Pastor issues $200K reparations payments each to remaining Tulsa massacre survivors

The remaining Tulsa massacre survivors will receive another reparations payment from the community.

A Tulsa pastor and church is giving a reparations payment, a total of $200,000 each, to the three survivors.

Transformation Church Pastor Michael Todd, who is a Black man, in Bixby, Okla., said he wants to use his wealth from his popular megachurch to transform the lives of Tulsa Massacre survivors who have been scarred for a century, Christian Post reported.

“Reparation is not a political word. Reparation is not a word that your left-wing friends or your right-wing friends have coined,” Todd said. “Let me give you the definition of reparations. ‘The action of repairing something that was devastated.’ Reparations mean that somebody is going to take up the mantle and actually put into action the process of repairing something that was destroyed.”

Todd also quoted Joel 2:25, a passage that talks about God repaying those in sorrow. It bridges the message that reparation is part of God’s lessons: “And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpillar, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.”

On May 31 and June 1, 1921, a white mob attacked and set fire to the homes and businesses of Black residents in Greenwood.

The aftermath saw over 800 hospitalizations and 39 deaths. The area suffered irreparable damage. Thousands of Black citizens were left homeless with over 35 square blocks destroyed.

The three remaining survivors and recipients of the reparations are Viola Fletcher, 107; Hughes Van Ellis, 100; and Lessie Randle, 106. Earlier this year they also received $100,000 payments from Justice for Greenwood.

“I’m a young black man who took over a church from a white man who built it in North Tulsa. That couldn’t have happened if you all didn’t survive. Today, we can’t restore everything that has been stolen from you. But today, we can put a seed in the ground,” he told the survivors.