Three years after an injection of state funding helped revitalize a scholarship program commemorating the Tulsa Race Massacre, a bill to expand the initiative to students across the country stalled at the Legislature.
Sen. Regina Goodwin, D-Tulsa, authored the measure that would have opened the scholarship to descendants who plan to attend a college in Oklahoma, but the proposal never made it out of a conference committee and didn’t get passed.
Goodwin’s legislation also would have mandated that descendants get first priority in the selection process. Current program rules state that applicants will be prioritized based on whether they’ve received the scholarship previously, and factors like family income and the area of Tulsa they live in.
If those factors don’t narrow down the pool sufficiently, program administrators will consider whether the applicant is related to a person who lived in Greenwood during the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Goodwin’s measure passed through the Senate unanimously but met some resistance in the House.
During debate on the bill, several Republican legislators raised questions about whether the program is a form of reparations, and how applicants’ relationships to massacre survivors would be verified.
Rep. Gabe Woolley, R-Broken Arrow, filed an amendment to the bill that he said would create a “merit-based” selection process for the scholarship. It included requirements for applicants to have at least a 2.5 cumulative high school GPA, and to submit a historical essay on the Tulsa Race Massacre.
Other lawmakers questioned Woolley on the House floor on whether he knew about existing scholarship application requirements or had talked to the legislation’s authors. The amendment eventually failed by five votes.
Woolley told the Frontier he believes in “personal responsibility” so he doesn’t support using public money to compensate Tulsa Race Massacre descendants. He said those efforts should be accomplished through private donations instead.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate to make people who did not cause the injustice or the harm pay through their tax dollars for the sins that other people have committed,” Woolley said.
Woolley said that while he’s aware of some existing program requirements, he wanted to make the application process more rigorous.
“I believe that for a scholarship, especially when it comes to taxpayer-funded things, I think it was always best to hold a high standard for education,” Woolley said.
The program application already asks students to fill out essay prompts on the importance of remembering the massacre, how the event impacts the community today and how the student’s future plans will honor the legacy of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, which was mostly burned to the ground by a white mob in 1921.
The application also asks students to report their cumulative high school GPA, though a spokesperson for the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education said in an email there are no GPA requirements for students to receive or keep the scholarship.
“It’s been around for 24 years,” Goodwin said. “They already have to write an essay. They already have to have a grade point average. So those points they were making up as to why they didn’t think we should pass it were ridiculous.”
A state commission to study the Tulsa Race Massacre in 2001 recommended creating a scholarship to help affected students, along with paying direct reparations to survivors and their descendants.
The commission wrote that restitution to the Greenwood community would be “good public policy and do much to repair the emotional as well as physical scars of this most terrible incident in our shared past.”
The Tulsa Reconciliation Education and Scholarship Program was created by the state Legislature that year to provide financial aid to students in Tulsa, “which was greatly impacted both socially and economically by the civil unrest that occurred.”
But for decades, funding for the program was limited and students related to Tulsa Race Massacre victims weren’t prioritized in the selection process.
State data obtained previously by The Frontier indicated that an average of only eight $1,000 scholarships had been awarded per year by the state regents from the program’s creation until 2022.
The Legislature appropriated $1.5 million in new funding that year for the program, helping administrators distribute 51 scholarships averaging about $2,500 each. Descendants of Tulsa Race Massacre victims make up about 14% of the program’s participants — a statistic that program administrators didn’t track until 2022.
“I think unless you are intentional and persistent about what we’re trying to do, we would not have even hit those marks,” said Goodwin.
Program data indicates that 66% of the students awarded scholarships since June 2022 identified as Black. Another 8% identified as Hispanic, and 14% didn’t report their ethnicity. Forty percent of students didn’t report if they were descendants of massacre victims.
Students of all races have always been able to access the scholarship, but they need to be able to address the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre in an essay, said Goodwin.
Current scholarship recipients Amarion Penny and Keyon’Dre Penny are the great-grandchildren of Lessie Benningfield Randle, one of the last two known living survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre. They said they remember being the first ones in their classes to know about the massacre because of stories they heard from their great-grandmother.
The scholarships have helped both Amarion and Keyon’Dre enroll in college classes that have set them up for future success, they said. Amarion, a sophomore at Langston University, majoring in business management and sports information, said he received a scholarship to play football, but it wouldn’t have been enough to cover his tuition.
Keyon’Dre, a sophomore at Oklahoma State University studying mechanical engineering, said though the program is partly for descendants of massacre survivors, he believes it benefits all students. He said he thinks it’s important to continue the program and reach as many students as possible.
“It will make it so we can’t repeat the history of what happened before,” Keyon’Dre said. “It will make the community more uplifting.”
Woolley believes the best way to preserve the history of the Tulsa Race Massacre is to teach about it in the classroom. As a former educator, he said he always taught about the massacre in his 5th and 6th grade classes, even if it wasn’t in the curriculum.
Two years after Oklahoma legislators passed a law banning some concepts about race in public schools, several teachers told The Frontier they discussed topics like the Tulsa Race Massacre more cautiously. But Woolley said he didn’t face pressure from administrators to stop teaching on the massacre after the law was passed.
Crackdowns on history education pose a threat to programs like the Tulsa scholarship, said Rep. Cyndi Munson, D-Oklahoma City, who co-authored the state bill that would have expanded the program. But she’s hopeful that legislators from both parties will band together to protect those initiatives.
“Our job is just to stay vigilant, keep people educated and push back on any attempt to end these really important programs,” Munson said.
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