Tulsa City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper is, by her own admission, not a “huggy” kind of person. In fact, she is often described as distant and unapproachable by those who find her steely stance on racial issues intimidating.
As the city’s local publication The Black Wall Street Times once put it, she has for many years “called out, challenged, offended, and in some instances, defeated white supremacy in Tulsa.” Her list of accomplishments is long. She has brought a Black-owned grocery store to her district, where there was once a food desert. She has done battle with a police force that she calls corrupt and racist. And most importantly, she has repeatedly forced her city’s leadership to make amends for the violence inflicted against its Black residents. Pastor Jamaal Dyer of Tulsa’s Friendship Church called her a “no nonsense, tell it like it is, too bad if you don’t like it” kind of leader.
Profanities flow often and freely from her lips, and she’s not one to hold back her thoughts about the true circumstances of “Africans living in America,” as she puts it. In a system designed to uphold white supremacy, she rejects the idea that people change out of the goodness of their hearts. Racists only do the right thing when forced, she believes. That is to say, “when pocketbooks are affected.”
While attending some council deliberations in person and watching recordings of others during the past several years, I saw firsthand how Hall-Harper registered skepticism or frustration: an eyeroll here, a neck tilt there. Poker faces were certainly not her strong suit.
“I pray before every council meeting,” she told me. “I ask the Lord to guide my tongue, my thoughts and my attitude.” She laughed a little at this. “Sometimes I let him. Sometimes I don’t. But I try.”
Since her first 2016 election victory, her popularity has only risen among her constituents with each subsequent voting cycle. In 2024, she won nearly 67 percent of the District 1 vote. To those who support her, she has precisely the kind of unsentimental demeanor that’s needed to get things done. And she had gotten something done. Something remarkable.
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Over the past decade or so, Councilor Hall-Harper has quietly managed to inch her community forward, step by step, in a tediously slow process, toward the monumental feat of achieving racial reparations—a word that means so many different things to different people. For Hall-Harper, however, reparations can only truly be one of two things: cash or land. And in this case, Tulsa residents may soon begin to see both.
“It’s fixin’ to get hot in Tulsa,” she told a crowd of Greenwood supporters at a recent gathering. She wore long, gray braids wrapped in a double-layered bun atop her head. Red, black, and green earrings dangled from her ears. “Power to the people,” she added at the end of her speech. But unlike the leather-jacketed men of an earlier era, she said these words without fanfare, or even a fist pump. Hall-Harper was nothing if not matter-of-fact.
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Once, when I first met her, over lunch near City Hall, Councilor Hall-Harper lifted the leg of her tailored suit pants to display what she called her “everyday gun,” a nine-millimeter Glock nestled inside her sock. She had five additional firearms at home, she said. Three handguns, a twelve-gauge shotgun, and an assault rifle.
Her first “little piece” was an automatic .22, which she bought for self-defense when she was a student at Jackson State University in Mississippi. Technically, her father bought it for her, since she wasn’t yet twenty-one. James Hall liked to hunt and always had guns around the house. It didn’t surprise him in the least when his daughter asked for one. They went to a local pawn shop together and she put down her own money, earned at a high school job working at Wendy’s.
During her junior year at Jackson State, she joined the ROTC, becoming involved in competitive shooting on the marksmanship team. She was ranked one of the best female shots in the class, which was how she met her future husband, Marcus Harper, also on the ROTC. She was a good shot for a woman, as they said, but he was the best shot in the entire school.
They returned to Tulsa together after her graduation in 1993 and married the following year. Later, Marcus joined the Tulsa Police Department, earning the rank of lieutenant and eventually serving more than three decades.
Hall-Harper’s plan had been to attend law school after graduation, but as life took over, that goal “just kept getting further away,” she said. “We came home, got married, bought our first home. Debt was the main reason I didn’t go. Just paying bills and not wanting to accumulate more.”
Instead, she earned a certificate of paralegal studies from the University of Tulsa Law School in 1995, while working as an intake counselor for the juvenile bureau of the district court. Later, she became community programs coordinator for the Tulsa County Health Department, where she stayed for more than twenty years, until 2021.
