On June 1, 2026, Monroe Nichols, the first Black mayor of Tulsa, made a historic announcement in what I like to call a microphone-drop moment. After months of silence and whispers about what he would do to address calls for reparations, Nichols unveiled his plans at a much-awaited ceremonial presentation at the Greenwood Cultural Center in North Tulsa, on the day that he’d recently proclaimed Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day, a citywide holiday.
From his place at the podium, Nichols spoke directly to the two known remaining survivors in the audience, honoring the community harmed by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre that killed some 300 citizens in what has been called the most violent act of domestic terrorism in our nation’s history. (Today, only one survivor remains: Lessie Benningfield Randle, who is 111.)
It was time to restore, Nichols said, quoting from the book of Isaiah.
“Instead of your shame you shall have double honor. And instead of confusion, they shall rejoice in their portion. Therefore, in their land, they shall possess double. Everlasting joy shall be theirs.” As Nichols later explained to me, he selected that passage because it spoke of a “reconnection and renewal of the relationship between God and his people. Tulsa, as a city in the Bible Belt, had broken that covenant in the most profound way possible, and in a very aggressive way, for a long time.”
That was all well and good, many who attended that day must have thought, as they waited. But what was the mayor actually going to do? They’d gathered expectantly to hear what they hoped would, at last, be an action plan.
On this first day of observance, Nichols continued, “I’m announcing that my office has been working alongside our legal department on the establishment of the Greenwood Trust—a private charitable trust that will raise and facilitate the investment of $105 million in private funds along our road to repair, restoration, and righteousness.”
Boom. There it was. Audible gasps could be heard from the crowd as he laid out what would come next.
At that moment, Tulsa established itself as next in line to possibly become only the second city in America to provide reparations to a Black community historically harmed by racist actions.
Evanston, Illinois, had been the first, in 2019, when the city’s legislative body voted to make payments of up to $25,000 for eligible applicants who had experienced housing discrimination and redlining between 1919 and 1969. As of September 2025, Evanston had met with more than 271 beneficiaries and paid out more than $6 million.
While the federal government actively blocks efforts at repair for historically harmed communities, there is hope in a growing number of municipalities—cities and towns all across America—where more than 200 reparations initiatives have been established in the last several years.
In my hometown of Santa Monica, California, one of the largest locally funded initiatives of its kind was unanimously approved by the city council in early 2026 with a $3.5 million Restorative Justice Fund—a development that had been instigated by the successful case of Constance White, the 90-year-old daughter of entrepreneur Silas White, who acquired land for an “Ebony Beach Club” in 1957. Nat King Cole was among the supporters, and some 2,000 members had signed up. White’s dreams were obliterated, however, when the city seized the property under eminent domain, and eventually demolished the building.
In nearby Manhattan Beach, a wealthy town that still has a Black population of only about 1 percent today, “Bruce’s Beach,” a seaside resort that was seized from Black entrepreneurs Charles and Willa Bruce in 1924, was also recently returned to the couple’s great-grandsons. For the first time ever in this country, a local government body returned actual land to an actual Black family—land that had been taken under eminent domain for racially motivated reasons.
The concept of reparations remains unpopular in this country among many citizens of all races, including a good portion of Black people.
But smaller bodies—municipalities and universities and religious establishments—are increasingly having conversations about what it means to make amends, and how communities can begin to do this work despite the knee-jerk unpopularity that the term tends to invoke.
Not long after Mayor Nichols’s historic announcement, I met with Tulsa city councilors Vanessa Hall-Harper and Lori Decter Wright for dinner. Hall-Harper, who has represented District 1 since 2016, is the single most powerful driving political force behind efforts to repair the Greenwood community. Decter Wright, who represents District 7, is her steadfast ally, and someone who played a central role in making sure the council passed its 2021 Apology Resolution as a necessary first step.
Storm, flood, and tornado warnings had been broadcast throughout the state that afternoon, and yet, to me, the air in Tulsa had never felt lighter as we sat down to eat. I could still remember my first trip to Tulsa, sometime after the 100-year centennial of the massacre, where I’d unknowingly booked a room in a hotel that overlooked the infamous former Brady Theater, which took its name from a renowned city leader and member of the Ku Klux Klan, and was said to be where so many Black Tulsans had been rounded up, imprisoned, and likely murdered. I’d been haunted every time I looked out the window.
