After George Floyd’s killing last year, Harvard Business School Professor Mihir Desai says he channeled his thoughts and emotions the best way he knew how—by writing a case study.

His aim was to design a classroom exercise that would give M.B.A. students a deeper understanding of the country’s racial scars and what role businesses might have in processing them, he says. He soon seized on a historical event he felt deserved more attention: the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, in which armed white mobs attacked Greenwood, a prosperous, albeit segregated Black neighborhood in the Oklahoma city that later came to be known as Black Wall Street. Over 24 hours, as many as 300 people were killed and more than 190 of the community’s businesses burned to the ground.

Prof. Desai’s case study, “The Tulsa Massacre and the Call for Reparations,” asks students to explore ways to reckon with the attack’s financial fallout for its victims and their descendants. He uses the Tulsa case as a launchpad to discuss the use of reparations to respond to the effects of slavery in the U.S. and its aftermath. Students are also asked to consider the role of business in addressing racial-justice issues more broadly.

Unlike conventional business case studies, the exercise doesn’t require students to assume the hypothetical position of a CEO making a management decision. Instead, Prof. Desai says the goal is to become more fluent in public debate over government reparations and to consider all the angles.

Pictures from the Tulsa race massacre adorn a shop in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Okla.

Pictures from the Tulsa race massacre adorn a shop in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Okla.

Photo: John Locher/Associated Press

If you are a business leader, “you will be asked to speak on a wide variety of deeply political and socially oriented questions, including matters of race and racial injustice,” says Prof. Desai, a 22-year veteran of the school who has taught the study to hundreds of M.B.A. students and to several executive-education classes in recent months. “To educate our students in how to do that, we need to incorporate really tough material on the historic injustices that are being referenced,” he said.

The exercise dovetails with the school’s mission to bring issues of race and diversity deeper into its case-study method of teaching. Harvard Business School officials pledged last summer to recruit more Black students and make conversations about race a priority in the curriculum after saying its past efforts had been insufficient.

The case examines a proposal by Regina Goodwin, a Democrat in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, who has called for the city of Tulsa to pay reparations directly to descendants of massacre victims. Her district includes Greenwood, and some of her ancestors lived through the massacre.

Her family filed a loss claim against the city of Tulsa as well as other entities involved in the massacre. In total, victims filed 1,400 lawsuits against the city, which amounted to claims of more than $4 million, or about $58.5 million in 2020—few of which were ever paid—the case recounts. Prof. Desai asks students to weigh whether calling for reparations to resolve a property issue, rather than a racial-justice one, would make it more politically palatable.

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The Tulsa Massacre of 1921 destroyed hundreds of Black-owned businesses and homes in the city’s Greenwood District. A century later, entrepreneurs and activists are working to preserve “Black Wall Street’s” memory while pushing to rebuild and recover what was lost. Photo: Rob Alcaraz/The Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

Prof. Desai first taught the case in November to about 40 M.B.A. students who volunteered for a trial run and gave suggestions on how to better teach it. In February, he led a session of more than 700 first-year M.B.A. students through the case study over Zoom. He has taught it to managers in online Harvard executive-education classes this spring and plans to continue this fall.

In a virtual session in April with about 80 executives that The Wall Street Journal listened in on, Prof. Desai asked them to describe their reaction to reading about the Tulsa massacre. Some said they were surprised they hadn’t heard more about it until recently. Before the class, they were given photos, videos and other materials detailing how the massacre unfolded and how much Black wealth was wiped out as a result. At the time, the case recounts, the estimated total property damage from the attack was $1.8 million—about $26.1 million in 2020 dollars.

Prof. Desai asked them to outline their strongest case for reparations for Tulsa massacre descendants. In general, he said, participants split over whether victims and descendants are owed a debt and whether present generations should pay for the sins of the past. He doesn’t urge students to come to agreement but wants them to work through the various sides of the debate.

Crowds of people watched fires during the June 1, 1921, Tulsa massacre.

Crowds of people watched fires during the June 1, 1921, Tulsa massacre.

Photo: Department of Special Collections|, McFarlin Library|, The University of Tulsa/Associated Press

“The most difficult thing about teaching this is I always worry about who is not speaking. The whole point of the case method is to get all the views out,” Prof. Desai said. “Are there folks there who are listening to all this saying, ‘No way that would work?’ And how do I get them to speak?”

The class touched on other examples of reparations, such as U.S. government payments in the 1990s to Japanese-Americans interned in camps during World War II. Another was a 1994 law passed by the Florida legislature that granted descendants of residents of Rosewood—a Black rural town burned down by white vigilantes in 1923—free tuition at the state’s public universities.

One student argued that every country would go bankrupt if required to pay reparations for past misdeeds. Another said that reparations were an important form of accountability and necessary to make up for the lost wealth of Tulsa residents.

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Ja’ Saint-Tulias, an M.B.A. student who participated in the case study in November and February, said she had advocated for reparations. Her grandmother had moved to Detroit from an Arkansas farm in the early 20th century and had told her stories of lynchings, as well as the hurdles that she and other Black families faced trying to build wealth. Such case studies, she added, should be part of business-school curricula.

“As you saw with George Floyd, so many CEOs were called upon to respond. Not necessarily through words, but with ways to create systemic change through corporations,” she said.

Brian Ratajczak, who participated in the same class, said he had argued that reparations would likely be too difficult to implement broadly in the U.S. As an aspiring manager, though, he said he was grateful the case pushed him to speak up on a race-related topic.

“At HBS, the goal is to influence business, society through companies,” he said. “This is an incredibly important issue.”

Write to Patrick Thomas at Patrick.Thomas@wsj.com