Ironically, like many other native Tulsans, Hall-Harper didn’t learn about the 1921 Race Massacre until she was in her early thirties, when her cousin Sherry discovered the truth about Greenwood’s history while attending the University of Chicago. Sherry saw a sign on a classroom door that said, ‘Tulsa Race Riot.” Curious, she went in, sat down, and listened to the presentation. Afterward, she called Hall-Harper to ask if she knew anything about it.
“No,” Hall-Harper replied. “What are you talking about?”
She would soon find out that in 1921, over a period of two days, from May 31 to June 1, armed white mobs numbering in the thousands murdered an estimated three hundred Black residents of Tulsa’s historic Greenwood district, and injured thousands more. The mobs destroyed more than thirty-five blocks of Black-owned property, in an area then known as the “Negro Wall Street” for its prosperity and self-sufficiency. Some 1,500 thriving homes, businesses, schools, churches, and theaters were burned to the ground, causing more than $200 million in property damage, including the Stradford Hotel, regarded as one of the largest and most luxurious Black-owned hotels in the nation.
The Massacre has been called the most violent act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history—an assessment that would be confirmed by an official U.S. Department of Justice investigation in 2025. Black citizens were rounded up at gunpoint and herded into unthinkable locations, such as the basement of the Brady Theater, where some were rumored never to have been seen alive again. Members of the mob tossed Black bodies into ditches and rivers, onto trucks and trains, and dumped them into unmarked graves. Countless residents fled the city and never returned. In the aftermath, more than nine thousand victims were left homeless and displaced, forced to sleep in tents for as long as two years while insurance companies denied their claims, and city officials actively blocked their efforts to rebuild Greenwood.
As historian Scott Elsworth has written, news of the massacre traveled across the country. Outside groups, from the National Guard to the American Red Cross to the Universal Negro Improvement Association, tried to send medical aid and tents but were rebuffed by city and state officials. The destruction was the result of a “race riot,” they claimed, caused by Black people themselves. Therefore, they would have to suffer the consequences.
After she began researching the atrocities, Hall-Harper decided to go visit her grandmother, who was born in 1919. But when she asked her about it, the older woman’s “whole disposition changed,” Hall-Harper said. Her grandmother may have answered her questions, but she did it “real short and quick,” recalled Hall-Harper. Like someone who preferred not to talk about it. She spoke in a low tone, too, she added. “Almost a whisper. It was taboo to speak of in our community.”
As she studied more about what was lost, and as she continued to watch her North Tulsa community deteriorate, Hall-Harper felt a growing urge to do more. There was a fourteen-year life expectancy gap between Black and white Tulsans, for example, and the Black infant mortality rate in Tulsa was nearly ten times that of white babies. Black adults, meanwhile, were arrested at a rate nearly 2.5 times that of whites, to name just a few of the challenges District 1 faced.
“Being a woman of faith, I felt that God was pressuring me to do more with the gifts that I had been given.” The number one lesson her parents taught her was to love the Lord. She knew she could be of greater service to Him, and to Greenwood.
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Many Americans heard about the Massacre for the first time in 2021, when global attention and media coverage zeroed in on the city for a centennial commemoration of the tragedy. Across the country, the racial reckoning that began with George Floyd’s murder was reverberating in cities like Tulsa and made even more urgent as Tulsa’s centennial events approached. It was at that same time that many American celebrities began to speak out about the massacre. Oprah Winfrey and LeBron James produced separate films about it, along with others, while actor Tom Hanks expressed outrage after reading an article in the New York Times about a one-hundred-year-old survivor. “How is it that this was not taught to me?” he asked in a widely circulated op-ed for the Times, adding to the chorus.
Locally, groups like Justice for Greenwood, founded by attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons, had advocated for reparative justice for the community for years, along with prominent Tulsa-based activists like Tiffany Crutcher, Kristi Williams, Reverend Robert Turner, Chief Egunwale Amusan, Greg Robinson, and others.
And yet, even then, as officials prepared for a slew of commemorative events, the Tulsa City Council remained silent. Up until early 2021, that body had held no meetings to discuss the state report or the atrocities. They sent no memos and made no recommendations, as Councilor Hall-Harper, then the lone Black member, told me before pausing to correct herself. In fact, the council did write one letter, she said. It was in support of an application to register for a national park service. “Which never happened, by the way,” she added.
