In 1921, the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma, witnessed a terrible and tragic massacre. A mob of white citizens descended upon the neighborhood of Greenwood, killed between 100 and 300 predominantly black people, and destroyed more than 1,200 buildings of all kinds.[1] Members of the mob were aided by some city officials, and even after the violence ended, local officials exacerbated the victims’ harm by, among other things, arresting and detaining thousands of Greenwood residents and using the city’s building code to block efforts to rebuild.[2]

One hundred years later, three survivors of the massacre sued the City of Tulsa, the Tulsa Regional Chamber, the Board of County Commissioners, the sheriff, and the Oklahoma Military Department seeking money under public nuisance and unjust enrichment theories.[3] Their case, Randle v. City of Tulsa, rose to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which, in a decision written by Vice-Chief Justice Dustin P. Rowe, held that these well-established theories of liability could not be “extend[ed]” to give the plaintiffs the money they sought.[4] Their allegations did not satisfy the elements of these claims, and to extend them, the court held, would venture the court “into the realm of outright policy making.”[5]

Ultimately, what the plaintiffs wanted were judicially crafted remedies to “generational-societal inequities,” but the court said these problems “can only be resolved by policymakers—not the courts.”[6]

Public Nuisance

The case rose to the state supreme court after an early dismissal—a point in litigation where the plaintiffs’ allegations are assumed to be true even though they are not yet proven.

The plaintiffs alleged that the property damage caused during the massacre amounted to a public nuisance that “persists to this day,” and that it must be remedied by “a series of affirmative policies directed at offsetting or minimizing [lingering] inequities.”[7] The court focused on the latter point about remedies.

Oklahoma case law limits public-nuisance liability to cases involving criminal conduct and physical damage to property.[8] The remedies for those harms are criminal indictment, civil action, or abatement.[9]

The court held that criminal indictment did not apply here because everyone who might be held criminally liable for the massacre died a long time ago.[10] The other remedies, meanwhile, did not apply because Oklahoma case law requires public-nuisance plaintiffs to identify some damaged property that a civil remedy or an injunction can fix, which the plaintiffs did not do.[11] Instead, the plaintiffs argued that in the 100 years since the massacre, the defendants “redirected public resources” to “overwhelmingly White parts of Tulsa,” which caused “insecurity in their lives and property” and destroyed “their sense of comfort, health, and safety.”[12] But the court held that these claims “do not fall within the scope of [Oklahoma’s] public nuisance statute.”[13]

The plaintiffs tried to better fit their claim within the law by claiming that all property in Greenwood is blighted by the “pall” that the massacre still casts over the neighborhood.[14] But palls and feelings of discomfort are beyond the limited powers of civil remedies and injunctions.[15] And indeed, what plaintiffs actually wanted was a bevy of “affirmative policies” aimed at fixing generational and societal disparities.[16] Those sorts of policies are not abatement, but policymaking, which is beyond the judicial power.[17]

In closing on the public nuisance claim, the court warned that the plaintiffs’ theory of public nuisance “runs the risk of creating a new ‘unlimited and unprincipled’ form of liability wherein both State and non-State actors could be held liable for their predecessors’ wrongdoing, in which current actors played no part.”[18] For all those reasons, the court affirmed the dismissal of the plaintiffs’ public nuisance claim.

Unjust Enrichment

As to unjust enrichment, the plaintiffs alleged that the defendants used the history of the massacre to attract tourism and to raise money for economic and community development.[19] These activities, they argued, amounted to the unjust theft of the survivors’ “pain and trauma” for the city’s benefit, and so the funds earned from those activities over the last 100 years should be handed over to the plaintiffs.[20] This claim, however, was far beyond the legal bounds of unjust enrichment actions.

Unjust enrichment actions have long been limited to “contractual and quasi-contractual relationships.”[21] There must have been some “exchange or transaction” or, at least, a fraudulent promise in which one party gains an unjust benefit at the expense of another.[22] For there to be a viable unjust enrichment claim here, the defendants must be shown to have fraudulently promised to give the plaintiffs a share of the funds they earned, yet the plaintiffs could make no such allegation. [23] 

In closing, the court said that although the plaintiffs’ grievances are “legitimate,” their claims attempt to unlawfully “extend our unjust enrichment jurisprudence beyond its recognized bounds.”[24] For these reasons the court affirmed the dismissal of the case.

The decision was at least partially unanimous; Justice James Edmondson, alone, concurred in part and dissented in part, but he did not file an opinion explaining his reasoning.

 

[1] See Randle v. City of Tulsa, 2024 OK 40, ¶ 2 (2024) (summarizing the facts of the massacre).

[2] Id. at ¶ 3.

[3] Id. at ¶ 4. Originally, the plaintiffs included descendants and relatives of survivors and a Greenwood church, but those plaintiffs were dismissed for lack of standing and did not challenge that decision on appeal.

[4] Id. at ¶¶ 21, 38.

[5] Id. at ¶ 20.

[6] Id. at ¶ 19.

[7] Id. at ¶¶ 17–18.

[8] Id. at ¶16 (citing State ex rel. Hunter v. Johnson & Johnson, 499 P.3d 719 (Okla. 2021)).

[9] Id. at ¶ 17 (citing Okla. Stat. tit. 50, § 8 (2024)).

[10] Id.

[11] Id.

[12] Id. at ¶ 18, n.11 (quoting the plaintiffs’ complaint).

[13] Id. at ¶ 17.

[14] Id. at ¶ 19.

[15] Id.

[16] Id.

[17] Id. (holding that addressing societal disparities is for “policymakers—not the courts”)

[18] Id. at ¶ 20 (quoting Johnson & Johnson, 499 P.3d at 725).

[19] Id. at ¶¶ 29–30.

[20] Id. at ¶ 29.

[21] Id. at ¶ 27.

[22] Id.

[23] Id. at ¶ 30.

[24] Id. at ¶¶ 38–39.

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