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Episode 1404Jun 12, 2025

Can reparations shrink the Black wealth gap in Tulsa?

The history behind Tulsa’s Black wealth gap.

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Can reparations shrink the Black wealth gap in Tulsa?
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

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More than 100 years after the Tulsa Race Massacre, the Oklahoma city’s mayor recently announced a $105 million reparations package to address the Massacre’s lasting impact. Marketplace’s Mitchell Hartman joins us on the show today to explain how we got here, and more from his reporting on economic injustice in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood. Plus, we’ll get into what the new reparations package could mean for Black Tulsans and the push for reparations in other cities.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

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Correction: (July 2, 2025) An earlier audio version of this story misstated the name of the cemetery in Tulsa, Oaklawn Cemetery, where mass graves of victims of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre have been identified. The error has been deleted.

The Team