The District 1 councilor aimed to change that.
Representing historic Greenwood, she was only the second Black woman ever to serve on the council, and the first to be elected its Chair. As the national and international press prepared to descend on the city for the commemoration, she knew that this would be a watershed moment. The time was now. This would be Greenwood’s chance to be heard at long last. If Hall-Harper were somehow able to achieve reparations for her community, Tulsa would become only the second city in the country to successfully do so. But she had to act quickly. There would be no other opportunity like this one, anytime soon.
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On June 1, 2021, President Joe Biden became the first sitting president to visit Greenwood and to acknowledge the Massacre. However, he did not mark the occasion with a presidential apology, a critical omission. Historically, in cities across America, apologies set a precedent. They opened the door to reparations.
Which is why, that same month, tensions ran high at City Hall, where some councilors tried their best to delay the vote on Councilor Hall-Harper’s Apology Resolution. Typically, when local reparations movements take root in cities and towns across America, the process begins with an official apology, sanctioned by government leaders. Hall-Harper and other advocates knew that the first step was acknowledgment, and that without an honest recognition of the damage that had been done, reparations would never move forward.
So it was that when Hall-Harper and her working group of three other councilors proposed an Apology Resolution, just weeks before the centennial was set to begin, some members expressed resistance and even indignation. The process had gone too quickly, they complained, arguing in some cases that such a proposal should take place in a virtual meeting, rather than an in-person one with public comment.
“They wanted to not have the pressure,” said Councilor Lori Decter Wright, who had been Hall-Harper’s co-conspirator and a key ally throughout the process of drafting the Resolution. “They wanted to be able to vote ‘no’ behind closed doors,” she said.
They failed.
Discussion began at the 2:30 pm Public Works Committee Meeting that day, which, although open to the public, was not typically attended by members of the community. After the Resolution was introduced by Councilor Mykey Arthrell-Knezek, who served as one of four members of the working group that drafted the proposal, there was an awkward pause.
There were some suggestions, most of them minor and irrelevant, and a few that were significant. And there were some distractions, too. In fact, the Resolution had already gone through twelve rounds of drafts, at that point, which was to be expected, as Hall-Harper acknowledged. After all, she said, that was what the democratic process was all about. “Give and take.”
But she did note that since the document had been made public, she had received many calls and emails about one of the statements that many of her constituents in the Greenwood district found especially troubling. It was a clause that Councilor Phil Lakin had proposed that would add language to the Resolution acknowledging the good works of corporations and philanthropists, who were presumably mostly white. Lakin wanted to show that the city had already done much to move forward, past the massacre.
He represented District 8, which was an area as far south as one could be from North Tulsa’s District 1. As Randy Krehbiel wrote in Tulsa 2021, “South Tulsa is where the insiders congregate. It has the nicest neighborhoods, the best stores, the swankiest clubs, and the finest restaurants . . . North Tulsa is for outsiders.”
Lakin was “so cushioned by his privilege that it is hard for him to really feel what it’s like,” as one councilor later explained to me.
Hall-Harper did her best to rebut the suggested language.
It’s “misplaced,” she said, swiveling slightly in her chair. She folded her hands together, adjusting a silver ring and exhaling. “It’s more of . . . making an excuse.” She paused. “I can’t really find the words . . . It seems odd.”
As the discussion volleyed back and forth, Hall-Harper pushed back again.
“We think the best of ourselves. But that doesn’t necessarily mean everybody else feels the same way.”
After nearly an hour of discussion, Councilor Jeannie Cue of District 2, which is also in South Tulsa and which abuts Lakin’s District 8, had not said a word. At times, she gripped her cheeks and nose as if in shock or dismay. At one point, she implied, as others had done, that there hadn’t been enough time to consider the Resolution.
Nor did Jayme Fowler, a Republican with a background in wealth management, speak during the discussion. He stared straight ahead, offering no comments, asking no questions, and making no suggestions. In fact, the four members of the working group believed that Fowler absolutely would have voted “no” on the Resolution had the national and international media not been watching.
A few hours later, the time had come for the council to hold its public vote. Earlier that morning, Hall-Harper posted a comment on Facebook for her constituents.
