Another Political Cash Grab in Black Pain’s Name But Nothing Concrete for The Black Population in Tulsa, Oklahoma
In 2024, Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols — a newly elected Black mayor — announced a $100 million private trust fund to address the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. But this proposal does nothing to directly support the Black residents who still live with the legacy of that massacre. Yet, its not called the greenwood revitalization plan.
Nichols wants to raise this money in the name of the victims and their descendants, but he’s offering zero direct payments to any of them. Instead, he plans to use the funds for “education” and “revitalization” of the Greenwood neighborhood. Meanwhile, the people who would be honored by the proposal see none of it.
Let’s look at the math.
According to the 2020 Census, Tulsa has approximately 65,000 Black residents. If Nichols truly wanted to use this $100 million to "repair" harm, he could give each Black resident $1 million—and still have $35 million left over to use for education and housing.
Instead, what we’re seeing is the same old game: another political leader leveraging Black death to raise money that won’t go to Black people. It’s not reparations. It’s a controlled cash grab. And no, education and neighborhood “revitalization” are not acceptable substitutes for actual compensation and wealth restoration.
Many of these families still live in housing insecurity. Even if their children get educated, there is no guarantee of employment or stability. And instead of giving them the means to rebuild their lives, this plan dictates what kind of “help” they’re allowed to receive. It assumes the city owns their lives and decisions just because they share ancestry with those murdered in Greenwood.
Millionaires don’t need tuition help. Millionaires don’t need subsidized housing. But Nichols wants to spend $100 million without making a single Black resident of Tulsa a millionaire, despite the fact that it was their blood, their history, and their families who built Black Wall Street—and whose bodies were burned to destroy it.
This is why more and more Black citizens under 50 are completely done with the Democratic Party. At least when someone like Donald Trump offers nothing, he doesn’t do it while pretending to be our savior. With Democrats, it’s performative concern followed by active denial of power and resources. They smile in our faces while standing on our backs.
Personally, I will never vote Democrat again — not even if it means the “demise of America.” Because as I now understand it, our suffering is self-inflicted every time we vote for what breaks us. We have supported the party that denies us wealth, denies us autonomy, and uses our pain for their advancement.
We’ve mistaken visibility for inclusion, and empty symbolism for actual justice. At this point, restoring dignity and power means disabling the Democratic Party, and making sure that false liberalism loses all of theirs. They’ve earned that loss through decades of broken promises, lies, and manipulation of Black voters.
This latest move in Tulsa is just another example: another million-dollar initiative where the only people who won’t see a dollar are the people it’s supposedly for.
The United States of America doesn't need vanity politics or vanity politicians. There's nothing intelligent about backing candidates that get you nothing for the donation or the vote. Let them go against the radical republican of this nation by themselves — that's how they leave us as citizens, without any of the promises of what it means to be American despite centuries of peace and contributions to this nation.
A growing number of Black Americans are voicing a renewed demand for official entrance in the United States as independent owners — the value of Forty Acres and a Mule to do with whatever they choose for their lives as Americans an inclusion that was promised to their ancestors but was repealed following the death of republican president Abraham Lincoln and has yet to be delivered.
"We want our money. We want the official recognition and legal standing in the United States that was long denied to those who came before us and it must come financially," say advocates. "We are not children. We are not property. And we reject being tethered to government aid systems that fail to address the root of our exclusion — systems that design our lives, against our freewill, through injustice and poverty, then label it our maximum potential."
The call is not just for economic justice, but for autonomy, legal protection, and a level playing field in a nation where, historically, American institutions have centered whiteness while systematically debilitating Black independence and prosperity. Legalized enslavement and the Tulsa Massacre are prime examples of that fact. For centuries, critics argue, attention, investment, infrastructure and court justice have been disproportionately allocated—leaving the general Black population debilitated and under attack.
While past generations may have tolerated these inequities, today’s American's are adamant: they will not do the same. Some have already turned to conservative political strategies, using their votes as leverage to challenge what they describe as superficial liberal outreach and hollow gestures.
"The smiles mean nothing without substance," one citizen noted. "More of us will move politically in ways that ensure this nation can never return to empty so-called liberal promises that brought us to the current condition in which republicans would need to be elected just to turn off the machines of liberal mind control."
In what some describe as an ironic yet deliberate act of resistance, many are now leaning into the only roles they've historically been granted in America—as entertainment or non-thinking, non-feeling, property—reflecting what they see as a nation that continues to deny their full humanity; and as a result their have been causalities, dependent Americans are discovering the consequences of not securing their financial and judicial freedoms and the nation is in calamity.
Democrats are doing the same hollow actions they did prior to the election of Donald Trump. They have not recognized that this is not a new election, it is a New World.
Support for these demands is not confined to the United States. International voices are increasingly calling for an end to the exploitation and systemic oppression of Black communities worldwide, with American struggles often cited as emblematic of broader global injustices.
The money for reparations is available. If passed, Mayor Monroe Nichols proposal is more than double the national average cost of 40 Acres. There is reason that the reparations to settle our nations racial divide, heal the past and move forward into a level playing field in the United States of America are not being direct deposited to the United States 42 Million Black Americans, "exactly" as they were paid out to every single race the U.S. entered contracts with—Indigenous, Japanese, Jewish, even plantation owners were paid for releasing human captives. But not us—there's a reason.
Acknowledging that reason as black people in this New World, is more important than anything that took place in the old world.
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