Department of Justice report released Friday. The report, which was released in the final days of President Joe Biden's administration, follows decades of advocacy efforts from massacre survivors, descendants and civil rights groups. Efforts to rebuild the historic community have been underway for years but advocates have continued to seek justice -- including reparations and an official federal review. The DOJ's civil rights division launched the review and evaluation last September into the massacre, where white attackers killed as many as people, mostly Black residents, living in Tulsa's prosperous Greenwood neighborhood.
But despite the gravity of the findings, the DOJ said "no avenue of prosecution now exists for crimes that occurred," citing the expiration of relevant statutes of limitations and the youngest potential defendants being more than years old. The report found law enforcement officers, both from the Tulsa Police and the National Guard, "disarmed Black residents, confiscated their weapons and detained many in makeshift camps under armed guard.
It pointed to witness testimony accusing a police officer of "shoot[ing] down allegro[e]s as they showed up. That same officer, according to the report, also "captured" six Black men in Greenwood "roped them together in single file, and led them running behind his motorcycle to detention at Convention Hall.
There is testimony from a white witness who reported seeing officers search Black men reportedly looking for weapons "only to steal money from them and shoot them if they protested," the report stated. Another witness recalled an officer bragging of personally killing four Black men, according to the report.
The Tulsa city mayor's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The massacre began after a Black man was alleged to have grabbed a white woman by her arm in an elevator in a downtown commercial building, according to an account by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Police arrested the man who was alleged to have assaulted the woman, according to the Justice Department report, which said that a local newspaper sensationalized the story, prompting a mob of white Tulsans to gather outside the courthouse and demand a lynching.