“The resolution being proposed is an acknowledgement, apology and commitment from the City of Tulsa. It is not a reparations package . . . I promised my constituents that I would begin what I call Freedom Work.
I don’t know and cannot tell you what the policies and work will look like as of yet . . . that’s because this will be a community led process. It will look like what the community says it will look like. However, let it be clear, I strongly support reparations and the continued efforts from community members for reparations. I will need your help more than ever to push this resolution through. Today at City Hall 5PM.”
That evening, she surveyed the room over the top of her eyeglasses with an unblinking stare. The council would waive the rules today, she told the crowd, moving straight to public comments. Twenty-six people had signed up to speak, the most notable being the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Jr., the former Democratic candidate for president and world-renowned civil rights activist.
The Apology Resolution passed unanimously, 9–0.
“Public pressure led to that unanimous vote,” said Decter Wright. “If we didn’t have a packed chamber and national news media there, we would have had a majority, but it would not have been unanimous.”
It was a victory, even with the final “watered down, whitewashed” version, as Hall-Harper and Decter Wright characterized it. Most importantly, the Resolution had retained the most important clause of all: a commitment “to making tangible amends for the racially motivated acts of violence perpetrated against Black Tulsans in Greenwood in 1921.”
Which is exactly what they would do.
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On August 27, 2024, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, made history. It elected Monroe Nichols, forty-one, its first Black mayor. Nichols was also the first Democrat to hold the seat in fifteen years.
From the start, he proved himself willing to stand up to conservative Republican forces in one of the top five reddest states in the country. As a state legislator for eight years, he had previously served as chair of the Oklahoma Legislative Black Caucus.
“A Democrat in Oklahoma,” he later noted. “You can imagine where that put me in my public votes.”
While on the campaign trail, Nichols was asked repeatedly if he would allow President Trump to use local law enforcement in his mass deportation plans. He answered plainly. “The answer is no. Tulsa is not going to be a community where people have to live in fear.”
He didn’t believe in walking on eggshells while in public office, he said. “It’s not a way to live. You’re not going to make a lot of progress that way.”
The new mayor took his time before announcing his administration’s official plan of action on the question of reparations, staying largely silent on the issue during his first months in office.
Meanwhile, Justice for Greenwood, led by attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons, saw two major defeats.
During the summer of 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed the group’s longstanding lawsuit against the city on behalf of the two known remaining survivors, Viola Fletcher and Lessie Benningfield Randle.
Solomon-Simmons appealed to the U.S. Department of Justice, urging the Biden Administration to open an official criminal investigation, which it eventually did. On January 10, 2025, the DOJ released its final report, just ten days ahead of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. The 123-page document, a “Review and Evaluation of the Tulsa Race Massacre,” provided detailed new information and a clear denouncement of the tragedy, which it called “a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community.” Moreover, the DOJ determined that this was not the result of “mob violence,” but rather, “a coordinated military style attack.”
Despite these findings, there was no recourse to be taken at the federal level, the report concluded. The crimes were too old, and the perpetrators were no longer alive. It was a serious blow. For the first time, Councilor Hall-Harper chose not to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance at City Hall, in response. “When there is truly justice for all, received by all, then that may be something that I will revisit,” she said. “But for now, I’m just not going to do it.”
The federal government’s refusal to act also confirmed, for her and others, that the city was the last possible stop on the road to repair.
Now, it was up to the mayor and the council to make that happen.
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On March 17, 2025, Mayor Nichols implemented the first step in his office’s commitment to the process, proclaiming by executive order that June 1 would become “Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day,” a city-wide holiday.
Three months later, his complete plan was unveiled, on June 1, at a highly anticipated ceremonial presentation at the Greenwood Cultural Center. Nichols opened his speech that Sunday afternoon by addressing the two known survivors directly, honoring their past and their pain. It was time to restore, he said, quoting from the Book of Isaiah:
“Instead of your shame you shall have double honor. And instead of confusion, they shall rejoice in their portion. Therefore, in their land, they shall possess double. Everlasting joy shall be theirs.”
As Nichols would later explain, he selected that passage because it spoke of “a reconnection and a renewal of the relationship between God and His people. Tulsa, as a city in the Bible Belt, had broken that covenant in the most profound way possible, and in a very aggressive way, for a long time.” In choosing that passage, Nichols told me, his goal was to take something associated with shame and to “restore it to . . . that everlasting joy.”
