Haunted survivors, descendants seek justice for rampage known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, which destroyed a prominent black community in Oklahoma in 1921

"On May 30, 1921, I went to bed in my family's home in the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa. I felt my sleep that night was rich, not just in terms of wealth but in culture, community and heritage," Viola Fletcher, 107, told members of a congressional subcommittee on Capitol Hill in May. "My family had a beautiful home, we had great neighbors and I had friends to play with. … Then a few hours (later), all of that was gone."

Still being able to "smell smoke and see fire", Fletcher, who has lived long enough to be called "Mother Fletcher" by all who come into her audience, had traveled all the way from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Washington DC, so that her story could be heard, and the century-old damages done to herself and her people be mended in the slightest possible way.

In bristling detail, Fletcher recounted the killing of her people and the burning of her community by a large white mob on May 31 and June 1 of 1921, as seen through the eyes of a 7-year-old.

Known today as the Tulsa Race Massacre and arguably the most horrendous incident of racial violence against black people that has taken place on US soil in the past century, the event led to the destruction of a 35-square-block neighborhood known as the Greenwood District in North Tulsa. In the aftermath, more than 10,000 black Tulsans were left injured, homeless and destitute. The number of deaths is estimated to be as many as 300, the victims' burial grounds largely remaining unknown.

"I am 107 years old and have never seen justice," Fletcher told her listeners on May 19, referring to the fact that no members of the mob had ever been held accountable and none of the victims compensated by any level of the US government.

She was joined by her 100-year-old brother Hughes Van Ellis and through videoconference by their fellow black Tulsan, 106-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle. All have spent their lives in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, part of the American heartland.

The prosperous community was once hailed nationwide as the "Black Wall Street". Yet according to Hannibal Johnson, attorney and author of the 2020 book Black Wall Street 100: An American City Grapples With Its Historical Racial Trauma, the designation is "a misnomer" due largely to the absence of banking and investment enterprises, and the community itself "one of necessity", given birth by state-sanctioned segregation.

In November 1907, Oklahoma, right upon its admission as a state, installed racial segregation laws as its first order of business. Commonly known as Jim Crow laws, they mainly targeted black as well as other people of color with active measures to disenfranchise them and undo their political and economic gains.

Nine years later in 1916, Tulsa City mandated residential segregation by forbidding black or white people from residing on any block where three-fourths of more of the residents were members of the other race.

Abutting downtown Tulsa, "the Greenwood District is in essence black mainstream for those unable to participate in the white-dominated economy", said Johnson.

One accidental result of the segregation was that wealth created by the black Tulsans had nowhere to go but to stay within the 35 blocks, in the form of 200 black-owned businesses and many affluent families that had among them black millionaires. The discovery of oil and natural gas, which led Tulsa to become the self-proclaimed "Oil Capital" starting from the 1910s, also contributed to the phenomenon.

Greenwood became the talk of the nation, a model of black cooperation and economic independence, and a beacon for all African Americans, especially those from the racism-marred Deep South. Yet it was also "an anomaly" to quote Johnson, one that "thrived at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was incredibly active in Oklahoma", dodging bloody white-on-black violence that had erupted across the US in what's known today as the Red Summer of 1919.

"All it needed was a sort of match, an igniter tossed on the embers," said Johnson.

That triggering event took place on May 30, 1921, and involved two teenagers — Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old black shoeshine worker, and Sarah Page, a 17-year-old white girl who ran an elevator in the Drexel building in downtown Tulsa.

"The boy went to the building, boarded the elevator, something happened, and Sarah Page began to scream. They both ran out of the elevator," said Johnson. "What happened there we'll likely never know. But the next day, Rowland was arrested and taken to the court."

That same afternoon, the white-owned Tulsa Tribune newspaper ran a highly inflammatory article with the headline "Nab Negro for Attacking Girl In an Elevator", accompanied by an editorial titled "To Lynch Negro Tonight" — something that a white mob immediately sought to do, by gathering on the lawn of the city courthouse, where Rowland was in jail on the top floor, and demanding his handover.

