Lionel Messi has 3 goal contributions to become fastest to 100 as Inter Miami tops Toronto 4-2

TORONTO (AP) — Lionel Messi had a goal and two assists to become the fastest player in MLS history to reach 100 goal contributions, and Inter Miami doubled up Toronto FC 4-2 on Saturday, upping its winning streak on the road to six.

Messi’s effort gives him 59 goals and 41 assists in 64 regular-season matches, shattering the previous record of 95 set by Toronto’s Sebastian Giovinco. Messi has piled up 87 goals and 57 assists in 101 career appearances in all competitions.

Rodrigo De Paul also had a goal and two assists to help Inter Miami bounce back from a 4-3 home loss to Orlando City in a match it led 3-0. The club is 0-1-3 at home since moving to Nu Stadium.

De Paul scored off a free kick in the 44th minute to give Inter Miami a 1-0 lead. The midfielder corraled the ball after it ricocheted off the wall of players and banged a second shot off the left post and into the net.

Messi usually takes all of the club's direct free kicks but he yielded to De Paul, who delivered his third career goal — all this year — in his 21st appearance over two seasons.

Messi and De Paul both picked up their third assists of the campaign when they set up Luis Suárez for his second goal and a 2-0 lead in the 56th minute. It was the 32nd goal in 63 career matches for Suárez.

Defender Sergio Reguilón made his third appearance when he subbed into the match in the 68th minute before scoring his first goal in the 73rd — with an assist from Messi — for a three-goal lead.

De Paul set up Messi for his ninth goal — one off the league lead — in the 75th minute to make it 4-0. De Paul has three assists after collecting his first four in 11 appearances last season.

Toronto avoided the shutout on a pair of goals by rookie Emilio Aristizábal. The 20-year-old scored in the 82nd and 90th minutes, giving him three goals in his first 11 matches. Dániel Sallói had his fourth assist on the first goal. Kobe Franklin snagged his second assist this season and fellow defender Walker Zimmerman earned his first to help Aristizábal complete the brace.

Dayne St. Clair finished with three saves for Inter Miami (6-2-4).

Luka Gavran stopped two shots for Toronto (3-4-5).

The match was stopped a couple of times when fans jumped onto the field to try and get close to Messi.

Miami: Visits FC Cincinnati on Wednesday.;.

Toronto: Visits Charlotte FC on Saturday.

AP soccer: https://apnews.com/soccer

Security arrives to take a fan off the field after he ran on to meet Inter Miami CF midfielder Lionel Messi (10) during second half MLS soccer against Toronto FC, in Toronto on Saturday, May 9, 2026. (Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press via AP)

Inter Miami CF midfielder Lionel Messi (10) celebrates his goal during second half MLS soccer against Toronto FC, in Toronto on Saturday, May 9, 2026.(Frank Gunn /The Canadian Press via AP)

Inter Miami CF midfielder Lionel Messi (10) is surrounded by security on the field after multiple fans ran onto the pitch during second half MLS soccer against Toronto FC, in Toronto on Saturday, May 9, 2026. (Frank Gunn /The Canadian Press via AP)

Toronto FC goalkeeper Luka Gavran (1) stops Inter Miami CF midfielder Lionel Messi (10) during second half MLS soccer in Toronto on Saturday, May 9, 2026. (Frank Gunn /The Canadian Press via AP)

Inter Miami CF midfielder Lionel Messi (10) moves the ball around Toronto FC defender Zane Monlouis (12) and teammate Jonathan Osorio (21) during first half MLS soccer in Toronto on Saturday, May 9, 2026. (Frank Gunn /The Canadian Press via AP)

Inter Miami CF midfielder Lionel Messi (10) and Toronto FC defender Walker Zimmerman (25) chase the ball during first half MLS soccer in Toronto on Saturday, May 9, 2026. (Frank Gunn /The Canadian Press via AP)

Toronto FC goalkeeper Luka Gavran (1) collides with Inter Miami CF forward German Berterame (19) as Toronto's Walker Zimmerman (25) looks on during first half MLS soccer in Toronto on Saturday, May 9, 2026. (Frank Gunn /The Canadian Press via AP)

NEW YORK (AP) — It wasn’t until his junior year of college that civil rights attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons learned about a devastating massacre that took place in his hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

His African American studies professor lectured about what is known today as the Tulsa Race Massacre — the days in 1921 when white mobs carried out a scorched-earth campaign against an outnumbered Black militia protecting the fabled Black Wall Street, a prosperous all-Black community.

“I actually told a teacher, ‘I’m from Tulsa. That’s not true,’” Solomon-Simmons recalled. “And of course, I was wrong.”

That day planted a seed for the then-aspiring attorney, who went on to lead a reparations campaign for the living survivors of the massacre and their descendants. Nearly 105 years later, no one has been compensated for what they lost, and none of the culprits have been held accountable.

That fight for reparations is the subject of Solomon-Simmons’ first book, “Redeem a Nation: The Century-Long Battle to Restore the Soul of America,” which is intended as a blueprint for justice in historic atrocities that Black Americans endured but never received reparations for. The book hits shelves Tuesday.

After the massacre, more than 35 city blocks of the neighborhood known as Greenwood were leveled in fires, an estimated 191 businesses were destroyed, and roughly 11,000 Black residents were displaced. The state of Oklahoma declared the death toll to be only 36 people, although many historians and experts who have studied the event put the death toll between 75 and 300.

