News

Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says

Published

2 hours ago

January 11, 2025

Tulsa Massacre Was a ‘Coordinated, Military-Style Attack,’ Federal Report Says

The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which a prosperous Black neighborhood in Oklahoma was destroyed and up to 300 people were killed, was not committed by an uncontrolled mob but was the result of “a coordinated, military-style attack” by white citizens, the Justice Department said in a report released Friday.

The report, stemming from an investigation announced in September, is the first time that the federal government has given an official, comprehensive account of the events of May 31 and June 1, 1921, in the Tulsa neighborhood of Greenwood. Although it formally concluded that, more than a century later, no person alive could be prosecuted, it underscored the brutality of the atrocities committed.

“The Tulsa Race Massacre stands out as a civil rights crime unique in its magnitude, barbarity, racist hostility and its utter annihilation of a thriving Black community,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement. “In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings and locked the survivors in internment camps.”

No one today could be held criminally responsible, she said, “but the historical reckoning for the massacre continues.”

The report’s legal findings noted that if contemporary civil rights laws were in effect in 1921, federal prosecutors could have pursued hate crime charges against both public officials and private citizens.

Though considered one of the worst episodes of racial terror in U.S. history, the massacre was relatively unknown for decades: City officials buried the story, and few survivors talked about the massacre.

The Justice Department began its investigation under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows the agency to examine such crimes resulting in death that occurred before 1980. Investigators spoke with survivors and their descendants, looked at firsthand accounts and examined an informal review by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, the precursor to the F.B.I. In that 1921 report, the agency asserted that the riot was not the result of “racial feeling,” and suggested that Black men were responsible for the massacre.

The new 123-page report corrects the record, while detailing the scale of destruction and its aftermath. The massacre began with an unfounded accusation. A young Black man, Dick Rowland, was being held in custody by local authorities after being accused of assaulting a young white woman.

According to the report, after a local newspaper sensationalized the story, an angry crowd gathered at the courthouse demanding that Mr. Rowland be lynched. The local sheriff asked Black men from Greenwood, including some who had recently returned from military service, to come to the courthouse to try to prevent the lynching. Other reports suggest the Black neighbors offered to help but were turned away by the sheriff.

The white mob viewed attempts to protect Mr. Rowland as “an unacceptable challenge to the social order,” the report said. The crowd grew and soon there was a confrontation. Hundreds of residents (some of whom had been drinking) were deputized by the Tulsa Police. Law enforcement officers helped organize these special deputies who, along with other residents, eventually descended on Greenwood, a neighborhood whose success inspired the name Black Wall Street.

The report described the initial attack as “opportunistic,” but by daybreak on June 1, “a whistle blew, and the violence and arsons that had been chaotic became systematic.” According to the report, up to 10,000 white Tulsans participated in the attack, burning or looting 35 city blocks. It was so “systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence,” the report said.

In the aftermath, the survivors were left to rebuild their lives with little or no help from the city. The massacre’s impact, historians say, is still felt generations later.

In the years since the attack, survivors and their descendants and community activists have fought for justice. Most recently, a lawsuit seeking reparations filed on behalf of the last two known centenarian survivors was dismissed by Oklahoma justices in June. In recent years, Tulsa has excavated sections of a city cemetery in search of the graves of massacre victims. And in 2024, the city created a commission to study the harms of the atrocity and recommend solutions. The results are expected in the coming weeks.

Click to comment

News

The strange world of the Euro-Gulf

Published

4 hours ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

Stay informed with free updates

Waiting for the Tube, I see a poster for an upmarket gym chain. Locations? “City of London. High Street Kensington. Dubai.” What a shame to choose a setting that is so disfigured with bad taste and clueless expats. Still, the City and Dubai branches must be first-rate.

Soon after, I am in Doha, and again the Euro-Gulf linkage is inescapable. The emir of Qatar is back from a state visit to Britain, where the hosts were angling for a trade deal. Swiss-headquartered Fifa has just given the World Cup hosting rights to Saudi Arabia. Even in skyscraper-free Muscat, where alleys that might have been rationalised elsewhere in the Gulf twist freely behind the corniche, three restaurants in my hotel are outposts of Mayfair brands.

What a shame the word “Eurabia” is taken. And by such cranks. (It is a far-right term for a supposed plot to Islamise Europe.) Because we are going to need a word for this relationship. The Arabian peninsula has what Europe lacks: space, natural wealth and the resulting budget surpluses to invest in things. For its part, Europe has “soft” assets that Gulf states must acquire, host or emulate to carve out a post-oil role in the world. This isn’t the Gulf’s deepest external connection. Not while 38 per cent of people in the UAE and a quarter in Qatar are Indian. But it might be the most symbiotic, if I understand that word correctly.

True, the US has a defence presence in all six Gulf Cooperation Council states. This includes the Saudi footprint that Osama bin Laden wasn’t super-stoked about. But everyday contact? America is a 15-hour flight away. Its soft assets are either harder to buy or less coveted. Its citizens have little fiscal incentive to live in tax havens, as Uncle Sam charges them at least some of the difference.