The crowd waited expectantly as the mayor then transitioned to the heart of his speech. The Scripture was all good, but was he going to do? The community had gathered in the heart of Greenwood to hear what they hoped would be, at long last, a plan of action.
“And on this first day of observance,” he said, referring to the new municipal holiday he had enacted, “I’m announcing that my office has been working alongside our legal department on the establishment of the Greenwood Trust—a private charitable trust that will raise and facilitate the investment of $105 million in private funds along our road to repair, restoration, and righteousness.”
It was a microphone drop moment. While many insiders were somewhat aware of certain aspects of his plan, Nichols had managed to keep the full scope of his announcement relatively quiet. Those in the room were stunned.
“I was bowled over,” said Mattece Mason, a member of the community-led Beyond Apology Commission. “We had no clue. And let me tell you, the total amount was even more than what we asked for.”
Pastor Keith Mayes of the historic Vernon AME Church and member of the Beyond Apology Commission agreed, praising what he called Nichols’s clarity and vision. “He has not blinked,” Mayes said, calling his leadership “sacrificial and courageous.”
The plan had several parts, as Nichols explained. There would be a $24 million fund for investment in affordable housing and homeownership “in alignment with the Beyond the Apology Commission Recommendations.”
But there would also be a second piece: $60 million to preserve Greenwood’s history through place-based projects, surviving entities, and cultural landmarks. This fund would be used toward reducing blight and helping implement certain aspects of the Kirkpatrick Heights–Greenwood Master Plan, which referred to an earlier project, implemented by Mayor Bynum, to facilitate community ownership of fifty-six acres of undeveloped city-owned public land, including the historic, and as yet undeveloped, Evans-Fintube site.
Third, there would be a $21 million endowment devoted to economic development and education, including scholarships, small-business grants, and no-interest business loans.
The trust would be fully operational on or before the next Tulsa Race Massacre Day of Observance, June 1, 2026, said Nichols.
And there was still more.
The city would also renew the 1921 Graves Investigation, an initiative that began well under the Bynum administration but went off the tracks when the Oversight Committee composed of community members and North Tulsa stakeholders such as Councilor Hall-Harper, Kristi Williams, and state senator Regina Goodwin, were abruptly shut out of the process. When they started asking questions about decisions that were being made by the city, the public meetings were discontinued, said Williams. “They went to Zoom meetings, then from there to emails, and then to text messages.” In a word, “they kicked us out,” Williams added. Senator Goodwin dubbed the Oversight Committee the “out-of-sight committee.”
The first Massacre victim would not be officially identified for several more years when, in July of 2024, it was announced that the body of C. L. Daniel had been found and was confirmed as a victim. Daniel, a World War I veteran, had likely been passing through Tulsa at the time, on his way home to his mother in Fort Gordon, Georgia. Documentation further indicated that he may have been just fifteen years old when he joined the Army and about twenty when he was killed. Researchers also identified living descendants—four great-nieces and one great-nephew—in Florida and Georgia. Renewing and completing the investigation would go a long way to reinstall trust in the community, said Nichols.
He then moved on to his last and final announcement, a revelation that was so unexpected that it inspired audible gasps from members of the audience at the Greenwood Cultural Center. And from me, too, in Miami, as I watched the event live-streamed.
“On top of this historic announcement,” Nichols continued, “I will be releasing more than forty-five thousand historical and relevant records directly related to the Massacre. These are records that have not been shared publicly to this point.”
“I was like a geyser when he said he opened those records,” recalled Mattece Mason, who in addition to her service on the Beyond Apology Commission, was a realtor, owner of a daycare center, and executive director of a community nonprofit. “I almost fainted. And I’m not even a fainter. But I almost passed out. I don’t know of any man,” she continued, “a Black man, white man, yellow man, orange man, who would have had the courage to unseal those records. Girl, please. It was too much. I just burst out crying.”
Nichols gave credit in his speech to Justice for Greenwood for recommending the release of the records, but in fact, the reality behind the scenes was that Solomon-Simmons’s long-standing feud over the documents had been acrimonious.
