Unsettled Accounts: Political Responses to Past Racial Violence in 20th Century America.

Abstract

This dissertation compares recent efforts to redress racial violence in Rosewood, Florida and Tulsa, Oklahoma. These cases constitute highly-belated efforts to redress past injustices; each concerned incidents of white-on-black violence experienced by African American communities in the early 1920’s. Despite the many similarities across these two cases, they departed significantly in their outcomes. In Rosewood, survivors were directly compensated for their losses; in Tulsa, however, the efforts to achieve reparations failed. Drawing on archival research, interviews with participants, and analysis of state legislative politics, this dissertation explains these different outcomes by highlighting the importance of the “opportunity structures” provided to claimants by state legislatures, and of the rhetorical frames used in the debate and ultimately to create legislation. These features, I argue, helped Rosewood advocates achieve a compensation bill focused on direct restitution to individual survivors and those that lost property. In contrast, the political actors in Tulsa focused on group-based compensation that failed to account for the number of survivors and the millions of dollars lost in property damage. In particular, the dissertation emphasizes the crucial role of the individual claim bill process, the framing of the issue in terms of “restitution” versus “reparations”, and the political engagement of survivors as key features shaping the outcomes of each case. It closes with a discussion of some of the implications of this research for rethinking the designation of success and failure regarding achieving compensation, and for recognizing the great opportunity that exists for rebuilding community in the absence of material responses from the state.