United States Vice-President Kamala Harris said in a recent television interview: “I eat ‘no’ for breakfast.” She was stating as clearly as she could why being told “no” at various times in her life was never a deterrent in her pursuit of an objective that she considered to be worthy and of importance.

I am accustomed to her plain-speaking ways, as she was my US senator and state attorney general before becoming vice-president. It is this spirit of eating “no” for breakfast that suffuses the spirit of many descendants of the Tulsa race massacre in the prosperous black enclave of Greenwood, which was destroyed by over 18 hours of mayhem, May 31 to June 1, 1921.

One hundred years have gone by without the country — or the state of Oklahoma — acknowledging the how, why, what, and wherefore of one of the worst instances of domestic terrorism the country has known. These are not my views, but the views of President Joe Biden who, in commemorating the centennial of that terrible event, largely hidden from American history, said in Tulsa on June 1, 2021: “This was not a riot. This was a massacre.”

There are three survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre in which the so-called Black Wall Street was destroyed by zealous, rampaging white hordes… jealous of the very prosperous African American community that flourished just 56 years after Emancipation. They killed more than 300 black men, women, and children; destroyed 35 blocks of black businesses; burnt down more than 1,000 homes; and left more than 10,000 people homeless.

Many of these homeless were interred without cause or due process — an internment pre-dating by more than 20 years, the internment of American citizens during Word War II. The tragic consequences of the Tulsa massacre, and others like it throughout American history, have led to little or no accumulated generational wealth (that is, wealth transferred from one generation to the next) among African Americans. This is a principal cause of black poverty in the United States. Greenwood — and its four generations since — are only an extreme example of this reality.

Their possessions were stolen or destroyed, and most of their land was expropriated and transferred via various deceptions to whites and the state of Oklahoma. Today, Oklahoma State University sits proudly on previously black-owned land.

How, therefore, is “no” being eaten? “No” is eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I dare say, when there is strong pushback against the governor and the Oklahoma legislature in their attempt to enact laws which outlaw the teaching of history that makes whites uncomfortable, or gives them feelings of guilt. Truth be damned. This is what desperate men do when they subsume the guilt, shame, and horror of their past under a contrived rubric of laws enhanced by a feigned ignorance.

There arises, now, the clarion call for restitution of land which was illegally seized, or compensation equal to its current fair market value. The excuse that the sins of long ago cannot now be atoned for, because the dispossessed and/or the aggrieved are long dead, doesn’t hold. There are at least three survivors of the Tulsa massacre who can legally make claims for restitution. They and their estates can lodge such claims which will remain in force even in the event of their deaths.

There is little appetite for anyone to relent now, as that would be fiercely resisted and strenuously opposed by the firm “no” it would evoke.

Dr Carl Blackwood is a retired aerospace engineer in Silicon Valley, California. He has worked in academia and has led research and development programmes in industry, including schemes for satellite ranging and attitude determination and RF autotracking on geostationary satellites. He earned his BSc (Hons) and PhD degrees in electronic engineering from University of Hull in England.