Five years earlier, the Justice for Greenwood legal team filed a lawsuit naming both the city and its clerk for withholding access to those same public records. In 2021, I spoke with Randall Adams, a partner at Schulte Roth & Zabel, which served as co-counsel on the case. “Presumably some documents aren’t even available anymore,” Adams said at the time. “My guess is that anything incriminating would have been destroyed decades ago. But what might be useful is what connects the dots between the land usage: how property changed hands from 1921 to today; how much land the city still owns in Greenwood; how the city came into possession of that land; and what decisions were made regarding land use.”
Adams was right. Information about what land the city may have acquired after the Massacre, along with the why and the how, would continue to be of critical material importance. Indeed, part of Damario Solomon-Simmons’s Project Greenwood plan called for a city audit of land it held in historic Greenwood to determine if it had been unlawfully seized and should be returned.
“It is time this part of our history is no longer shrouded in the shadows but fully understood and brought to light,” Nichols concluded. As proof, he directed the audience to a new page on the city’s website, where the public documents were already, at that very moment, posted: all forty-five thousand pages of them. Although he had not gone through them in detail yet himself, Nichols later told me, he agreed that it was possible they contained information about land transfers and city ownership of properties that once belonged to Greenwood residents.
“So today brings a new chapter for our city, but also a new opportunity for our entire country,” he concluded. It was time to put aside outdated thinking about Black versus white, or red versus blue. The Road to Repair was a plan to “bind the wounds left open for ten decades.” It was about “reconciliation,” “repair,” “renewal,” and “righteousness.” Perhaps most importantly, it was about “finding our way back to each other.”
At forty-one, Nichols brought a fresh, youthful energy to the mayor’s office, on display when we met in his office in City Hall two days later. Words like “awesome,” “cool,” and “wild” peppered his speech as he moved about his office, like a man with a plan. He acknowledged that the city had spent “a lot of time stuck in neutral” and had not gotten a lot done in terms of racial repair. “You know, I’m from Texas,” he said, “and I remember Lyndon Johnson during the civil rights movement saying, ‘What the hell’s the presidency for?’ I feel the same thing about being mayor right now. What the hell’s it for if you can’t do this stuff?”
Born in Waco, Texas, on September 24, 1983, to Monroe Nichols III, a police officer, and Ramona Curtis, a probation officer, Nichols came from preacherly roots, where both his maternal grandfather and great-grandfather were United Methodist pastors.
But it wasn’t until Nichols was fourteen, the year his father died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age thirty-five, that he had his first real conversation with God. Nichols had come home from school in October of 1997 and was at his grandparents’ house when he was given the news. (His parents divorced when Nichols was four years old.)
“I remember going to the bathroom and I put my hand on my head,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was trying not to cry.” He prayed for strength and courage, and he believes that on that day, his prayer was answered.
Later, at the University of Tulsa, he studied political science and economics and played football, earning a master’s degree in public administration.
Like so many others, Nichols didn’t know much about the Massacre. “I probably first heard something about Black Wall Street, literally, in a rap lyric or something like that,” he said.
After college, he worked as an assistant to Tulsa Mayor Kathy Taylor, charting a path that would eventually lead him to where he sat today.
“After I got elected, I mean within the first couple weeks, all these recommendations came to my desk,” he said. From the start, many assumed that reparations were something he’d planned to do all along. Those who knew him, however, knew that wasn’t the case. In fact, he’d run his campaign on the issue of homelessness, not racial justice, or reparations.
Nichols had used his first months in office to study the issue of repair and to meet with a wide variety of stakeholders, public officials, and advisors. His conclusion came early on, and it was not good news. If left in the hands of the city council, there would be no reparations. Period. After meeting individually with each councilor, he quickly realized that the council simply did not have the five votes needed to move forward on any kind of reparative action. Attempting to get a majority would have been “a real battle,” as he put it, and not one that they were likely to win.
For some councilors, “the perceived political consequence was something they just couldn’t get around,” said Nichols, “and that made me angry in some cases. I’d heard about how difficult it was just to get the Apology Resolution through, so, that gives you some indication how hard getting anything else done might be.”
