100 years of Solitude:  Today is the memorial Day, but also the 100^th anniversary of one of the most horrific and little known racial incidents in the country, a two-day rampage by white rioters who destroyed the prosperous black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, an event known today as the Tulsa Massacre.

  Little mentioned, if ever, the Greenwood massacre is the subject of a spate of recent documentaries and uncounted newspaper and magazine articles leading up to this date.

  The attack destroyed 35 square blocks of the neighborhood that was at the time the wealthiest black community in the United States, known as “Black Wall Street”. Estimates range from 75 to 300 people killed, both black and white. More than 800 were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 Black residents were penned up for several days at the Convention Hall and the Fairgrounds, which had been set up as detention camps.

  As many as 1,250 homes were burned.  Among the businesses and buildings destroyed; two theaters, a drugstore, beauty salon, hotel, a doctor’s office, and a dentist’s office.

  The events began the morning of May 30, 1921, when a young black man named Dick Rowland rode the elevator in the Drexel Building at Third and Main with a white woman named Sarah Page. Rumors circulated that some kind of sexual assault occurred in the elevator and the story got bigger in every telling.

  Rowland was arrested and a crowd of both white and black residents formed around the jail the next day. Shots were fired and the outnumbered blacks retreated to Greenwood District.

  The next day, an armed white mob destroyed Greenwood in an outburst of racist rage that lasted into the next day. They shot and burned black people, torching homes and businesses. Airplanes dropped incendiaries feeding raging fires that consumed city blocks.  

  Earlier this month Viola Fletcher, who was 7 at the time, testified before Congress. She said, “I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home. I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I have lived through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I cannot.”

  Testifying over video, Lessie Benningfield Randall, 106, who testified over video conference, said the effects of the massacre are still felt today in Tulsa.” My opportunities were taken from me and my community. Black Tulsa is still messed up today. They didn’t rebuild it. It’s empty, it’s a ghetto.” 

   Fletcher’s younger brother Hughes Van Ellis, a World War II veteran, said, “We were made to feel that our struggle was unworthy of justice, that we were less than the whites, that we weren’t fully Americans.”

  Fletcher told the congressional panel, “I am 107 years old and I have never … seen justice. I pray that one day I will,” she said. “I have been blessed with a long life and have seen the best and the worst of this country. I think about the terror inflicted upon black people in this country every day.”

  Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in the 1619 Project for The NY Times that decades of post-slavery violence “was a symptom of the psychological mechanism necessary to absolve white Americans of their country’s original sin.”

  She wrote that, “If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justification for how this nation allowed slavery would collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mirror in which the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.”  

  No local, state, or federal government agency helped to rebuild Greenwood. To this day, a handful of survivors is suing fpr punitive damages, tax relief, and scholarships for survivors and their descendants, along with priority for Black Tulsans in awarding city contracts.

  No one was ever prosecuted for the murders and destruction. Dick Rowland, whose elevator ride sparked the massacre, was never charged with a crime.

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