Legislation to designate the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 as a national monument breezed through the Senate last month, but its path through the House is less certain.
The bipartisan effort from Sens. James Lankford and Cory Booker would also establish an advisory commission appointed by the interior secretary that would be made up in part by descendants of massacre victims. At least one House Republican from Oklahoma is hesitant to outright endorse the existing legislation.
Rep. Kevin Hern, whose district covers part of Tulsa and who serves as policy chair of the House Republican Conference, has some preliminary concerns.
“Congressman Hern has heard many concerns from constituents in the community with the bill as it’s currently written. These will need to be addressed before the bill can move forward in the House,” Miranda Dabney, Hern’s spokesperson, told NOTUS in an email.
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Hern’s office did not provide additional details. And Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise did not respond to inquiries from NOTUS about what, if anything, they are planning to do with the bill.
The massacre was a two-day militarized attack by white Tulsans on a prosperous Black community known as “Black Wall Street,” which killed hundreds and burned city blocks to the ground. The massacre got revitalized attention after the protests in 2020 against racial violence, and again a year later for its centennial anniversary.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sought to restore some of the monuments that have been taken down or changed in the past several years, like statues of Confederate generals.
But in the Senate, proponents of the bill to designate the Tulsa Race Massacre site as a national monument say it should be a priority.
“The urgency with which the survivors and the community asked me to do this was something that became really important to me,” Booker, a Democrat, told NOTUS as he sat down on a stool to talk about the proposal outside the Senate chamber. “The fact that Senator Lankford, who is a friend and somebody I have a lot of respect and affection for despite partisan disagreements, I just found that partnership supercharged our ability to get it done.”
A Senate version of the bill passed last year, but a similar version in the House did not.
“It’s written very carefully in very close cooperation to make sure there’s no eminent domain for the federal government, there’s no federal takeover, private property rights are all protected,” Lankford said on the Senate floor in May.
A spokesperson for Lankford told NOTUS that the senator “was proud to see bipartisan support — and the strong voices from Greenwood — help push this bill across the finish line. He looks forward to it being signed into law.”
Rep. Tom Cole, also of Oklahoma, seemed open to the idea of the national monument but said he had not yet seen the bill.
Cole told NOTUS he didn’t think an act like this would face much opposition in the House, and he compared it to the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site, where the U.S. military massacred a Cheyenne village in western Oklahoma in 1868.
“It’s obviously not a happy moment in our history, but it’s very appropriate that it’s a federal monument and it’s got a designation,” Cole said. “I would think the same thing to be true for the Tulsa Race Riot. I know it’s locally well-supported in Tulsa, so I can’t imagine anybody would be opposed to it.”
The site of the Tulsa Race Massacre has received much national attention recently. On Sunday, Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols announced a $100-million trust as part of a reparations effort for descendants of those killed in the massacre and its survivors — two of whom are still alive and more than 100 years old.
This comes a few weeks after Democratic Rep. Summer Lee reintroduced a resolution that would recognize that the federal government was responsible for providing reparations to Black Americans; the resolution specifically mentions survivors and descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre.
And in January, during the final days of the Biden administration, the Department of Justice published the first federal review of the massacre — over 100 years after the atrocity.
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Em Luetkemeyer is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and Oklahoma Watch.
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