Outside the courthouse, the white mob clashed with a group of black people who marched down there to protect Rowland and make sure he received a trial. A shot was fired and "things sort of went south from that point", said Johnson.

Armed and greatly outnumbering the black group, the white mob shot its way through the Greenwood District, firing indiscriminatingly into businesses and residences. That was followed by looting and burning, which lasted for 16 hours until noon June 1. The assault was even assisted by the use of private planes, with attackers either shooting from the plane or dropping incendiary devices onto the buildings.

Five-year-old George Monroe was enveloped by sheer terror.

"All of a sudden my mother was excited because she saw four men coming towards our house. All of them had torches, lighted torches on their side coming straight to our house," recalled Monroe in the mid-1990s. "When these four men came in, they walked right past the bed, straight to the curtains in the house and they set fire to the curtains. As a result, everything in and around was burning."

All the time, Monroe was hiding under the bed with his older sister, who threw her hand over his mouth to stop his screams from being heard when a rioter unknowingly stepped onto his finger.

Monroe waited for 75 years to tell his story: in 1996, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, a state-sanctioned task force, was set up to investigate the massacre, and Monroe was among the 108 survivors whom the commission ultimately located across the country.

Among other things, the commission concluded that the city had conspired with the white mob against its black citizens.

"We don't know of any approved incident where law enforcement officers were murdering people, but what we do know is that they deputized some people in the white mob and provided them with weapons," said Johnson. "The National Guard rounded up black people and put them in internment centers in the middle of the massacre. The stated purpose was to protect them, but we know from the survivors that what it did was to leave the Greenwood community largely defenseless."

However, in a report issued by the Tulsa City Commission two weeks after the massacre, Mayor T.D. Evans was unequivocal: "Let the blame or this negro uprising lie right where it belongs, on those armed negroes and their followers who started this trouble and who instigated it."

A lawsuit was filed in September in Oklahoma state court against the City of Tulsa by attorneys for the massacre victims and their descendants, including Fletcher, Ellis and Randle, whose appearance before the congressional subcommittee constitute part of that quest for delayed justice.

In 2007, the US Supreme Court upheld lower court rulings that a federal lawsuit seeking damages was barred by the statute of limitations, effectively telling the victims and their descendants that they were too late for any remedy.

Behind the prolonged fight is what many see as "the greatest conspiracy of silence".

Immediately after the massacre, all original copies of that particular issue of the Tulsa Tribune that instigated the mob disappeared, apparently having been destroyed. The relevant page is even missing from the microfilm copy.

According to a newspaper report at the time, Sarah Page, who left the town immediately after the massacre, later wrote a letter to county prosecutor saying that she didn't want to press charges against Rowland.

With Tulsa the self-proclaimed "Oil Capital" still on its upward trajectory, the city government was only too eager to bury what it saw as its biggest PR problem. Meanwhile, the victims themselves were too traumatized and too afraid to talk about it. In fact, with their entire community in charred ruins, many left Tulsa and never returned.

But some did choose to stay. Left to pick through the rubble amid smoldering debris, those black Tulsans embarked on an arduous rebuilding, one that was often impeded by the city government.

"The city passed an ordinance that you had to rebuild with nonflammable materials, which my grandfather thought was unfair and unreasonable," said John Whittington Franklin, whose grandfather, Buck Colbert Franklin, was a Tulsa-based attorney in the first half of the 20th century. "He fought it successfully all the way to the state Supreme Court."

The rebuilding resumed, with black Tulsans encouraged by the lawyer to use whatever they could find, from old bricks to pieces of wood. For four years, the man lived in tents, away from his wife and children, including son John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), father of John W. Franklin and renowned African American historian.

"My grandfather moved 60 miles from the small town of Rentiesville to Tulsa and opened his law firm in February 1921. My grandmother had planned to join him at the end of May, but the massacre changed everything," John W. Franklin told China Daily in early June. "The family wasn't reunited in 1925."

