Just days before Tulsa was set to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, three massacre survivors—107-year-old Viola Fletcher, 106-year-old Lessie Evelyn Benningfield Randle, and 100-year-old Hughes Van Ellis—testified before a House Judiciary Committee, demanding justice and reparations for the pogrom that destroyed their all-Black neighborhood of Greenwood and sent their families running for their lives. 

“The night of the massacre I was woken up by my family,” Fletcher recounted at the May 19 hearing. “My parents and five siblings were there. I was told we had to leave. And that was it. I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our house. I still see Black men being shot, and Black bodies