Adding to this challenge were the constraints of Oklahoma state law, which had, in 2012, joined with seven other states to abolish any kind of race-based remedies. California had been the first to do so in 1996; Washington, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, Arizona, and New Hampshire had followed. Nichols understood that such a barrier meant that he would have to find another way to move forward. Giving up simply wasn’t an option. “Just because it may not be possible politically, that doesn’t make it impossible. If you can’t get the five votes,” he told those councilors who were in support of reparations, “then we’ll just have to find a different route.”
Councilor Hall-Harper advised him to do as she had always done: to go around government and to find other avenues of support, in the same way that the working group for the Apology Resolution had met behind closed doors, and in the same way that the Beyond Apology community-led process had been formed and financed, without the council’s input, funding, or interference.
Nichols took these words, along with those of other advisors, to heart. Funding the Road to Repair with private money would be the easiest, most efficient, and most legally plausible way to go. He worked behind the scenes, sharing little of his plan with councilors or even with the Beyond Apology commissioners.
His plan was to bring Tulsa to a national stage, and to engage potential donors across the country, he said. “The story of the Massacre is not just a Tulsa story. It’s an American story. I think there is a lot of national philanthropy that will be very interested in Greenwood.”
To that end, Nichols shared during our meeting that he was in discussions with potential partners like Bloomberg Philanthropies, which had invested in Tulsa for some time; Blue Meridian, a partnership of philanthropists in New York; and the Black Economic Alliance. Locally, Tulsans could also most likely expect to see contributions from the George Kaiser Family Foundation, as well as the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.
But even as he did this work, Nichols found it ironic that reparations had fallen into his lap, especially since it had never been his priority. “I never would’ve guessed that this would be where I would be, politically,” he said, shrugging over a Styrofoam box of takeout lunch that he had yet to eat.
“But I’m proud of it. Some issues just pick you,” he added. “Who would’ve known that after 104 years, this would show up on that desk of Monroe Nichols from Waco, Texas, of all places?”
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In writing this book, my driving question was simple. In an era of such widespread hatred, division, and misunderstanding, can hearts and minds be changed? Can ordinary people still find a way to listen to one another in today’s America, despite seemingly insurmountable differences? I wanted to better understand how members of one municipal body were interrogating long-held views and perceptions about race. Perhaps even more importantly, I wondered how their sometimes-imperfect efforts at allyship might slowly begin to inch them, and the rest of us, forward.
I confess to being an eternal optimist in all things. Maybe naively so, as my husband would say. But as this body, the Tulsa City Council, was thrust into the national and international spotlight in 2021, at the time of the Centennial Commemoration, the world bore witness to a moment of true historical reckoning. I wondered if it was possible that the city might serve as an example of politics as a kind of “soul craft,” as Pete Buttigieg once put it. Could it one day represent a politics that “calls us to our better selves”? I hoped that Tulsa might even come to represent our capacity for spiritual transformation.
I wasn’t disappointed. By the summer of 2025, the city, with Nichols as its leader, had slowly, and often reluctantly, begun to prove me right.
There is evidence that municipal bodies may be our best and last hope for true and authentic community dialogue. Plenty of scholarship points to the fact that school boards and city councils are not nearly as sharply polarized along partisan lines as state or federal government bodies. In them, people from deeply divergent backgrounds and belief systems are forced to look one another in the eye, up close and in person, on a regular basis, and to figure out how to work together to solve problems. In local politics, your worst political enemy may also be the mother of your sister’s babysitter, or the father-in-law of your eighth-grade teacher. It is nearly impossible, in other words, to escape the innate and authentic humanity of those who live and work in your community.
Local politics also brings with it local uproar and local feedback. In this book, community members often show up for the five pm council meeting where, on some issues, public comments have lasted for hours, well into the night. Local politics means having to face your neighbor and explain exactly why you’re not going to help them, even though you clearly have the power to do so. As Tulsa city councilor Laura Bellis once put it to me, “we can only get up to so much nonsense. Too much nonsense and your streets aren’t going to get paved.”
In 2019, Evanston, Illinois, was the first American city to successfully implement reparations for victims of racial discrimination. Fifth Ward Alderman Robin Rue Simmons led the effort to bring about repair for historic housing discrimination against African Americans, and the city began making payments of up to $25,000 for eligible applicants in 2021. As of September 2025, Evanston officials had met with more than 271 beneficiaries and paid out more than $6 million.
