On May 19, 107-year-old Fletcher traveled to Washington, D.C., for the first time to share with Congress what she remembered of the Tulsa Race Massacre nearly a century ago. Fletcher, whose parents had been subsistence sharecroppers in southwestern Oklahoma before they moved to Tulsa, had just turned 7. Her life was filled with promise: a lovely home, happy neighbors, a good school. Awakened in the middle of the night, she fled with her family. 

“I’ll never forget the violence of the white mob,” she testified. “I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke…I still see Black businesses being burned…I live through the massacre every day.”

This year marks the centennial of the deadly and well-organized assault by white people on the homes, businesses, and bodies of the Black people who lived and prospered in a 35-block, segregated section of North Tulsa, called the Greenwood District. 

Greenwood, dubbed “the Negro Wall Street of America” in 1913 by educator and author Booker T. Washington—since updated to “Black Wall Street”—was both unique and a beacon, an intentional response to the ugly restraints of Jim Crow racism that prevented Black folk from participating in the thriving economy created by the region’s oil boom of the 1910s. It worked. In 1906, O.W. Gurley, a wealthy Black landowner, bought 40 acres of property in Tulsa to be sold to “coloreds only.” He provided loans for new business ventures to African Americans, launching what quickly became a successful experiment in Black prosperity.

During the two-day massacre, every home was burned, businesses were destroyed, and historians estimate that up to 300 people were brutally murdered by the mob, who had been coached by local police. White locals even repurposed crop dusters to drop homemade turpentine bombs on Black bankers, grocers, barbershops, teachers, tailors, the beloved theater, and the local newspaper office. No one has ever been held accountable. And yet, for all its horror, few Americans had heard of it until recently; virtually nobody who is currently old enough to vote learned about it in school. Like the wealth and promise that died for Fletcher in the early hours of May 31, this history had largely been erased.

That is all about to change. 

The anniversary has become a surprisingly robust node in a broad conversation about racism and justice, and the history has become personal to many, including those in corporate America, whose leadership must now demonstrate a fluency in issues of race in ways unimaginable even five years ago. What’s on the table now is a chance to process in real time—and out loud—how the various tools of state-sanctioned violence and systemic gatekeeping have contributed to the Black racial and opportunity gap in the U.S. And it’s time to talk, once again, about reparations. 

What a difference a generation makes. On the 80th anniversary of the attack, and despite years of lobbying by survivors and advocates, Oklahoma passed legislation that agreed to some investment in Greenwood, including an official memorial—medals were even issued to the then 188 survivors—but it did not include meaningful reparations. Now, the once dreaded R-word is everywhere. In addition to state and congressional hearings like the one Fletcher attended, scholarly research about reparations is getting new attention, and another “forgotten” massacre that wiped out a prosperous town in Rosewood, Fla., in 1923 has become a blueprint for victim compensation. Media outlets have been visiting Greenwood for months, and a pair of extraordinary documentary films timed to the anniversary—one directed by Peabody and Emmy Award–winning director Stanley Nelson (Freedom Riders) and Peabody and duPont-Columbia Award winner Marco Williams (Two Towns of Jasper); and another underwritten by LeBron James and Maverick Carter and directed and produced by Fortune alum Salima Koroma—offer unflinching examinations of the historical elements that made Greenwood both possible and a threat to white hegemony, then and now. 

The 100th anniversary has arrived, and Tulsa is still burying its dead, a process that began in 2020 after a yearlong search revealed unmarked mass graves likely filled with the bodies of victims. Exhumations have begun in earnest, under the watchful eye of a still-wounded community. What hangs in the air is the Big Question: Where would the country be if we had never “forgotten” what happened in North Tulsa on May 31, 1921?

If pondering the opportunity cost feels like an exercise in racial time travel, the legacy of Greenwood continues to make itself known in real-world ways. 

The city remains beset by poverty, crime, and a history of lethal police violence against Black residents. And a promising 2018 initiative called Tulsa Remote, which aimed to entice a diverse cohort of work-from-anywhere digital trailblazers to move to Tulsa for $10,000 and the promise of a built-in community, had trouble retaining Black applicants. Turns out, they were just one Google query away from an upsetting history lesson. A Harvard Business School case study published in 2020 framed the problem. “All people had to do was search for ‘Tulsa,’ and information about the 1921 race massacre would pop up,” the program’s director shared with researchers. Citing data at the time that placed Tulsa seventh nationwide in fatal police incidents per capita, he said, “I can see why some people would think, ‘God, I don’t need that challenge.’” Today’s data ranks Tulsa fifth nationwide.

What happened in Tulsa set a standard for the erasure of Black wealth and humanity that, over time, has become business as usual: redlining, gentrification, underserved communities filled with undervalued homes, and lack of access to capital markets and venture investment. It was a victory for white supremacy.

And while there is much to unpack as a society, the story remains personal.

Viola Fletcher and the two other remaining survivors, her 100-year-old brother, Hughes “Uncle Red” Van Ellis, and 106-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle, are the lead plaintiffs in a reparations lawsuit filed last year against the city of Tulsa and others, unimpeachable witnesses to an unexamined history. They are also poor; according to an oral history interview, Fletcher worked cleaning houses until she was 85 years old. Their plight has become the focus of a campaign led by Color of Change, a national racial justice organization, to get Tulsa to earmark some of the $30 million they raised for its centennial commission to support the elderly descendants. 

“They’re living in poverty,” says Color of Change senior campaign director Jade Magnus Ogunnaike. “They can’t afford basic items like milk, cheese [as well as caretaking support]. If you are willing, as a mayor, to raise money…and not a penny of it goes to restorative justice or descendants, then you’re all talk.” 

