Magistrate Judge Christine Little removed two references to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre from a redlining consent order involving the Department of Justice and the American Bank of Oklahoma earlier this month.

Little agreed to strike portions of paragraphs 4 and 29 of the DOJ complaint — areas to which American Bank of Oklahoma had objected.

“The allegations regarding the Tulsa Race Massacre, while historically and technically accurate, are clearly not essential or important to the determination of the plaintiff’s specific claims involving lending practices a century later,” Little said in the order.

However, Little left the substantive portion of the August consent order unchanged — the $383 million-asset lender remains obligated to open a branch in a majority Black and Hispanic census tract within its four-county lending area in the Tulsa metropolitan region. Additionally, the American Bank of Oklahoma must establish a $950,000 loan fund to subsidize mortgages and home improvement financing in predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, according to the original consent order.

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The Collinsville, Oklahoma-based lender was founded in 1998, 77 years after the massacre.