How will President Biden handle the Rosewood centennial in 2023?

 

Last week was the 100^th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre.  In 1921 a white mob destroyed a prosperous black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Thirty-five blocks were burned to the ground and historians estimated 300 black people were killed.  President Biden visited Tulsa, met with the last three survivors, and gave a speech. Biden discussed policy initiatives that would help black Americans build generational wealth in order to narrow the racial wealth gap.

Afterwards, critics pointed out Biden didn’t mention reparations.   The critics were correct, but also incorrect.  According to Professor Trevon Logan, an expert on economic reparations, there are different definitions of reparations used by reparation experts.

1).  There are reparations for enslavement due to descendants of slaves.

2). There are reparations for post-emancipation oppression and economic exclusion of African-Americans that continue to the present.

Now, when definition two is combined with the fact that advocates for reparations have always indicated that reparations do not have to be direct cash payments to African-Americans, in other words, reparations can take the form of government programs designed to redress financial disadvantages created by the lingering effects of discrimination.  Then Biden actually mentioned reparations by listing his policy initiatives to reduce the racial wealth gap.

However, others criticized Biden for dodging the question when asked if he supported reparations specifically for the survivors of the Tulsa massacre. 

It’s obvious the Tulsa survivors should receive reparations, but it’s not so obvious that the question was a set-up.

Last year the Washington Post ran a story called - After Reparations.  It was about the 1923 Rosewood, Florida racial massacre, an event that was similar to the events in Tulsa two years earlier.  (The official death count in Rosewood was 6 black people, but eyewitnesses estimated the number of black people murdered was between 27 and 150.)  In 1994 Florida passed an unprecedented bill to allocate $2 million in reparations to the survivors of the Rosewood massacre.  The Florida bill encouraged the formation of the 1997 Tulsa Race Massacre Commission, which recommended that each survivor of the massacre should be paid $150,000 and a Scholarship should be set up for the “Tulsa youth”.  (These recommendations were the same as the Rosewood payments, but the Oklahoma legislator never followed through.)

However, the subtitle of the Washington Post’s After Reparations story said: How a scholarship helped - and didn’t help - descendants of victims of the 1923 Rosewood Racial Massacre.

The Washington Post story said, “There were only nine living survivors who would receive the full payouts [but] their families didn’t receive much.  By the time the 143 descendants received checks from the state of Florida, the controversial action of reparations amounted to little more than a tax refund.  Only half received more than $2,000.  The survivors would eventually spend the money as quickly as they got it, in part to avoid family infighting.  They bought new sofas and new houses, and donated money to their churches.  Anticipating how quickly the money would vanish, [proponents of the reparations bill] came up with one more idea, one way to help ensure the story of Rosewood would endure.  That idea was the scholarship.”

Since 1994, 297 students received Rosewood scholarships, but the Washington Post story dismissively asked, “What can a scholarship do to address a historical injustice?”  

Recipients of Rosewood scholarships were interviewed.  The recipients expressed gratitude, but also suggested they felt pressured to attend college out of an obligation to the past instead of their own personal desires.  One student even said, “Reparations are cute, but I mean … It’s not going to change anything.”  Another student referred to reparations as - shut up money.

Now, when Biden was asked if he supported reparations for the survivors of the Tulsa massacre, he dodged the question in order to avoid the follow up questions.  The questioners would have asked Biden if he thought the Rosewood reparations payments were too little and did the descendants of the Tulsa massacre deserve a better financial arrangement.

President Biden will not use the term reparations, or support reparations for the survivors of the Tulsa massacre, until he figures out how to handle the Rosewood centennial in 2023. 

Will the president praise the fact that reparations were paid or dismiss the reparation payments as insufficient funds?

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 6/9/21