In his junior year of college, civil rights lawyer Damario Solomon-Simmons said a professor taught his class about the Tulsa Race Massacre—an account of the 1921 days when white mobs carried out a scorched-earth attack on an outnumbered Black militia that was protecting what became known as Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Solomon-Simmons recalled telling a teacher he was from Tulsa and being corrected, saying he was wrong. He later led a reparations campaign for living survivors of the massacre and for their descendants, and his first book, “Redeem a Nation: The Century-Long Battle to Restore the Soul of America,” is intended as a blueprint for justice in historic atrocities that Black Americans endured but did not receive reparations for. The book hit shelves Tuesday.
The Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed large parts of Greenwood, the Black neighborhood founded in 1906. According to AP, more than 35 city blocks were leveled in fires, an estimated 191 businesses were destroyed and roughly 11,000 Black residents were displaced. AP also noted that Oklahoma declared a death toll of 36 people, while historians and experts who have studied the event put the toll between 75 and 300.
Greenwood, Solomon-Simmons said, represented a beacon of Black prosperity and progress. He told AP that if people could ignore Greenwood, “then you can ignore Black people in general,” and he said the country’s focus on his work reflects what he said it means across Black America.
The argument in “Redeem a Nation” extends beyond recounting the massacre and into a broader case for repairing the nation. Solomon-Simmons questioned Americans celebrating the country’s accomplishments without paying reparations, pointing to historians’ linkage between unresolved racial injustice and modern disparities in wealth. In the book, Solomon-Simmons wrote that repairing “America’s soul” did not mean restoring something that was once whole, and he said “America has never had a soul,” adding there was “no moral center to recover.”
He wrote that the nation cannot choose between rebuilding America and repairing Black America, according to AP’s account of the book’s themes. In particular, Solomon-Simmons argued that the struggle for justice in Greenwood was “about proving whether America can build a soul at all through truth, through justice, through repair.”
The book arrives amid long-running debate in the U.S. over reparations for slavery and other historical racial injustices. Jennifer L. Morgan, a professor of history at New York University, told AP that debates are complicated by questions of who pays and who receives, and she said she does not view the discussion as about individuals owing other individuals. AP reported that Morgan said “America is still grappling with reparations because America is still grappling” with the legacy of slavery, racial discrimination, Jim Crow and violent exclusion of Black people from political life.
In addressing objections to reparations, Solomon-Simmons disagreed with arguments that there are no living culprits or direct victims of enslavement who can meet legal standards. AP reported that Solomon-Simmons said the perpetrators of the massacre are still living in Tulsa and referenced allegations that the city and chamber of commerce obstructed Greenwood’s recovery.
Solomon-Simmons’ case work has also continued to face legal setbacks. AP reported that he led a lawsuit in 2020 on behalf of 11 plaintiffs, including the last three known living survivors at the time, against the City of Tulsa and seven defendants. The suit, AP said, was the first of its kind in state court and progressed far enough to see a judge, but in 2024 the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed it. AP also reported that the Justice Department, in the final days of the Biden administration, released a report saying it determined there was no longer an avenue for criminal prosecution over the massacre.
Even with that outcome, Solomon-Simmons said the fight continues, both for cash payment to survivors and descendants and for the return of land stolen after the massacre and during later urban renewal in Tulsa. AP reported that in 2025 Tulsa’s first Black mayor, Monroe Nichols, endorsed a broad proposal known as Project Greenwood, including compensating 111-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle, funding a scholarship program for descendants and designating June 1 as Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day.
Solomon-Simmons also runs the nonprofit Justice for Greenwood, which he founded in 2020 ahead of the community’s centennial observance in 2021. He told AP that people involved in the work want more than money, saying they seek recognition and an apology—an acknowledgement that something happened to them and their families.