Honoring a long fight for Truth and Justice

On October 9, Hughes Van Ellis, who was one of the last three known survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, passed away at age 102.

- Marian Wright Edelman

The story of the white supremacist mob violence that devastated Tulsa’s Black community is the kind of American history too few students learned about in school. It is also the kind of American history some leaders are trying to ban schools from teaching right now. For decades, the truth was hidden in Tulsa. But we all suffer without knowing and understanding our full history, and every new effort to hide the truth about history from our children must not work. Hughes Van Ellis was just an infant, and his 109-year-old sister Viola Ford Fletcher and 108-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle were just children when the massacre happened--but all three became determined to make sure their families’ stories were told and to seek justice.