TULSA, OKLAHOMA — Civil rights attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons will publish his book "Redeem a Nation: The Century-Long Battle to Restore the Soul of America" on May 12, 2026. The book is intended as a blueprint for justice in historic atrocities for which Black Americans have not received reparations, including chattel slavery and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

Solomon-Simmons leads a reparations campaign for the living survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre and their descendants. As of 2026, no survivors or descendants have received compensation for their losses, and none of the perpetrators have been held accountable.

Solomon-Simmons founded the nonprofit Justice for Greenwood in 2020 and that same year led a lawsuit on behalf of 11 plaintiffs, including the last three known living survivors of the massacre, against the City of Tulsa and seven defendants. It was the first reparations case over the massacre in state court to see a judge. In 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed the suit. Lessie Benningfield Randle, aged 111, is the only remaining survivor involved in the lawsuit.

In the final days of the Biden administration, the U.S. Justice Department released a report stating that no avenue for criminal prosecution remained over the massacre. In 2025, Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols endorsed Project Greenwood, which proposed financial compensation for Randle, funding a scholarship program for descendants of victims, and designating June 1 as Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day.

Solomon-Simmons learned about the massacre during his junior year of college. He served as a law clerk for the Reparations Coordinating Committee, which included Charles Ogletree Jr. and Johnnie Cochran. After witnessing Ogletree argue a Tulsa reparations case in federal court in 2004, Solomon-Simmons said he considered the practice of law to be a calling.

In 1921, white mobs attacked a Black militia protecting the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, destroying more than 35 city blocks and an estimated 191 businesses, and displacing roughly 11,000 Black residents. The state of Oklahoma declared the death toll to be 36 people, while historians estimate the toll to be between 75 and 300. Greenwood was founded in 1906 and developed into a neighborhood with Black-owned grocery stores, soda fountains, cafés, barbershops, a movie theater, music venues, cigar and billiard parlors, tailors, dry cleaners, rooming houses, and rental properties.

"The struggle for justice in Greenwood is not about returning to a mythical past. It is about proving whether America can build a soul at all through truth, through justice, through repair," Solomon-Simmons said. "People want reparations, but people (also) want acknowledgment."