After leaving public service, Rue Simmons founded FirstRepair, which serves as a repository for data and hosts national conferences and workshops for those leading reparations efforts. She believes that the many hyperlocal initiatives are having a “trickle up” effect on the country, changing the culture and thinking around racial repair.
In fact, at the local level, reparations movements have steadily gained momentum since 2020. Currently, there are 106 local reparations efforts throughout the country and forty-seven municipal task forces, she said. What’s more, in 2019, there were sixty-five co-sponsors for HR 40 in Congress, Rue Simmons noted. By 2022, that number had gone up to 217 yes votes and co-sponsors. Hyperlocal and municipal initiatives often represent the most powerful beacon of hope in the reparations landscape, she added.
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Not long after Mayor Nichols’s historic announcement, I met with Hall-Harper and Decter Wright for dinner. Storm, flood, and tornado warnings had been broadcast throughout the state that afternoon, and yet, to me, the air in Tulsa had never felt lighter.
I could still remember my first trip there, where I’d unknowingly booked a room in a hotel that overlooked the former disgraced Brady Theater. I’d been haunted every time I looked out the window. But now, the Brady Theater had been renamed the Tulsa Theater, and four years had passed since the council’s Apology Resolution. It finally seemed that the city was ready to take its next monumental step forward.
Hall-Harper was in her usual form, unbought and unbossed, at the Mexicali Border Café, which was now located, not on Brady Street, but on a street called Reconciliation Way. She glanced at the menu and ordered without fanfare, disappointed that the restaurant didn’t have her favorite beer, Budweiser in a bottle. (Never a can.) Wearing a sweatshirt, casual leggings, and no makeup, her thoughts were punctuated with more than a few profanities as she continued to call out those she considered to be barriers to progress.
Overall, she was pleased with Mayor Nichols’s framework for Road to Repair, calling it the city’s first acknowledgment that included financial compensation as opposed to just “the symbolism of apologies.” Still, she wasn’t about to let down her guard. Her standing position had always been “we’ll see,” she said. Tulsa was good about “looking like it was doing something” when it really wasn’t and, at the end of the day, the city had “consistently maintained status quo, which was white supremacy.”
The road to repair had been long and treacherous for Hall-Harper and her entire family, who had been targeted with the explicit goal of harming their credibility, character, and livelihood. She had spoken frankly with me about the toll this persecution had taken on her marriage. In fact, she and her husband, Lt. Marcus Hall, had been separated for more than a year at that point and planned to divorce.
And even with Mayor Nichols’s groundbreaking plan, her fight was only just beginning.
She would continue to argue that in addition to Nichols’s private trust, public funds should also be used for reparations. If the city was materially culpable, then it should pay to repair the damage it had done. “I would still want to propose, as we originally had planned to do under the previous administration, allocating a portion of the $75 million that’s dedicated to housing, to a housing reparations program. Those who want to support it, can do so on the record, and those who don’t want to support it, again, their vote would be on the record.”
“Oklahoma State University–Tulsa is the largest landowner in Greenwood,” she said. “The government used eminent domain to acquire all that land, and to make it some type of educational facility. It was supposed to provide scholarships and pathways that ultimately would lead people out of poverty. But those things never happened.”
“I do think that over the long haul, there will be a conversation about a public contribution,” Nichols told me, agreeing with this assessment. He also believed that it might become easier to make these arguments, for reparations using public assets and funds, over time. As more people begin to see the positive impact of the private fund, he said, “it just may begin to soften folks.”
Nichols had lifted the heavy weight off the council’s shoulders. He had moved reparations forward with private funding, and without any real input from their side. But it remained to be seen how that body might eventually vote on the issue. There would most likely come a time when all nine members would have to take a stand, and to answer the question that was still pending: would the City of Tulsa, the government-sanctioned entity that participated in the devastation, pay for the harm it had done to its Black citizens? Or would the council take its place in history as having offered nothing more, in the end, than a belated and reluctant apology?
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Adapted from Tulsa Speaks: A City Council, Reparations, and Race in America Today by Kristal Brent Zook, published in June 2026 by Rutgers University Press.
