America is finally acknowledging the Tulsa race massacre. The next step is reparations | Akin Olla

The US owes African Americans reparations for Tulsa - but also for slavery, and countless other lynchings and race massacres, and Jim Crow

A hundred years have passed since a mob of white Americans - with the backing of local political figures and police - stormed into the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, also known as Black Wall Street, and massacred an estimated 300 African Americans while burning and looting the entire neighborhood. This crime, for which no one was convicted, was one of the most severe single instances of racial violence in the history of the United States, and is finally being openly discussed after decades of national silence.

With this renewed attention should come more than just news coverage and speeches. African Americans must be paid reparations - for the money and lives stolen by this country as a whole, for the crime of Tulsa and for the long list of violent acts that the United States was built upon. Reparations would not undo the injustices of the past - or the modern violence of budget cuts, housing discrimination, mass incarceration and mass policing - but it would at least signal a turning point, while greatly improving the lives of a people deeply wronged by a system that could hardly exist without them.