A century later, death arrives before justice

One down, two to go.

It may not be fair to attribute that as the reaction of the city of Tulsa and other entities to the death of Hughes Van Ellis, but Tulsa has not treated Ellis and others like him fairly for more than 100 years.

Ellis died Oct. 9 at the age of 102. He was one of only three known survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the more infamous and shameful chapters of white supremacist violence in American history, which ended in the destruction of Tulsa’s Black neighborhood, including “Greenwood” the prosperous commercial district known as “Black Wall Street.”

Its flashpoint was a confrontation May 31, 1921, between a Black male teenager and a white female teenager on an elevator. The confrontation was magnified into a lie of sexual assault.

On June 1, groups of white men went to the courthouse with the intent of lynching the Black teen. Twice, they were confronted by dozens of armed

Black men, many World War I veterans, who were there to protect the teen.

They did, but they could not stop the orgy of violence to come. Black Tulsans, including women and children, fell to fire from machine guns and were attacked from airplanes, from which incendiary devices were dropped.

A 2001 report of the Tulsa Race Riot commission concluded, among other things, that at least 300 Black people were murdered, many of them buried in mass graves; 35 square blocks were destroyed; more than 1,470 homes were burned or looted; dozens of businesses, as well as churches and schools, were burned down; 8,000 to 10,000 people were displaced; and

6,000 people were detained in internment camps. The uncompensated damages would be $27 million today.

When the violence of assault and destruction was over, the violence of the cover-up and erasure began.

The Tulsa Tribune removed from its bound volumes the front-page story that incited the massacre, and information about it was removed from police and state militia archives.

For decades, the Tulsa Race Massacre was neither discussed nor commemorated in history books or in the white community (which wrote the history books.) But it was whispered about in Black communities across the nation and through generations, a myth that was real, an urban legend made from fact and kept alive by people like Ellis, 108-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle and Ellis’ sister, 109-year-old Viola Ford Fletcher.

Ellis was a few months old when his family fled Tulsa in the night, leaving behind their home. It would be several years before they returned. Ellis would serve in an all-Black combat unit in World War II.

In 2020, along with other descendants of massacre victims, Ellis, Fletcher and Randle filed a lawsuit seeking reparations. Among the seven defendants were the city of Tulsa, the city’s chamber of commerce and the Tulsa County Sheriff ’s Office.

The case was dismissed in July, but in August the state’s high court agreed to an appeal.

In asking for the case to be dismissed, the city of Tulsa argued that “simply being connected to a historical event does not provide a person with unlimited rights to seek compensation from any project in any way related to that historical event.”

In Ellis, Fletcher and Randle, the city had three surviving centenarians who were directly affected by the massacre.

In her recently published memoir, Fletcher writes of the smell of smoke, the sound of gunfire and the sight of Black bodies in the street.

Three people who could have been among the Black bodies, hidden in the mass graves yet to be unearthed, lived to be more than 100 years old as they sought some measure of justice.

Whatever the remorse Tulsa officials expressed about the massacre, it wasn’t enough for them to attach a monetary value. They couldn’t find the grace and decency to attempt to make right with Ellis, Fletcher and Randle.

Fletcher’s memoir is titled “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story.”

Tulsa officials did that for decades. Now, they wait for the survivors to be buried.

One down, two to go.

CARY CLACK

Ellis