In 2015, eight years after John Hope Franklin and his son edited and published the late lawyer's autobiography My Life and An Era, John W. Franklin was presented with his grandfather's manuscript, discovered in a rented storage area.

"I wept, I just wept," said the grandson, who first visited his grandfather in Tulsa in 1954, at the age of 2.

Within those 10 pages, the lawyer told one of the greatest tragedies of his era, through the story of one man with whom he had crossed paths several times in life.

It begins in 1918, soon after World War I, when a young African American veteran named Mr. Ross felt angry and betrayed because of his treatment despite his military service. It proceeds to an account of Ross defending his black community in 1921 during the massacre, and ends 10 years later, with the man, who had lost both his eyesight and his mind in the fires that destroyed his home, sitting in a mental asylum staring blankly into space. Somewhere on a street corner in Tulsa sits Mother Ross with her tin cup in hand, begging alms of the passers-by.

The typewriter on which the story had been written, on yellowed legal paper, is now on view in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC, a museum for which John Hope Franklin served as the founding chairman of its scholarly advisory committee. The gallery, whose collection John Whittington Franklin helped to build, is dedicated to the memory of the Tulsa Massacre.

In an article published on June 3, 1921, two days after the massacre, The Morning Tulsa Daily World, citing Tulsa County deputy sheriff Barney Cleaver, stated that "… the negroes participating in the fight … were former servicemen who had an exaggerated idea of their own importance".

"Exaggerated idea" was the black World War I veterans' expectation for civil rights seen through the distorting prism of racism. Ellis, one of the massacre survivors who spoke at the US Capitol in May, knows all about that expectation and the crushing disappointment that follows.

Joining an all-black battalion in the highly segregated US Army of the era and fighting in the China-Burma-India Theater of World War II, Ellis "put my life on the line for my country" before going back home to find himself denied all GI benefits due to the color of his skin.

"Today, even at this age of 100 … I still live with the thought of what Greenwood was and what it could have been," said Ellis, born in Greenwood in January 1921.

With the city haunted by its own dark history, crucial discoveries are being made by archeologists in Tulsa's Oaklawn Cemetery, home to only two official victims of the Tulsa Massacre. There, intermittent archeological digging over the past two years has unearthed a total of 27 unmarked remains.

To determine whether or not they are related to the massacre, forensic scientists are hoping to, among other things, match the remains' features — height for example —with city records and World War I draft records.

Some have hailed the excavation as carving "a path towards reconciliation", while others point to ongoing racial tension in a city where predominantly black North Tulsa is "messed-up" and "empty" in the words of Randle, one of the three survivors.

According to Damario Solomon Simmons, the attorney who is leading the lawsuit against the city of Tulsa on behalf of the massacre victims and descendants, more than 33 percent of residents in North Tulsa live in poverty compared with less than 14 percent of those in South Tulsa.

Calling the current situation "the legacy of that violence", Simmons, born in Tulsa, clearly sees in his hometown "an aversion to making amends for systemic racism".

In October, an anti-racism protest attracted numerous white militia members armed with automatic weapons, who were there to intimidate the peaceful protesters. The sight, captured by a recently released documentary on the massacre, is agonizingly evocative for black Tulsans who are aware of the history of the massacre and for those who have lived with it for the past 100 years.

"I think about the horror inflicted upon black people in this country every day," said Fletcher, who in 1921 found herself running past "black bodies … injured or dead … not able to get up and get out of the way of whatever was happening."

Having had her childhood upended and her chance at education erased by the massacre, Fletcher spent most of her life as a domestic worker "serving white families" — to use her words. In the 1940s, she worked briefly in the shipyards of California supporting her country's World War II effort and saw, in those and subsequent years, six men in her family join the US military.

"For 70 years, the city of Tulsa and its Chamber of Commerce told us that the massacre didn't happen as if we didn't see it with our own eyes," she said.

"Our country may want me to forget this history, but I cannot. I will not. And other survivors did not. Our descendants do not."