One of the lawyers who sued for damages in the immediate aftermath of the riots was Franklin’s father. Speaking from his Durham, N.C., home yesterday, Franklin recalled the fear he felt as a six year-old boy living in Rentiesville, Okla., 60 miles south of Tulsa, at the time of the riots.

His father, Buck Colbert Franklin, had travelled to Tulsa with the intention of moving the family to the city. Following the riots, Franklin’s father was detained for a week, and the family had no knowledge of his whereabouts. After Buck Colbert Franklin’s release, “he went back to the place where he thought he had a home only to discover that it had been flattened by looting and burning,” the 89 year-old historian said yesterday.

“If you were a black and you tried to assert your rights, you were indicted or run out of town,” said Brophy, who received a doctorate in the history of American civilization from Harvard in 2001.

As recently as the early 1970s, a white National Guard officer faced death threats when he began investigating the 1921 riots, Brophy said.

After the end of the Jim Crow era, “the courts were effectively open to black people in general, but they were not open to these riot victims,” Brophy said. “Those folks had no shot at justice.”

Only after the state-sponsored commission’s 2001 report did survivors have a realistic chance at winning reparations, he said.

Survivors approached Ogletree in 2002 after a lecture he presented at the University of Tulsa Law School and asked him to take on the case.

“Here were people in wheelchairs, with all sorts of illnesses, who are clinging to life looking for someone to defend them,” Ogletree recalled.

“Fifteen clients have already died in the one year since the lawsuit was filed. We don’t have any basis to delay the expeditious continuation of this case,” he said.

Ogletree responded to the survivors’ stories by cobbling together a dazzling array of attorneys.

“Now that I know and have met so many of the survivors and their descendants I’m even more committed to making sure that their interests are vindicated,” said Roberts, who the Washingtonian magazine named the top lawyer in the capital in April 2002.

The Tulsa legal team included attorneys on a national advocacy group called the Reparations Coordinating Committee (RCC), which Ogletree co-chairs.

Other Tulsa lawyers on the RCC include Cochran and Dennis Sweet, a Mississippi-based attorney who helped win a landmark $400 million verdict against the maker of the Fen-Phen diet pill.

And Ogletree told The Crimson in April 2002 that the group was considering filing suits against universities with historic links to slaveholders—including Harvard and Brown.

Ogletree said yesterday he was encouraged by an “extremely fruitful and productive” session in December with a Brown University commission that is probing the school’s past ties to the slave trade.