100 years ago, when there’s living survivors.”

Another descendant, Chief Egunwale Amusan also criticized the mayor for his half-a**ed efforts to get at the complete facts of the massacre. Amusan said a lot of white people have come forward with clues and information about what they know, “without indicting their own families.” The mayor has asked Black people to come forward with information, but he could subpoena anyone as part of a criminal investigation, Amusan pointed out. There are hundreds of people showing their faces in photos, he noted. “You mean to tell me in the small city of Tulsa, nobody knows who these people are in these pictures?”

You can still, today, look up the first and last names of the Klan members who participated in this bloody massacre. There is absolutely the ability to hold families, groups, governments responsible for these crimes. There simply isn't the will.

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