But now, the Brady Theater was called the Tulsa Theater, and it had been four years since the city council passed their landmark Apology Resolution, a measure that had pushed forward all that was to come afterward. It finally seemed that the city was ready to take its next monumental step forward. I breathed in the overcast air with a renewed sense of hope.
Hall-Harper was in her usual form when she arrived at Mexicali Border Cafe, which was now located, it should be noted, not on Brady Street, but on the renamed Reconciliation Way. Unbought and unbossed, she glanced at the menu and ordered without fanfare, disappointed that the restaurant didn’t have her favorite beer, Budweiser in a bottle. Never a can. Wearing a sweatshirt, casual leggings, and no makeup, her statements were punctuated with more than a few profanities as she continued to call out those whom she considered to be ongoing barriers to progress.
Overall, she was pleased with Mayor Nichols’s framework for Road to Repair, calling it the city’s first acknowledgment that included financial compensation as opposed to just “the symbolism of apologies.” And yet, she was not about to let down her guard. Her standing position had always been “We’ll see,” she told me. Tulsa was good about “looking like it was doing something” when it really wasn’t. At the end of the day, the city had “consistently maintained status quo, which was white supremacy.”
To start, nothing had been resolved regarding the “corrupt-ass” Tulsa Police Department, she said. While the department’s case against her husband, Lt. Marcus Harper, whom they had attempted to frame, had failed, and he had been exonerated of all criminal charges, he remained restricted to “supervised employment” as continued retaliation against him and their family.
That same month, Marcus Harper had filed a lawsuit for malicious prosecution, abuse of process, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, naming the City of Tulsa and Rogers County prosecutors, and claiming that the Tulsa Police Department targeted him in retaliation for speaking out against “systemic racist practices.” Rogers County was the last choice, Hall-Harper explained, after both the Oklahoma County district attorney and a federal grand jury refused to charge him. In interviews with the press, Harper noted that both the Rogers County lead prosecutor and second assistant district attorney on the case that led to his arrest were later suspended and subsequently resigned due to alleged prosecutorial misconduct.
Hall-Harper was frank about the toll the persecution against them had taken on their relationship. She confessed that they had been separated since October 2024 and now planned to divorce. “No marriage is perfect, and ours wasn’t perfect before,” she said. “But a situation like that certainly didn’t help. It created a very, very stressful situation in the household. We lost our life savings. Almost lost our home.”
Their entire family had been targeted with the explicit goal of harming their credibility, character, and livelihood. Thankfully, the couple’s daughter, Kaylyn, had been away during those years and didn’t have to “see and hear about the case constantly,” she said. In fact, Hall-Harper had urged Kaylyn, then 23, not to come back to Tulsa after she graduated from college, saying there were better opportunities and less racism in other cities. Kaylyn took her mother’s advice, accepting internships and her first job as a legislative aide in Washington, D.C.
The police also continued to play an active role in covering up the massacre, she believed. For years, Hall-Harper and others had spoken out about a box of photographs from the massacre, including those of a mass grave site, that a former Tulsa police officer was known to have discovered back in the 1970s. The department denied any knowledge of the photos, but Hall-Harper wasn’t backing down.
It was not an unimportant fact that at the time of the massacre, as Randy Krehbiel writes in Tulsa 2021, “Tulsa’s police force was under investigation by the state attorney general’s office for a variety of alleged misdeeds, including some white officers’ treatment of Black people. After the Massacre, Black and white witnesses would testify that the Tulsa police helped set the fires that burned Greenwood to the ground.”
“I still believe those photos are in someone’s basement,” said Hall-Harper. “Maybe not everyone knows where they are. But someone knows.”
Even with Mayor Nichols’s groundbreaking plan, her fight was only just beginning.
She would continue to argue that in addition to his private trust, public funds should also be used for reparations. If the city was materially culpable, then it should pay to repair the damage it had done, she said.
