The Tulsa Massacre, which took place from May 31 to June 1, 1921, remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in US history.

Ashley McCray (MBA 2022) was a little nervous as she prepared to join 700 of her first-year classmates in February for a virtual discussion of Professor Mihir Desai’s new case, “The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations.” “Talking about race is hard. When you add the business implications, some people are too afraid to start the conversation. But, we did. We started a dialogue,” says McCray, a Black woman from Chicago, who is active in issues of diversity and inclusion.

Brian Ratajczak (MBA 2022) was a little nervous, too. “If you are talking about finance, and someone says something you disagree with, there’s probably not going to be a lot of emotions stirred up,” says Ratajczak, a white man from Calabasas, California.

This case was different. It seemed impossible to separate emotions from the events that had occurred in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, from May 31 to June 1, 1921. An estimated 300 Black residents were killed and homes and businesses along 35 square blocks of the city were destroyed at the hands of a white mob over the course of 18 hours. Unfounded accusations that a young Black shoe shiner had assaulted a white woman sparked the massacre. This event and other examples of systemic racism are rarely taught in American schools. In fact, Ratajczak says, “I only heard of the Tulsa Massacre about two years ago when I was doing a walking tour through Harlem. I thought there must be some disconnect because how could I have lived nearly 30 years without ever hearing of this event?”

Listening and Learning

To prepare for the discussion of reparations for these century-old crimes, Ratajczak spent more time than usual thinking about how to best present his arguments and the language he would choose to make his point. “I wanted to frame it in a way that could create debate, rather than in a way that rubbed people the wrong way or made them feel hurt,” he says. McCray had strong opinions on the case, but decided she would focus on listening and learning from the different perspectives of her classmates.

In their trepidation and careful preparation, McCray and Ratajczak both learned one of the many lessons Desai hoped the case would impart: the importance of having difficult conversations and approaching them with empathy.

Desai, the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance, was inspired to write about the Tulsa Massacre after George Floyd’s killing in the spring of 2020. He wanted to find a way to channel his frustration into something productive and realized that creating pedagogic material [see related story] on these issues could be powerful.

For Desai, it was important to go beyond featuring a Black protagonist. “Only by directly confronting the underlying issues and history can we actually understand the role of Black leaders in our society and the way they can flourish or not,” he says. In “The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations,” Desai and coauthors Suzanne Antoniou and Leanne Fan ask students what Desai calls “one of the hardest questions we face: how do you address historic injustices?”

The story of Greenwood—known as Black Wall Street due its prosperity—was a way for Desai to explore issues of reparations, taking the debate from a broad and far-reaching one to a discussion of a particular place and particular people: Do the descendants of those who died or lost property deserve reparations? The relative recency of the Tulsa Massacre and the economic loss—estimated at $26.1 million in today’s dollars—accompanying the tremendous human toll of the event added layers for class discussion.

Sign of a Great Conversation

In the virtual classroom, Ratajczak steered the conversation away from past harms to the Black community to the current issues that stem from them. He wondered how payments could address modern inequities and if such payments should be available only to the descendants. McCray found herself engaging on questions of policy solutions. When one student proposed dispersing reparations in the form of college scholarships, McCray voiced concerns about overlooking those who do not attend college. “Matriculating into college requires more than funds. It requires a better educational foundation which starts way earlier than college scholarships can solve alone. It starts with improved public school systems that close the literacy gap between communities of color and their white counterparts,” she explains. “So, unless the literacy rates increase overnight, providing a financial scholarship isn’t overriding the years of systematic oppression of these communities.

“That’s the sign of a great conversation, conflict but progressing the issues forward,” she says of her participation. McCray remembers thinking that, instead of being a bystander so she could listen to the perspectives of others, “This is a dialogue and I have to be a part of it.” She was also interested to see what was the baseline of her classmates’ analysis of this conversation, especially the international students.

That kind of dialogue is essential to the HBS classroom and in the business world, says Ratajczak. “I think it’s necessary for us as business leaders to not only practice talking about these issues, having a perspective, and understanding what we can do as business leaders to advance the equities we think are important, but also to practice having conversations that aren’t easy—that do create a lot of tension.”

Desai hopes the conversation about reparations will ripple out from the HBS classroom. To help make that happen, the School is offering for the first time a free pdf of the written case, and educators can also request a free teaching note. A multimedia case created by Ruth Page, director of multimedia development at HBS’s Technology Product Group, is also available to the public on the School’s website. It features the images and voices of Tulsa’s Black community, past and present. In addition, Desai taught the case as part of HBS’s Managing Diversity Speaker Series for alumni and the broader HBS community, which features conversations on the impact of systemic racism in business and society.

McCray sees herself and her fellow students as a force for change. Of the 700 students in the classroom that day, “I’m hopeful at least half of them went on to tell a friend or their parents. If 10 percent of the people they spoke to tell more people, it can become a true change factor,” she says. “Awareness is the first step.”

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