In the 1970s, when Opec profits gushed through London, Anthony Burgess wrote a dystopia in which grand hotels became “al-Klaridges” and “al-Dorchester”. What a mental jolt it was for even the worldliest Europeans to see — we mustn’t pussyfoot around this — non-white people with more money than them. Still, they could condescend to the Gulf as being no place to live. Half a century on, their grandchildren would call that copium. In fact, their grandchildren might literally live there for economic opportunities. (Al-Dorado?) As a banker friend explains it, the time zones allow you to sleep late, trade the European markets, then dine late, so it is the young ones who do a Gulf stint, not the burnouts who are my age.

For how long, though? It is the sheer unlikelihood of this tryst, between a universal rights culture and monarchical absolutism, between a mostly secular continent and the home peninsula of an ancient faith, that distinguishes it from anything I can think of. A relationship can be both necessary and untenable. It wouldn’t take much — some intra-GCC violence, say, which seemed close in 2017 — for Europe’s exposure to the Gulf to age as badly as its former openness to Russia. If Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City are found to have committed financial chicanery, a chunk of Premier League history will be tainted. Because it is “just” sport, I sense people are underprepared for the backlash.

And it is parochial to assume that the relationship could only ever break down on one end. It is the Gulf side that has to make the awkwardest cultural adjustments. Because Europeans associate 1979 with Iran and perhaps with Margaret Thatcher, they sometimes pass over the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by zealots who thought the House of Saud had grown soft on western habits. Governments in the region assuredly don’t forget.

How far a place can liberalise without tripping a cultural wire occupies (and is answered differently in) each state, or emirate. Everyone is very nice to “Mister Janan” in his Doha hotel. But the metal scanners that must be passed on each re-entry to the building stand as a reminder of the stakes here. I wonder if Europe and the Gulf throw so much into their liaison out of a niggling doubt that it can last.

Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning

News

Fox News headed for trial, again, over 2020 election fraud claims

Published

5 hours ago

January 11, 2025

Press Room

Fox News headed for trial, again, over 2020 election fraud claims

Fox News appears headed for trial over false election fraud claims made after the 2020 election, after a New York state appellate court chose not to dismiss a lawsuit brought by voting tech company Smartmatic.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

hide caption

toggle caption

Spencer Platt/Getty Images/Getty Images North America

Fox News appears to be headed once more to court over the lies involving election fraud it aired about the 2020 presidential race. This time, it’s over the false claims that election tech company Smartmatic sabotaged the re-election of then-President Donald Trump.

In April 2023, on the eve of a trial in Delaware in which Fox founder Rupert Murdoch was set to testify, the network and its parent corporation agreed to pay $787.5 million to settle a defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems.

Fox News settles blockbuster defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems

A flood of revelations from the pre-trial process of discovery yielded damning internal communications. The judge found that network figures from junior producers to primetime hosts, network executives, Murdoch and his son Lachlan knew that Joe Biden had won the election fairly. Yet, they allowed guests to spread lies that Trump had been cheated of victory to win back Trump viewers. Some hosts amplified and even embraced the claims.

Now, an appellate court ruling in New York state is allowing Smartmatic’s parallel, $2.7 billion suit to press ahead. The same ruling also dismissed some counts against the network’s parent company, Fox Corp.

Pro-Trump Fox hosts including Maria Bartiromo and the late Lou Dobbs invited guests making unsubstantiated and wild claims about Smartmatic on the air, and at times appeared to endorse those allegations themselves.

Fox forced Dobbs off the air just a day after Smartmatic filed its suit in February 2021. Two weeks later, Fox News and Fox Business Network ran an awkward segment with a voting tech expert, Edward Perez, to present viewers with a rebuttal to those outlandish claims. Newsmax, a right-wing channel in competition with Fox for viewers who supported Trump, did much the same.

“Today, the New York Supreme Court rebuffed Fox Corporation’s latest attempt to escape responsibility for the defamation campaign it orchestrated against Smartmatic following the 2020 election,” Smartmatic’s lead attorney, Erik Connolly, said in a statement. “Fox Corporation attempted, and failed, to have this case dismissed, and it must now answer for its actions at trial. Smartmatic is seeking several billion in damages for the defamation campaign that Fox News and Fox Corporation are responsible for executing. We look forward to presenting our evidence at trial.”

Unlike Dominion, whose voting machines were used in two dozen states, Smartmatic says its technology was used only in Los Angeles County in 2020. Fox has sharply questioned the value of Smartmatic and the contracts it says were jeopardized and lost.

“We will be ready to defend this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events when it goes to trial,” a network spokesperson said in a statement. “As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims are implausible, disconnected from reality, and on their face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms.”

In the Dominion case, Fox also relied on arguments that its shows and hosts were simply relaying inherently newsworthy allegations from inherently newsworthy people — the then-president and his allies. The presiding judge in Delaware, Eric M. Davis, rejected that argument; he found that Fox’s executives, stars, and shows had broadcast false claims and defamed Dominion in doing so.

