For city's darkest day, justice is still to be dispensed

"The push to change really took place two or three years ago, as people in the community wanted to sort of take back the naming rights for the event."

While the word massacre captures the horror of the killing, he said, it may have failed to convey the active resistance put up by black Tulsans in face of the advancing mobs.

Back then with Tulsa the self-proclaimed oil capital still on its upward trajectory, the city fathers were only too eager to bury what they knew would severely tarnish its image. The victims themselves were too traumatized and too afraid to talk about it, and in fact with the entire community in ruins, many left Tulsa, never to return.

However, some chose to stay. Left to pick up rubble amid smoldering debris, these black Tulsans embarked on an arduous rebuilding, one that the city government often did its best to impede.

"The city passed an ordinance that you had to rebuild with nonflammable materials, which my grandfather thought was unfair and unreasonable," said John Whittington Franklin, whose grandfather, Buck Colbert Franklin, was a lawyer in Tulsa in the first half of the 20th century. "He fought it successfully all the way to the state supreme court."

The rebuilding resumed, with black Tulsans encouraged by Franklin to use whatever they could find, from old bricks to pieces of wood. For four years the man lived in tents, away from his wife and children, including his son John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), father of John W. Franklin and renowned African American historian.

"My grandfather moved 60 miles from the small town of Rentiesville to Tulsa and opened his law firm in February 1921," John W. Franklin said. "My grandmother had planned to join him at the end of May, but the massacre changed everything. My father remembered learning how to fish from my grandmother, something young men usually do with their fathers. The family was reunited in 1925."

The would-be historian attended public schools in Tulsa, including Booker T. Wa shingt on High School, one of the very few structures that had escaped destruction in the massacre. He may also have said his Sunday prayers at the Vernon African Methodist Episcopal Church, burned to the ground during the massacre before being rebuilt by black Tulsans the very next year. In the wee hours of July 1, 1921, as the fires burned away the floors above the ground, men, women and children found shelter in the church basement.

In 2015, eight years after John Hope Franklin and his son edited and published the late lawyer's autobiography My Life And An Era, John W. Franklin was presented with his grandfather's manuscript, discovered in a rented storage area.

"I wept, I just wept," said the grandson, who first visited his grandfather in Tulsa in 1954, at the age of 2.

Within those 10 pages typewritten on yellowed legal paper, the lawyer, who had dreamed of becoming a novelist, told of one of the greatest tragedies of his era, through the true story of one man with whom he had crossed paths several times.

It begins in 1918, soon after World War I, when a young African American veteran named Ross feels angry and betrayed because of his treatment despite his military service. It proceeds to an account of Ross defending his black community in 1921 during the massacre, and ends 10 years later, with the man, who had lost both his eyesight and his mind in the fires that destroyed his home, sitting in a mental asylum staring blankly into space. Somewhere at a street corner in Tulsa sits Mother Ross with her tin cup in hand, begging alms of passersby.

In an article published on June 3, 1921, two days after the calamity, The Morning Tulsa Daily World, citing Tulsa County deputy sheriff Barney Cleaver, said "the negroes participating in the fight … were former servicemen who had an exaggerated idea of their own importance".

"Exaggerated idea" was the expectation of black returnees from the war in Europe－400,000 African Americans fought in the war－for civil rights, seen through the distorting prism of racism. Ellis, one of the massacre survivors who spoke in Washington in May, knows all about that expec tat ion, and the crushing disappointment that follows.

Joining an all-black battalion in the highly segregated US Army and fighting in the China-Burma-Indian Theater of World War II, Ellis was asked to "stay at the very bottom of the ship" like his fellow black soldiers. "I put my life on the line for my country," said the old man who at war's end returned home to find himself denied all GI benefits due to the color of his skin.

Today, at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, a museum for which John Hope Franklin served as the founding chairman of its scholarly advisory committee, the typewriter on which the historian's father produced his searing eyewitness account is on view in a gallery dedicated to the memory of the massacre.

"Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes－now a dozen or more in number－still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of air," B.C. Franklin wrote in his manuscripts in 1931, 10 years after the massacre. He was referring to the use of private aircraft by the white mobs, with the attackers either shooting from them or dropping incendiary devices onto the buildings of Greenwood.