Can reparations shrink the Black wealth gap in Tulsa?

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Marketplace

News, Business

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

More than 100 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre, the Oklahoma city’s mayor recently announced a $105 million reparations package to address the Massacre’s lasting impact. Marketplace’s Mitchell Hartman joins us on the show today to explain how we got here, and more from his reporting on economic injustice in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood. Plus, we’ll get into what the new reparations package could mean for Black Tulsans and the push for reparations in other cities.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

"The Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed Black lives and wealth. What's owed to survivors' descendants?" from Marketplace
"Black Tulsans still feel effects of Greenwood neighborhood's "second destruction'" from Marketplace
"$105 Million Reparations Package for Tulsa Race Massacre Unveiled by Mayor" from The New York Times
"$105 million trust to be built for 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre reparations, city says" from Public Radio Tulsa

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everyone, it's Neil Scarborough.
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0:28.3	slash action.
0:34.4	Hey, everyone. I'm Rima Grace.
0:40.8	Welcome back to Making Me Smart, where we make today make sense.
0:44.5	And I'm Kimberly Adams.
0:45.7	Today is Thursday, June the 12th.
0:48.3	Now, Juneteenth is coming up next week, and since we're going to be on holiday and we won't have a new show, we wanted to take this opportunity today to talk about the black wealth gap in the United States.
1:00.4	Because even after calls to address economic injustice after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the wealth gap between black and white Americans is actually just getting wider.
1:12.6	Yeah.
1:13.0	And our colleague here at Marketplace, Mitchell Hartman, has been doing some incredible reporting lately on how black wealth was built up and then torn down in one city in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was devastated by the Tulsa Race Massacre back in 1921.
1:45.3	And I'm actually here right now with him in studio at Oregon Public Broadcasting. We're in like a little small space. Hey, Mitchell. Hey, it's good to be here. Hi, Kimberly. Hey, Mitchell. So your reporting took you to a Tulsa neighborhood called Greenwood that used to be known as America's Black Wall Street.
1:50.0	Can you just tell us about Greenwood and why it was given that nickname?
1:58.3	Yeah. And actually, I'm going to start at the sort of moment in my reporting in Tulsa that really sort of shocked me and brought everything home to me at the same
2:02.0	time just outside of the little black business district that is what is left of Tulsa's
2:09.4	Black Wall Street of the 1920s and painted on a building side. I saw a mural that said mass graves this way with an arrow.
2:22.9	I followed the sign, downward 66, to the old town cemetery.
2:29.1	It's called Greenwood Cemetery.
	...

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