“I would still want to propose, as we originally had planned to do under the previous administration, allocating a portion of the $75 million that’s dedicated to housing to a housing reparations program. Those who want to support it can do so on the record, and those who don’t want to support it, again, their vote would be on the record.”
“Oklahoma State University–Tulsa is the largest landowner in Greenwood,” said Hall-Harper. “The government used eminent domain to acquire all that land, and to make it some type of educational facility. It was supposed to provide scholarships and pathways that ultimately would lead people out of poverty. But those things never happened.”
Nichols agreed that at some point the city and the council would likely have to be a player “in some way, shape, or form,” noting that it had “land assets that could potentially be transferred to the trust.” Wherever public funds and assets were involved, the council would likely play a role in those decisions.
“I do think that over the long haul, there will be a conversation about a public contribution,” he told me, adding that it might become easier to make these arguments over time. As more people begin to see the positive impact of the private fund, “it just may begin to soften folks.”
At Mexicali, Councilor Decter Wright joked casually about the challenges both she and Hall-Harper continued to face. In the 2024 election, Decter Wright, a former opera singer originally from San Francisco, California, had managed to maintain her District 7 seat, winning 48 percent of the vote against Eddie Huff, a Black Republican who was opposed to reparations and had publicly downplayed the ongoing impact of the massacre.
Later, she offered to give me a ride to my hotel, and we sat in the car afterward talking for some time. Vanessa had gotten really quiet in council meetings, she said, noting that her friend seemed to be in what Decter Wright called “peace-preservation mode.” She just wasn’t willing “to waste time trying to talk anybody into anything, or to engage in pointless debates.”
Or maybe Hall-Harper was simply conserving her energy for future battles?
Nichols had lifted the heavy weight off the council’s shoulders. He had moved reparations forward with private funding, and without any real input from their side. But it remained unclear how they would vote if forced to decide on any form of reparations that used public funds.
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In 2024, two new Republican councilors were elected to the council: Karen Gilbert of District 5 and Carol Bush of District 9. Neither responded to my interview requests. Councilor Phil Lakin, a Republican who has represented District 8 since 2011, also ignored multiple e-mail and phone requests over a period of about four years. When I asked Lakin, in person at a council meeting, if he would talk to me on the record, he rushed off saying only, “I’m good.”
But there would most likely come a time in the not-too-distant future when all nine members would have to take a public stand, and to answer the question that was still pending: Would the City of Tulsa, the government-sanctioned entity that participated in the devastation, pay for the harm it had done to its Black citizens? Or would the council, as public servants of its people, take its place in history as having offered nothing more, in the end, than a belated and reluctant apology?
I wrote this book because I was captivated by the interpersonal and political dynamics among the nine members of the Tulsa City Council, especially when it comes to conversations and interactions around racial justice. “They are nine good people,” as Mayor Nichols described them to me, “who may struggle as a body.”
But we are all struggling at this moment. We are all fighting for our faith, for our children, for our livelihoods, and for our dignity. The Tulsa council is us. Every one of us. We can learn to talk to one another, or not. We can choose to see, and to value, our shared innate humanity, or not. The future of repair is up to all of us—in every heartfelt town, city, and state of our troubled and resilient nation.
With the midterm elections now firmly upon us, the question is whether Democratic candidates will do more than merely occupy ballot lines as mild alternatives to the red-hot crisis that is Donald Trump.
As Trump spends over $1 billion a day on a globally destabilizing war on Iran and admits that he doesn’t “think about Americans’ financial situation,” millions across the country are struggling with the surging costs of essentials. Democrats must seize this moment and advance bold, small-“d” populist ideas—not settle for cynical caution that once again snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
The Nation elevates progressive ideas, movements, and elected officials achieving real change across the country into the national conversation. At the same time, our journalists are exposing how crypto and AI-funded super PACs are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to knock out candidates they oppose, reporting on the devastating impact of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and sounding the alarm on attempts by red states to quickly redraw electoral maps, disenfranchising Southern Black voters.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Huevel
Editor and Publisher, The Nation
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