The three last living survivors of the racist Tulsa Massacre of 1921 have gotten a $1 million donation from an unlikely place: a wealthy, white New York philanthropist who’s half their age, has no ties to Tulsa and only recently became aware that the tragedy even occurred.
Ed Mitzen, an entrepreneur who owns a marketing firm, donated the cash to help Viola Fletcher, Lessie Benningfield Randle and Hughes Van Ellis, all of whom are more than 100 years old and were children at the time a white mob destroyed a prosperous section of Tulsa known as the Greenwood District, which has also since been dubbed “Black Wall Street”.
The Greenwood survivors have for years been in a lawsuit seeking official acknowledgment and compensation from the city of Tulsa for what happened 101 years ago. While there’s no official records of how many Black residents were murdered but oral histories, photographs and other artifacts of the time show that some city officials, including police, were at least complicit, if not actively involved in the racialized terror.
It was among a number of similar incidents of mass, racist violence perpetrated by whites on Black communities across the U.S., especially in the South, in the early 20th Century.
Mitzen told CNN that he felt compelled to make the contribution since the Tulsa survivors had clearly been wronged and shouldn’t have had to fight so long for recompense.
Mitzen said he became frustrated and angry knowing the survivors had to go to court.
“They had their homes destroyed, insurance claims denied. Whether it was 101 years ago or six months ago, it doesn’t change the fact that they were clearly wronged. We felt badly that they had to work so hard to try to get what we felt was an obvious thing that was owed to them,” he said.
The legal battle also reminded him of efforts from 9/11 first responders, where it felt like officials were just “running out the clock,” he said.