Justice Can't Wait - Reparations Now

My name is Tiffany Crutcher and four years ago Tulsa police officer Betty Shelby shot and killed my twin brother, Terence Crutcher, in our hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma known as 'Black Wall Street.' Police looking for a weapon instead found gospel CDs in his car. Like so many Black people killed by police – from 12-year-old Tamir Rice to 26-year-old Breonna Taylor – my 40-year-old brother didn’t get a fair chance to live.

My hometown of Tulsa has a long history of putting Black people in early graves. It’s been 99 years since a white mob led the Tulsa Race Massacre, decimating the affluent Black neighborhood of Greenwood, proudly known as Black Wall Street. When the smoke cleared, up to 300 Black people lay dead and millions in hard-wrought Black wealth was wiped out as if it had never existed. My great grandmother was lucky to narrowly escape the carnage, leaving her successful business and the only life she knew behind in the ashes.

No one was ever arrested for the slaughter of Black bodies. None of the Black people who built small businesses, bought homes, and raised families on Black Wall Street received a penny for their losses.

Tulsa officials kept the race massacre and the city’s ongoing cruelty hidden from the wider public for decades. But now that the world has discovered our existence – through HBO’s Watchmen, Human Rights Watch’s research, and the media’s headlines – we, the survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race massacre and their descendants, have a message. It’s unacceptable, and outright inhumane, to continue asking Black people to wait for justice in Tulsa, Toledo, or anywhere else in America.

Justice can’t wait when Covid-19 is harming Black people in the US at three times the rate of white people, with disparities across all age groups and areas of the country.

Don’t ask us to wait when Black infants are more than twice as likely to die as white infants—making the disparity worse than it was in 1850, when Black people were enslaved.

Don’t ask us to wait when the gap between Black and white wealth is as large as it was in 1968.

Justice can’t wait for those of us who are constantly in the crosshairs of white supremacy. And it doesn’t have to. Right now there is a bill before the US House that does more to address our plight in Tulsa and the systemic racism across the country than any other piece of federal legislation on the docket. HR 40 would establish a commission to investigate the legacy of slavery and its ongoing harms as well as come up with proposals to Congress for reparations.

HR 40 recognizes that the destruction of Black Wall Street and the racial disparities that persist across the United States today stem from the enslavement of Black people. The systemic racism that held Black children hostage on plantations and tore them from their parents is the same systemic racism that ran my great grandmother out of Greenwood as her neighborhood burned. There is no way forward if the US government doesn’t do what it knows that it should: properly account and atone for the horrors of slavery that continue to haunt us.

There is unprecedented momentum behind HR 40 – in fact, it would easily pass if the House held a floor vote today. But here’s the problem: House members who support the bill won’t vote on it this year unless they hear from their constituents. They believe that if Black people waited this long, we won’t mind waiting some more.

They are wrong. And worse, they are sitting on a rare opportunity to help make America whole. Tell Congress to bring HR 40 to an immediate vote. They need to hear that justice for Black people can’t wait in Tulsa, or anywhere else.