Imagine living with such unspeakable trauma for more than a century, reliving the death and destruction visited on you, your family, and everyone you knew, only to be told that there will be no recompense for your suffering. That the world that has wronged you has no desire to make it right—and, in fact, only wants to take more from you at every opportunity. That you lived long enough to see the family home you rebuilt after all that taken from you by Tulsa’s racist urban development policies before you saw reparations for the first life-changing injustice done to you.
And yet, Mother Randle is still here, holding all of that within her for more than one hundred years—finally long enough to see some promise of repair.
It’s the truth of the Black experience here: that America can take everything from you, offer you nothing in return, and erase the memory of its sins from the history books so it can repeat them later. And yet, through sheer will, you keep going, keep building, keep hoping, even when the generational wounds you carry within you and suffer in your own body cannot be so easily healed.
As Resmaa Menakem talks about in My Grandmother’s Hands, the wounds don’t just belong to the oppressed. They belong to all of us who live in this country that refuses to reckon with its history of violence, only to repeat it.
The assault on Greenwood is not simply a sad event from a bygone era. It lives in Mother Randle, her descendants, the City of Tulsa, and in every American, all of whom have grown up bound to our country’s unending cycle of cruel amnesia.
It is happening now, in another form, as former Confederate states seek to claw back voting rights and civil rights from descendants of the formerly enslaved, and rewrite school curricula to gloss over the truths of our past.
Mother Fletcher would’ve been 112 years old last month. She didn’t live long enough to see justice for what was done to them. Fortunately, Mother Randle has.
Together, they connect us to the past we strive to forget, as do our grandparents and great-grandparents who lived in a world that kept us separate while claiming it was equal. Their memories live in us. And as long as they do, it was never “a long time ago.” It’s always “right now.”
That’s why we can’t afford to forget them, what they survived, and whom they lost. And we also can’t afford to give up hope, not when Mothers Fletcher and Randle refused to surrender after a century.
Whether it takes 100 years, 250 years, 400 years, or more, we can never tire of remembering the wrongs that were done and laboring to make them right.
