On Monday, Hughes Van Ellis—one of the very last survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre—died at the age of 102. Van Ellis, who went by “Uncle Redd,” survived the 1921 harrowing act of terrorism that destroyed “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa. A white mob descended on the neighborhood, with around between 75 and 300 Black people being killed.
More than 1,000 homes and almost every business was destroyed, leaving thousands of Black folks reeling. With Van Ellis’s death, that leaves just two living survivors of the massacre remaining: Van Ellis’ sister, Viola Ford Fletcher, 109, and Lessie Benningfield Randle, 108.
Survivors and their families filed a lawsuit to hold Tulsa responsible for the massacre and last year, they appeared in a court hearing about reparations. Over the summer, a lower court dismissed the case. However, in August, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled it will consider the reparations case.
Anneliese M. Bruner, the great-granddaughter of Tulsa Race Massacre survivor Mary E. Jones Parrish, explains to The Root why Van Ellis’ death is so devastating. “We’re beginning to see a closing of that chapter as far as the way we’ve known it to date, since there’s been a resurgence of interest—particularly due to the centennial in 2021.
“Interest in the lawsuit being brought by Justice for Greenwood. Interest demonstrated during the centennial when they went to Congress and testified and entered their story into the national record. This is something that will continue to have importance from here on out in the history of this country.”
Bruner discusses how Van Ellis used his final years to seek justice for himself as well as his community. “This is the beginning of the closing of a chapter and certainly the chapter of his life where he was continuing to fight, to seek justice, to seek remuneration, to seek recognition, to seek acknowledgement of a wrong done to him and to so many others.”
Bruner also recalls how this massacre affected her own family. “My great-grandmother, Mary Jones Parish, was one of those persons to whom wrong was done. She lost her business. She lost her home. But I think more important, she lost her sense of security, her assurance that when she woke up every day, things would be normal.
“And I would say normal as far as Black life in America was concerned, particularly at that time, she lost her daughter’s innocence. Her daughter was my grandmother, Florence Mary Parish Bruner, who was seven years old at the time of the massacre—coincidentally the same age as Viola Fletcher, who was seven at the time of the massacre.”
America, she states, has worked tirelessly to omit this injustice from its history. However, Bruner’s great-grandmother wrote The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, which has now been published widely for audiences featuring an afterword by Bruner.
“We keep seeing these huge themes of what are people owed after a country—a government—has decimated and destroyed their prospects, their hopes, their dreams? What is the obligation of people to be able to accept their role and responsibility for that?
“What happens when a disempowered, or as we call today, marginalized community experiences blows like this, and then to add insult to injury, they are prohibited or prevented somehow from telling the truth of their story?” She correlates this pattern to our current political climate.
“It hearkens forward to what’s going on in some of these deep red states like Florida and Texas, where we are basically seeing the imposition of memory laws, where the memory of truth, the memory of accuracy, the memory of people suffering is being suppressed in a school curriculum, for example, and more broadly in the society in terms of it being a taboo topic to talk about what has happened to us as a people.”
Van Ellis’ death reminds us of the imminent erasure of one of the most heinous acts of violence in American history. “I think that Mr. Van Ellis’ death really brings all this into a really sharp relief in terms of these issues. We continue to face the lack of justice, the lack of financial justice, the lack of commitment to truth, because as we know, no reconciliation can be possible without an absolute acceptance of truth and responsibility.
“This has not been laid to rest—he’ll be laid to rest. There still is no peace and folks are not resting easy.”