Lessie and the Lawsuit

Lessie Benningfield Randle was six years old on the night of May thirty-first, nineteen twenty-one. She was in Greenwood. She survived.

She grew up, raised a family, and lived in Tulsa for the rest of her life. In twenty twenty, at the age of one hundred and six, she and a handful of other massacre survivors and descendants filed a lawsuit in Oklahoma state court under a public nuisance statute, seeking reparations for what had been done to Greenwood and its people. The lawsuit named the city of Tulsa, the Tulsa County sheriff, and a number of other defendants. Two survivors were still alive when the suit was filed: Lessie Benningfield Randle and Hughes Van Ellis.

An Oklahoma district court dismissed the case in July of twenty twenty-three, and the Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld that dismissal in June of twenty twenty-four, ruling that the plaintiffs had not demonstrated a continuing public nuisance. Hughes Van Ellis, known as Uncle Red, died in October of twenty twenty-three at age one hundred and two. Lessie Benningfield Randle lived on, still the last surviving witness to the massacre. She had spent more than a century in the same city where she had watched, as a toddler, the world around her burn.

The named victims of the massacre include Doctor A.C. Jackson, whom the Mayo Clinic had described as the most able Negro surgeon in America. J.W. Williams, who owned the Williams Dreamland Theatre, was killed. Reuben Everett was killed. The full list is not established in the public record, because the official investigation of nineteen twenty-one called it a riot, denied insurance claims on that basis, and left the count unfinished.

The question of what is owed, and to whom, and by what legal mechanism, remained unresolved when Lessie Benningfield Randle died. It remains unresolved today.