I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Wednesday, June 2nd.

This week marks 100 years since the Tulsa Race Massacre, in which historians say a coordinated attack on the so-called

Black Wall Street neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa left as many as 300 black people dead,

10,000 homeless and 40 square blocks of the neighborhood destroyed.

Those numbers, according to historians cited in the Washington Post.

And we'll go over some of that history here too, but mostly in this segment, we'll ask this

question about the present. After that kind of human rights atrocity, which included at least

government complicity in its failure to stop the massacre, if not direct participation.

What are the generational effects of all the wealth that was destroyed in that wealthy black

neighborhood? What does it add up to in dollars and cents and what reparations are rightly

owed? There is both a bill in Congress and a lawsuit seeking reparations on behalf of

descendants of Tulsa Massacre victims, as well as three actual survivors, ages 101 to 107,

who are still alive. Their names are Viola, Mother, Fletcher, Hughes, Uncle Red, Van Ellis, and Lessie, Mother Randall, Benningfield, Randall.

I guess when you get to 100 years old, everybody has a nickname.

And justice for them in the form of reparations became an issue at this week's commemoration, as the Washington Post reports.

The premier event on Monday, a concert organized by the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission,

was abruptly canceled over the question of reparations.

The event called Remember and Rise was supposed to feature a performance by John Legend and a keynote speech by voting rights activist Stacey Abrams, but lawyers representing those last known massacre survivors said the celebrities pulled out after the commission failed to address requests that it used some of its funds to compensate them,

the three 100-year-olds, for what they lost during the rampage. In a minute, we'll talk to the

Washington Post reporter who wrote that story, but also some of you have heard the first

episode of a new WNYC podcast series with a history channel called Blind Spot Tulsa Burning.

It ends like this, does episode one, with our host, WNYC's Calla Lea.

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