The massacre began at night on May 31, 1921. It would go on to claim some 300 people, leave some 10,000 homeless, and raze more than 1,000 residences and businesses. Telling her story to the congressional committee a century later, Fletcher spoke of the massacre in the present tense: “I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lining the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burnt. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I live through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history. I cannot. I will not.”
What the massacre destroyed, a century of disinvestment calcified. In Tulsa, dispossession unfolded not as a single event, but instead through the denial of insurance claims, the exclusion from public programs, the removal of homes through urban renewal, and decades of political pressure not to speak. Even a century later, Tulsa’s northern neighborhoods remained Blacker and poorer while the rest of Tulsa accumulated wealth. In parts of North Tulsa, home to Greenwood, the average life expectancy is approximately 10 years less than that of many parts of South Tulsa. And the data sour beyond these regional or neighborhood boundaries: Black infant mortality is three times greater than for white infants in Tulsa. Across Tulsa County, Black people, on average, live six fewer years and are twice as likely as their white peers to be unemployed.
Fletcher’s life would never be the same after the massacre. She told Congress that she lost the chance to study beyond the fourth grade. She spent most of her years as a domestic worker for white families, earning so little that even at 107, she told the committee, she could “barely afford everyday needs.” Her grandson said in a radio interview that for years, his grandmother would not let him utter the word “massacre.” According to him, Fletcher spent most of her life sleeping without lying down, fearing that she might, for some reason, need to make a quick escape. What many Americans saw as a historical event, she relived daily.
With Fletcher’s death, and the prospect of personal recompense answered, the question becomes what America will remember of that day. The country is well practiced in the art of forgetting. For much of my childhood, the massacre was not mentioned in my textbooks. I did not learn its scope in school. I learned about it only through references from elders and convoluted apologies by city leaders.