On the morning of May 31, 1921, Lessie Benningfield Randle was a little girl who lived in a community whose residents had done every single thing America claims “Black people need to do.”
By that evening, Randle was no longer a little girl who led her choir and played basketball; she was a “survivor.” Nearly a century later, on Oct. 14, 2020, Lessie Benningfield Randle became the first survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre to give a sworn deposition.
“I remember seeing a truck, a flatbed truck,” Randle testified. “They just threw dead bodies on that truck, stacked them up like livestock after a slaughter. They said they were going to take them to the morgue, but we heard later they took those bodies down and threw them in the river.”
Long before he became the attorney for Randle and the other living survivors of the 1921 Greenwood race massacre, Damario Solomon-Simmons knew what he needed to do. Born and raised in the shadow of America’s bloodiest race massacre (unless you count race-based slavery, the entire year of 1919 and the annual massacre of unarmed Black men by law enforcement officers), he is dedicated to justice. But America is not the only nation he is battling.
As a descendant of Muscogee Chief Cow Tom, Solomon-Simmons has also led the fight to regain citizenship for his fellow Black Creek after the Muscogee (Creek) Nation stripped its Black members of their citizenship. Still, when it comes to restoring or repairing this nation’s soul, Solomon-Simmons admits that there is an enormous obstacle in his way.
“America has never had a soul,” he writes in the author’s note of the new book, Redeem A Nation: The Century-Long Battle to Restore the Soul of America. “From its beginning, this nation was built on genocide, slavery, and racial exploitation. There was no moral center to recover.”
The ContrabandCamp contributor sat down with Michael Harriot to discuss his new book, the history of Greenwood and the most unachievable goal of all—the Oklahoma Sooners winning a national championship. We will continue this conversation on Saturday, May 23, at 44th & 3rd Bookseller in Atlanta.
Redeem a Nation: The Century-Long Battle to Restore the Soul of America is available in bookstores everywhere.
