A century later, she still bears witness to a race massacre

America has been telling Viola Ford Fletcher to wait for justice ever since she was 7 years old. Now a spry 107, Fletcher is running out of patience with America.

Delivered by midwife on a farm in Lawton, Okla., on May 10, 1914, Fletcher was born 138 years after the American experiment commenced in 1776.

As a Black daughter of Oklahoma, she had no more reason to believe in America's promises than the Native Americans moved unceremoniously from rich farming and mining land they had negotiated in treaties to end the Indian wars.

Fletcher would witness another century of broken promises from a country that acts like an incorrigible deadbeat whenever the subject of justice comes up. America is more than twice her age now, but still disposed to gaslighting her, lecturing her about how it isn't racist and telling her to wait.

No wonder Fletcher is tired of waiting. She's already waited through two pandemics, many decades of Jim Crow, the Depression, World War II, the births and deaths of several of her children and a second global economic meltdown.

In her lifetime, she's seen 18 presidents, including a Black one, come and go, so she no longer suffers from the delusion that anyone sitting in the White House hears her or has the inclination or the power to address the issue she cares most about.

Last year, Fletcher and several other Americans, including her little brother Hughes Van Ellis, a mere stripling at 100, and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 106, decided it was time to file suit against Oklahoma and force a serious discussion about a crime that occurred before her very eyes.

As part of her legal strategy, Fletcher traveled to D.C. last week to testify before the House Judiciary Committee about crimes that took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, in the Greenwood section of Tulsa.

"I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street," Fletcher said in a clear voice reading from a prepared statement. "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 massacres every day."

Three hundred Black people are believed to have been murdered by hundreds of white men who descended on the Greenwood district in response to a bogus rape claim that implicated a Black teenager.

Over the course of two days, 1,200 homes were destroyed and 10,000 people were displaced by raging fires. An estimated 30 blocks of Black-owned businesses and homes were destroyed and 800 Black people were wounded. Hundreds were arrested for either defending themselves or merely existing while Black in Greenwood during two horrific days of looting, rape and killing.

Fletcher and her family escaped in a horse and buggy and lived in a tent in the woods through part of the following winter. They were lucky, relatively speaking. When they returned to Tulsa, Greenwood was gone and no one had been arrested for the carnage that had wiped it off the map. No one talked about it openly. It was as if a whole community had been "raptured" by God instead of murdered.

"I am 107 years old and have never seen justice," Fletcher said in her testimony last week. "I pray that one day I will. I have been blessed with a long life — and have seen the best and worst of this country. I think about the terror inflicted upon Black people in this country every day."

Before it was reduced to ashes, Greenwood was nationally renowned for the entrepreneurial spirit and independence of its Black population. It was nicknamed Black Wall Street and was the envy of white communities that surrounded it.

A murderous resentment of the Blacks who lived in Greenwood was stoked by daily newspapers that dehumanized them even as they surpassed white Oklahomans in quality-of-life benchmarks.

So when a charge of sexual assault was leveled against a Black teenager by a white female elevator operator, it was all that was needed to rile up the population and bring Greenwood's experiment in self-sufficiency and Black excellence to a bloody end.

Black men who had served in World War I arrived to protect the teenager who was in police custody, but they were quickly surrounded by hundreds of armed white men who had zero regard for their status as veterans or patriots.

No one knows who shot first, but the white mob pressed its numerical advantage and pursued the retreating Black soldiers back to Greenwood, where the horror commenced.

Later, an investigation of the massacre, which was called a "riot" for most of the last century instead of the one-sided slaughter it actually was, exonerated the young man of sexual assault.

As best can be determined, he tripped over the elevator operator's foot and ran from the scene after she began screaming. There was no rape, flirtation or reckless eyeballing involved — just a young man's panic and a woman's decision to lie as an exercise of her sadistic power and privilege.

Van Ellis, who was an infant at the time, testified on the effect of the massacre's aftermath on his family during his formative years. "We were left with nothing," he told the subcommittee. "We were made refugees in our own country."

Randle, who is one year younger than Fletcher, didn't mince words recalling the day her comfortable world collapsed around her. "They burned houses and businesses," she said. "They just took what they wanted out of the buildings then they burned them. They murdered people. We were told they just dumped the dead bodies into the river.

"I remember running outside of our house. I ran past dead bodies. It wasn't a pretty sight. I still see it today in my mind 100 years later," said Randle, who testified remotely because she couldn't travel to D.C.

The House chamber was riveted on the testimonies of the survivors of the Tulsa massacre. The only building left standing during the fiery assault on Greenwood was Vernon A.M.E. Church, which was damaged, but not destroyed. The church is also a plaintiff in the suit against Oklahoma.

The three survivors claim that they are entitled to reparations and that the state engaged in a history-defying coverup for decades that prevented a single prosecution for acts of mass murder, arson, civil rights violations of every magnitude, theft of land and property.

In a just world, it would be difficult to argue with their contention, but this is America, and America is just getting around to acknowledging that "something" dramatic and tragic happened in Tulsa 100 years ago, but more study is needed to say definitively what happened to hundreds of relatively prosperous Blacks who "disappeared" from the tax and property rolls without a trace.

The three survivors are critical of the commemoration activities by Tulsa and the state that have raked in millions marking this centennial year of the massacre without addressing the ongoing needs of a community that has yet to recover economically from the trauma. When survivors began coming forward in the 1980s and 1990s, they had to deal with the skepticism of a ruling class that initially denied it had happened or that something relatively small was being exaggerated for financial reasons.

Viola Fletcher has told her story to sympathetic audiences and those who politely applaud her longevity while failing to take her experience seriously for years. Oklahoma's Republican-dominated legislature and governor acknowledge that the massacre took place, but are not inclined to look kindly on reparations as part of a package of remedies, no matter how much standing the victims believe they have as survivors of a terrible crime.

Meanwhile, America bides its time waiting for the last witnesses to an injustice that continues to reverberate through history to die. In a few years, it can say with a straight face that all those who "truly know" what happened a century ago are dead and beyond interrogation. Time to move on to things that truly matter — like tax cuts.