As Biden marks 100 years since Tulsa Massacre, calls grow for reparations to close racial wealth gap

President Biden traveled to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to mark the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, one of the single greatest acts of racist terrorism in U.S. history. Over a span of 18 hours, a white mob burned down what was known as “Black Wall Street,” the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, and killed an estimated 300 African Americans. Duke University professor William Darity says it’s “very impressive” that a sitting U.S. president highlighted the Tulsa race massacre and its lingering effects, but he says he’s skeptical that Biden’s economic proposals do enough to close the racial wealth gap. “We need something much more potent and much more substantial,” Darity says. “If we were going to bring the share of Black wealth into consistency with the share of the Black population, it would require an expenditure of at least $11 trillion.”