Damario Solomon-Simmons did not learn about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — the devastating attack on his hometown’s prosperous Black community — until an African American studies professor lectured about it during his junior year of college. Solomon-Simmons, now a civil rights attorney leading the fight for reparations for the massacre’s survivors and descendants, recalled telling the professor the account could not be true. He was, as he later acknowledged, wrong.
That moment of discovery, Solomon-Simmons told the Associated Press, planted the seed for a legal career that would become a calling. His first book, Redeem a Nation: The Century-Long Battle to Restore the Soul of America, published Tuesday, chronicles the century-long reparations campaign for the destruction of Greenwood — a district known as Black Wall Street — and argues that compensating the remaining survivors and descendants is essential national work. “If you can ignore Greenwood, which was the beacon of Black prosperity and Black progress in the history of this country, then you can ignore Black people in general,” Solomon-Simmons said. “I think that’s why people around the nation are so focused on the work that we’re doing, because they understand what it means to all of Black America.”
The book’s title reflects a thesis that runs through its 343 pages: the idea that America can repair a soul it never possessed. “When I speak of repairing America’s soul, I do not mean restoring something that was once whole,” Solomon-Simmons writes. “America has never had a soul. … There was no moral center to recover.” He suggests the nation cannot choose between rebuilding itself and repairing Black America — it must do both, and reparations are the test of whether it is willing to try. “The struggle for justice in Greenwood is not about returning to a mythical past. It is about proving whether America can build a soul at all through truth, through justice, through repair.”
The history Solomon-Simmons recounts is by now well-documented: on May 31 and June 1, 1921, white mobs carried out a scorched-earth campaign against an outnumbered Black militia defending Greenwood, a district founded in 1906 that had grown into a self-sufficient enclave of Black-owned businesses — grocery stores, cafes, barbershops, a movie theater, music venues, and professional offices. More than 35 city blocks were leveled by fire. An estimated 191 businesses were destroyed. Roughly 11,000 Black residents were displaced. Oklahoma’s official death toll stands at 36, though many historians place the figure between 75 and 300. No one has been compensated for the losses. No perpetrator has been held accountable.
The legal campaign Solomon-Simmons leads has been fought across multiple fronts. In 2020, he filed a lawsuit in Oklahoma state court on behalf of 11 plaintiffs, including the last three then-known living survivors, against the City of Tulsa and seven other defendants. It was the first reparations case of its kind in state court and the first to advance far enough to reach a judge. In 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit. In the final days of the Biden administration, the Justice Department released a report concluding that no avenue for criminal prosecution over the massacre remains. “We know who did the massacre — the perpetrators are still living in Tulsa,” Solomon-Simmons said, referring to the city and the chamber of commerce, which the plaintiffs alleged obstructed Greenwood’s recovery after the attack.
Today, the reparations effort centers on Lessie Benningfield Randle, the 111-year-old sole surviving plaintiff. “If we cannot get her reparations while she’s alive, for the massacre, it’s gonna make it that much harder for us to get reparations for enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining and all those things that we are owed,” Solomon-Simmons said. The stakes, he argues, compound as the nation approaches its 250th anniversary in 2026, 89 years after the abolition of chattel slavery — a history that scholars say informs present-day disparities in wealth between Black and white Americans.
Solomon-Simmons’ own path to the reparations fight began in law school, where he was introduced to the Reparations Coordinating Committee and worked as a law clerk under the late Harvard professor Charles Ogletree Jr., who mentored Barack and Michelle Obama, and the late Johnnie Cochran. After watching Ogletree argue a Tulsa reparations case in federal court in 2004, Solomon-Simmons said the practice of law became more than a credential — it became a vocation.
The book arrives amid continued debate over reparations for slavery and historical racial injustices, a conversation that has persisted since Reconstruction. Jennifer L. Morgan, a professor of history at New York University, said such debates are complicated by questions of who pays and who receives payment. “I don’t think that we’re talking about individuals who owe anybody else reparations. I think we’re talking about states, about institutions, about the nation,” Morgan said. “America is still grappling with reparations because America is still grappling at the legacy of slavery, racial discrimination, Jim Crow, and violent exclusion of Black people from the body politic.” Some opponents of reparations argue there are no living culprits or direct victims of enslavement, nor people with verifiable claims of harm that can be presented in court. Solomon-Simmons disagrees.
In 2025, Tulsa’s first Black mayor, Monroe Nichols, endorsed Project Greenwood, a broad proposal that calls for financially compensating Randle, funding a scholarship program for descendants of massacre victims, and designating June 1 as Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day. The proposal represents a shift in the city’s posture, though it does not carry the force of a court judgment.
Solomon-Simmons also runs the nonprofit Justice for Greenwood, which he founded in 2020, a year before the centennial of the massacre. “One thing I’ve learned from this work, and as a lawyer in general, is that people want justice,” he said. “People want reparations, but people also want acknowledgment. They want to be seen. They want people to understand that something happened to them and their family, and they want an apology.”