Greenwood, founded in 1906, had been a bustling city within a city, with Black-owned grocery stores, soda fountains, cafes, barbershops, a movie theater, music venues, cigar and billiard parlors, tailors and dry cleaners, rooming houses and rental properties.

“If you can ignore Greenwood, which was the beacon of Black prosperity and Black progress in the history of this country, then you can ignore Black people in general,” Solomon-Simmons recently told The Associated Press. “I think that’s why people around the nation are so focused on the work that we’re doing, because they understand what it means to all of Black America.”

Solomon-Simmons’s book comes just months before the United States will mark 250 years since its founding in 1776. That was 89 years before the institution of chattel slavery — meaning an enslaved person was held as legal property of another — was abolished. The civil rights attorney questions the idea that Americans can truly celebrate the country's accomplishments when it has yet to pay reparations, which historians say informs modern day disparities in wealth between Black and white people.

“We cannot talk about what America has been and will be, without making sure that these issues are discussed and we get reparatory justice for both” slavery and the Tulsa massacre, Solomon-Simmons said.

In 343 pages, Solomon-Simmons does more than recite the history of the massacre or make a legal thriller out of his reparations campaign. For him, securing justice for the survivors and descendants of the massacre is also about healing a nation whose earliest promises of equality for all rang hollow.

“When I speak of repairing America’s soul, I do not mean restoring something that was once whole,” Solomon-Simmons writes in the book. “America has never had a soul. … There was no moral center to recover.”

He suggests that America's soul cannot be repaired if it is forced to choose between rebuilding the nation or repairing Black America. They must do both, he says.

“The struggle for justice in Greenwood is not about returning to a mythical past. It is about proving whether America can build a soul at all through truth, through justice, through repair.”

Reparations for slavery and other historical racial injustices has been debated in the U.S. since Reconstruction, through the Civil Rights Movement and for much of the 21st century. Jennifer L. Morgan, a professor of history at New York University, said such debates are complicated by the question of exactly who pays the reparations and exactly who receives the payment.

“I don’t think that we’re talking about individuals who owe anybody else reparations. I think we’re talking about states, about institutions, about the nation,” Morgan said. “America is still grappling with reparations because America is still grappling at the legacy of slavery, racial discrimination, Jim Crow, and violent exclusion of Black people from the body politic.”

Some opponents of reparations argue there are no living culprits or direct victims of enslavement, much less people with verifiable claims of harm that can be presented in a court of law.

Solomon-Simmons disagrees.

“We know who did the massacre — the perpetrators are still living in Tulsa,” he said referring to the city and the chamber of commerce, which plaintiffs alleged had a hand in obstructing Greenwood's recovery.

There is one remaining massacre survivor involved in the reparations lawsuit: 111-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle.

“If we cannot get her reparations while she’s alive, for the massacre, it’s gonna make it that much harder for us to get reparations for enslavement, Jim Crow, redlining and all those things that we are owed,” Solomon-Simmons said.

In the book, Solomon-Simmons reflects on what committed him to the reparations fight.

While in law school, he was introduced to high profile civil rights attorneys working for the Reparations Coordinating Committee — the late Harvard Professor Charles Ogletree Jr., who mentored Barack and Michelle Obama; and the late Johnnie Cochran, who is widely known for defending O.J. Simpson during his trial for murder of his ex-wife. Solomon-Simmons became a law clerk for the committee.

After witnessing Ogletree argue a Tulsa reparations case in federal court in 2004, Solomon-Simmons said the practice of law stopped being just a credential for speaking, writing, or teaching. It became a calling.

In 2020, Solomon-Simmons led a lawsuit on behalf of 11 plaintiffs, including the last three known living survivors of the massacre, against the City of Tulsa and seven defendants. The suit was the first of its kind in state court and the first to get far enough to see a judge. In 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit. In the final days of the Biden administration, the Justice Department released a report saying it had determined there is no longer an avenue for criminal prosecution over the massacre.

But the fight continues, Solomon-Simmons says, for cash payment to Randle and other descendants, as well as the return of land stolen after the massacre and during a period of urban renewal in Tulsa.

In 2025, the city’s first Black mayor, Monroe Nichols, endorsed a broad proposal dubbed Project Greenwood, which calls for financially compensating Randle, funding a scholarship program for descendants of victims, and designating June 1 as Tulsa Race Massacre Observance Day.

Solomon-Simmons also runs the nonprofit Justice for Greenwood, which he founded a year before the community marked the centennial of the massacre in 2021.

“One thing I’ve learned from this work, and as a lawyer in general, is that people want justice,” he said. “People want reparations, but people (also) want acknowledgment. They want to be seen. They want people to understand that something happened to them and their family, and they want an apology.”

Aaron Morrison is the race and ethnicity news editor at AP.

Damario Solomon-Simmons poses for a portrait at The Root Co-working space on Saturday, May 2, 2026, in Tulsa, Okla. Solomon-Simmons is the author of a new book about reparations over the Tulsa Race Massacre (AP Photo/Milo Gladstein)

Damario Solomon-Simmons poses for a portrait at the memorial for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre on Saturday, May 2, 2026, in Tulsa, Okla. Solomon-Simmons is the author of a new book about reparations over the Tulsa Race Massacre (AP Photo/Milo Gladstein)