Fox has said that the New York case offers a new venue, with slightly different implications, although Davis applied New York defamation law in his Delaware proceedings.

Fox settled, as it has in many other cases, before opening arguments of the trial with Dominion. It maintains it will fight the allegations Smartmatic is making in court.

News

Trump Blames L.A. Wildfires on Newsom Using Familiar Tactics

Published

14 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

When enormous wildfires began to menace Los Angeles, the incoming president did not use his social media site to pledge support to emergency responders or offer words of compassion to a city where thousands of people have lost everything.

Instead, President-elect Donald Trump used his megaphone to tell the world who was at fault.

It wasn’t the Santa Ana winds, nor was it the rising temperatures that have dried out vegetation and made fires harder to extinguish.

The culprit, he wrote, was “Gavin Newscum.”

The Los Angeles fires have killed at least 11 people, reduced thousands of structures to ash and burned more than 36,000 acres, an area larger than the footprint of San Francisco. It’s the kind of devastation that, in a bygone era, might have prompted at least a temporary political cease-fire and pledges to work across the aisle to rebuild, even as the authorities face legitimate questions about their handling of the crisis.

Instead, with 10 days until Trump’s second inauguration, he offered a reminder of how he has long used disasters to damage political opponents like Gov. Gavin Newsom, Democrat of California — even when they’re still going on.

“What this feels like is, the man hasn’t changed an inch,” said Carmen Yulín Cruz, the former mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, whom Trump described as “nasty” when they tangled over the federal response to the devastation of Hurricane Maria on the island in 2017.

But it’s not just about hurting his political foes. Trump has always been a master of tapping into people’s angst and projecting it far and wide for his benefit — and there is a lot of angst in Los Angeles right now.

‘Why is he doing this?’

Residents in Los Angeles are angry that water systems never designed to fight so many threatening fires have run dry. They are mystified that Karen Bass, the Democratic mayor, wasn’t in the city when the blazes began. They are scared for their lives and fearful that the institutions they have come to rely on, like insurance, won’t make them whole on the other side of this.

This week, Trump has called for Newsom to resign, blamed other Democrats like President Biden and Mayor Bass and said incorrectly that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had no money to respond to the disaster because of the “Green New Scam.”

It’s a revival of a tendency he displayed during his first presidency, when he injected his personal politics into once-sacrosanct concepts like providing federal disaster aid to areas no matter whether they were blue or red. He told aides he wanted to stop money from reaching Puerto Rico after Maria, claiming that the island’s leadership was corrupt, and publicly insulted Cruz.

“At the beginning, I thought, ‘Why is he doing this?’” Cruz told me in an interview today. She suspected, she said, that it was because she was a Latina and a woman who had challenged his federal response to the disaster in her city. “It can be distracting, but it wasn’t distracting because I very clearly saw that it gave me an opportunity to talk about what was really going on in Puerto Rico.”

(He also struggled to manage the optics of his own response, like when he traveled to the island and hucked paper towels into the crowd.)

He also fought extensively with California. After the state’s devastating wildfire season of 2018, he tweeted that he had ordered FEMA to “send no more money” unless the state changed its approach to forest management. He has clashed on and off with Newsom over issues like water management and federal aid ever since.

In a text message last fall, Newsom told my colleagues that Trump often seemed to expect personal treatment before the state could receive aid, saying he was “publicly threatening, playing his politics — looking tough … forcing a call, a ‘transaction’ in his mind — reminding you in process who’s in control, why he matters.”

Beyond withholding aid, Trump has used disasters as political ammunition on the campaign trail. After a train derailed and spilled toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio, in early 2023, he used the site as a backdrop to hammer the Biden administration, helping his presidential campaign pick up steam.

And last fall, when Hurricane Helene slammed into Georgia and North Carolina, he made a series of false claims about the federal disaster response as he sought to depict the Biden administration as hapless and even biased against Republicans who were in harm’s way.

Unavoidable politics

Trump’s defenders say there is no reason he shouldn’t bring up politics in a moment irrevocably shaped by them.

“We will have a fire, and there will be winds to blow the fire, but what determines the flow of the fire and the infrastructure capability of the fire department to fight, it is on them,” said former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, referring to the Democratic leadership of the city and the state.

He added: “In a time of crisis, people look at their electeds for leadership. How do you think they’re doing? They’re blaming somebody else. They say you can’t ask these questions. They’re not in town — they can’t answer why something happened.”

James Gallagher, who serves as the Republican leader in the State Assembly and represents Paradise, a Northern California community that was devastated by the Camp Fire in 2018, said there was deep frustration that more hadn’t been done to reduce wildfire fuel in the state.

Climate change exacerbates conditions that can lead to wildfires, he said, but he blamed Democrats’ leadership for inadequate management of the dry brush that can fuel fires. (Trump has discussed this in the past, although his recent posts have focused more on his dispute with Newsom over water management, which California officials say would not have changed the circumstances around the fires.)

“The politics are wrapped up in some very substantive policy,” Gallagher said.

“We’ve been saying this for a long time — maybe we don’t have as big of a megaphone” as Trump, he added.