Remembering the Tulsa Race Massacre

As a scholar of genocide, I have met many people who have lived through heinous crimes. But encountering “Mother Fletcher” and “Mother Randle”—107-year-old Viola Fletcher and 106-year-old Lessie Beddingfiled Randle—this weekend in Tulsa, Oklahoma, gave an entirely new meaning to the word “survivor.” They are certainly the oldest humans I have met, but perhaps the most striking part of meeting them is that they are survivors of a xenocidal massacre perpetrated right here in the United States.

Xenocide is when a group of people are attacked by their fellow civilians because of their identity. The xenocide Mother Fletcher and Mother Randle survived was hidden from view, and to this day it has gone uninvestigated and unpunished. No reparations have been paid to its victims.

The xenocide Mother Fletcher and Mother Randle survived was hidden from view, and to this day it has gone uninvestigated and unpunished. No reparations have been paid to its victims.

On May 30, 1921, a white teenager named Sara Page screamed in the elevator she operated in downtown Tulsa. A Black teenager, Dick Rowland, had entered the elevator to go to the Black-only bathroom on the top floor of the building. For some reason, Rowland allegedly grabbed Page’s arm. She screamed. Someone called the cops. Page did not press charges.

Yet Rowland was arrested for what was labeled an attack. False news reports inflamed passions in the city. On the evening of May 31, a century ago today, a lynch mob of 2,000 white men gathered at the courthouse baying for Rowland’s blood. A smaller contingent of armed, Black World War I veterans came to defend Rowland. A shot was fired. Moments later, a dozen Tulsans—10 white, two Black—were dead.

Over the next 12 hours, the white mob engaged in an attack on the prosperous district of Greenwood in downtown Tulsa, known as Black Wall Street. Greenwood was burned to the ground—191 businesses and 1,275 homes were set aflame, 36 deaths were reported (later revised to as many as 300), more than 800 people were injured, mainly Black. Churches, schools and the only hospital in the neighborhood were destroyed. Some 6,000 Black people were placed in detention. The entire community of 10,000 Black Greenwood residents was made homeless.

I am writing this piece sitting at the intersection of Greenwood Avenue and Archer Street,  where what is today known as the Tulsa Race Massacre was unleashed. There is a defiant, festive atmosphere. Rap music beats out from a stage behind me, a group of Buffalo Soldier bikers rumble past on glittering Harleys, vendors sell Black Wall Street t-shirts, and brightly colored floats remind onlookers that Black lives matter. The atmosphere is part commemoration, part celebration, part protest. There is a sense of optimism, despite the past.

But it also feels as if the struggle Mother Fletcher and Mother Randle have witnessed their entire lives remains far from over. The life and opportunity lost in this Tulsa district a century ago have never been retrieved. Greenwood then represented the possibility of a Black future, fewer than 60 years after the end of slavery. Instead, families were plunged into pain, not prosperity. I met many of their descendants on my visit to Tulsa. I saw them promise the three living survivors—Mother Fletcher, Mother Randle, and Fletcher’s younger brother, Hughes Van Ellis—that they will fight for justice in their names. A call for reparations is not unreasonable. Records can show who owned the buildings that were burned and their descendants can make documented claims. After all, Holocaust survivors and their descendants are still claiming buildings confiscated by the Nazis in the 1930s. The question here in Tulsa is, who will pay those reparations? Is anyone ready to own America’s past?

For all the progress in the century since the Tulsa Race Massacre, white and Black Americans often seem to still live in different worlds. I went out for dinner at a popular spot in downtown Tulsa over this Memorial Day weekend, and I saw people all having fun, but not together. I counted 25 tables on the rooftop patio, each occupied by a Black group or a white one. Not a single table, except my own (white, Black, and Asian), was mixed. Social segregation remains a reality.

Memory hangs heavy over Greenwood, like the pall of smoke that darkened the sky on May 31, 1921. Mothers Fletcher and Randle were interviewed extensively during the pandemic by conversational video company StoryFile, which I helped found. We film people to preserve their life stories, and we use artificial intelligence to make it possible to hold conversations with these people long into the future. Fletcher and Randle answered hundreds of questions about their memories of that night in 1921 when they fled as children from the flames. They spoke of nightmares, of their fear that lingers to this day and keeps them from leaving their homes after dark. Mother Fletcher, who testified before Congress last week, has only recently begun to tell her story. She’d kept her secrets to herself, until now.

Like the many Holocaust survivors I have listened to over many years, these women said that the pain does not go away. They hope that the next generation learns what happened and applies its meaning to their own lives. They want to ensure their stories live on. “I have noticed that young people are interested to learn now,” Mother Fletcher told me, her eyes bright as she learned that generations to come would be able to converse with her in her own words. “That is the most important thing.”

Stephen D. Smith is Finci-Viterbi executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation. The first episode of “The Memory Generation” was released on April 15, 2021, and can be found here: https://www.memorygenerationpodcast.com/episodes