A century later, city still struggles with slaughter

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."