A New York philanthropist who donated $3 million to the last three living survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre called on other wealthy white Americans to contribute to reparations, citing the lack of action from states and the federal government.
Business for Good founder Ed Mitzen, author of “Wealthy and White: Why Guys Like Me Have to Show Up, Step Up, and Give Others a Hand Up,” told CNN this week he was deeply moved by the ongoing legal plight of the aging survivors, leading him to put up his own money in 2022 to help the survivors, while he criticized public officials in Oklahoma for slow-walking compensation efforts.
“It just made me angry,” Mitzen said, explaining his motivations to the network.
“I was sitting there thinking what happened to them was irrefutable, whether or not it happened 102 years ago, or two years ago — it happened. It’s undeniable. And it felt to me like the government out there was trying to run the clock out on these folks.”
Two years ago, Mitzen’s New York-based nonprofit Business for Good donated $1 million to each of the survivors, while no federal, state, or local government entities have ever paid any money to the descendants of Tulsa victims, whose entire livelihoods were wiped out 100 years ago.
The last survivors — Viola Fletcher, 109, Lessie Benningfield Randle, 108, and Hughes Van Ellis Sr., who died in October at age 102 — filed their initial reparations lawsuit in 2020, nearly a century after their neighborhoods were incinerated, and their family members and neighbors murdered in one of the worst episodes of racial violence in U.S. history.
Modern courts have persistently denied any payout to the descendants due to the long time that has passed since the massacre, as demonstrated in 2005 when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a reparations appeal from Tulsa victims.
No other domestic nonprofit entity has ever stepped up on reparations in a big way like…
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