One of the Last Known Survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Hughes Van Ellis, Dies at 102

Hughes “Uncle Redd” Van Ellis, one of the last three known survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, has died.

He was 102. According to a statement released by his family, Ellis died Monday night in Denver, Colorado.

Ellis was one of three lead plaintiffs — alongside Lessie Benningfield Randle, 108 and his sister, Viola Fletcher, 109 — in a reparations lawsuit filed against the city of Tulsa, Tulsa County, the state of Oklahoma and the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce.

In their lawsuit, the plaintiffs and their representation claimed that the survivors were never compensated for what they lost in the event, with the loss now totaling $200 million in today’s currency, and that the massacre contributed to the disparities that the Black community in Tulsa faces today. The lawsuit also claimed that government officials neglected the Black community in Tulsa to favor the white parts of the city and prevented the community from rebuilding itself.

After a judge dismissed the lawsuit in July, the trio vowed to fight the dismissal with “their last breaths.”

“Please do not let me leave this earth without justice, like all the other massacre survivors,” Ellis said at the time.

Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a thriving city by 1921 and highly segregated. Much of Tulsa’s African-American population lived in a neighborhood called Greenwood, which included a flourishing business district known to many as the Black Wall Street.

On the night of May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a teenage shoe shiner, was accused of assaulting a white elevator operator, Sarah Page in the elevator of a building in downtown Tulsa. The Tulsa Tribune printed the story the following day, alleging Rowland attempted to sexually assault the elevator operator. The publication also stated that there was a lynching planned. African-American and white mobs showed up at the courthouse where Rowland was being held, and chaos ensured. By the dawn of June 1, 1921, thousands of white residents entered the Greenwood District, burning down and stealing from homes. Most Black-owned businesses were damaged, looted or destroyed during the massacre.

Ellis was just a few months old when his family fled Greenwood amid the massacre.

Ike Howard, his grandnephew, said via The Washington Post. “He told us to keep fighting. He said, ‘I have more things I want to accomplish.’ It was like he had a foot in both worlds, like he wanted to catch wings,” meaning die, “but he knew he had unfinished business. He had an undying sense of what was right and what was wrong.”