“This was not that long ago,” says Charisse Conanan Johnson, a managing partner at Next Street, a capital advisory firm that focuses on small-business owners who have been historically disenfranchised because of race or gender. The wealth destroyed, estimated by experts to be upwards of $200 million worth of Black property in today’s currency, robbed Greenwood descendants of more than just a whole lot of money. What was also lost, she says, was the cultural capital of achievement, the kind that might have cemented a new narrative around Black belonging in a country that was actively failing to reckon with its Civil War past. “It’s the intangible wealth that comes from confidence, that comes from exposure, that comes from knowledge,” all of which was prevented from informing Black communities or rippling through Black family trees, she says. “That was all taken away by this event.” 

This is the history that current residents of Greenwood are determined not to repeat. 

This compelling mix of both personal and collective history brought Brooklyn-based photographer DeSean McClinton-Holland to Fortune last year. While flipping through family albums he was discovering the history of the massacre at the same time. “I came across the story of Tulsa,” he recalls, “finding that we had family that lived there, that we believe owned businesses there.” For someone whose work has focused on Black diaspora themes, learning about his own connection to a previously unknown event was “like a punch in the face, to be honest.” The photos he made and the stories he collected felt like a giant family reunion, he says. 

McClinton-Holland, along with Fortune journalists, spent time with people who live and work in the Greenwood District today, many of whom are descendants of the people for whom the original community was a dream come true before it was a dream brutally deferred. They are working to leverage their painful shared past to fight for a better future.

Brenda Nails-Alford

Before the Tulsa massacre, Brenda’s grandparents, James and Vasinora Nails Sr., along with her great-uncle, Henry Nails, were the owners of Nails Brothers, a shoe and record shop once located at 121 North Greenwood Ave.

Along with the shop, her family were the owners of a taxi and limousine service as well as a skating rink and dance pavilion located in what is now Lacy Park in Tulsa.

Nails-Alford didn’t know about her family’s experience in the Tulsa massacre until 2003, when she received a letter that said she was being included in a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa regarding reparations for descendants and survivors.

“I remember reading that letter five times, wondering to myself why was I receiving it and what exactly did it mean,” Nails-Alford says.

After receiving the letter, she committed to learning more about her ancestry by reading books and documents and watching an interview with her aunt Dr. Cecelia Nails-Palmer about the massacre, conducted in the ’70s.

Being raised in Greenwood, it was disheartening for Nails-Alford to discover that her family had been directly impacted by a tragedy whose effects still reverberate in the area to this day.

“I grew up in the Greenwood neighborhood along with my family members and community members, and they were absolutely wonderful,” Nails-Alford tells Fortune. “It was hard to believe that something as horrible as the race massacre could have occurred in our community.” 

Nails-Alford is now dedicated to passing along what she knows about the massacre to the next generation. She serves on the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission and works with the public oversight committee for the city’s mass graves investigation.

As the centennial approaches, Nails-Alford is reflecting on the tribulations of her forebears.

“I’m here today so humbled and honored to stand in their stead in a time that I don’t believe they could have ever imagined, where we are talking about the race massacre and also trying to find the victims of the race massacre to bring justice to our community,” she says.

Beyond talking about and reckoning with the 1921 destruction, Nails-Alford says the city needs to compensate the descendants of survivors as it promised to after the violence.

“Nothing changed about the situation in our community,” she says. “Our community lost everything, people were killed, and restitution was due then, and 100 years later it is still due.”

Dwight Eaton

Dwight Eaton, born in Tulsa in 1963, can remember visiting his grandparents’ barbershop as a kid with his siblings.

“Civic leaders of Tulsa frequented the barbershop,” Eaton says. “They got their hair cut and talked about politics. A lot of discussions took place in barbershops back in the ’60s and ’70s. The barbershop is a place of solace for the Black community.”

His grandfather Joseph Eaton was in his early twenties when the 1921 Tulsa massacre took place, he says. Black community members worked together to revitalize the commercial area known as Black Wall Street. Over 20 years later, Joseph Eaton opened his own barbershop. His wife, Louise, was a writer and involved in the community, Dwight Eaton says.

But the Tulsa massacre wasn’t at the heart of many of the barbershop conversations.

“I can recollect maybe once or twice where my grandfather even discussed the massacre,” he says.

Eaton asked his father, Bobby Eaton Sr., who eventually took over the barbershop and continued community activism, why the elders didn’t bring up the destruction of Black Wall Street much in conversation.

“I was told the elders didn’t speak of it because of fear of retribution,” Eaton says. “It was something solemn for them because it was such a traumatic event.”

Eaton now lives in Houston, where he mentors youth and is the managing partner at Keep My Houston Clean. He is also co-owner of the Black Wall Street Liquid Lounge, a coffee shop located on Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa. 

The elders of the Eaton family taught him and his siblings to “take charge of your life—yourself,” and instilled the values of entrepreneurship, he says. Eaton opened his first business about 10 years after finishing college. He also required his son to “learn how to start a business from A to Z—then account for it and run it,” he says.

“This is the 100th year of the destruction of Greenwood,” Eaton says. “However, in our coffee shop, our motif represents the pioneers and the development of Black Wall Street.”

What the Black community can learn from once thriving Black Wall Street is “we need to be able to support business [owners] who look like ourselves,” Eaton says. “You’ve got to make an effort to do so and allow businesses to grow and become pillars in the community like they once were before.” 

Bobby Eaton Jr.

When Bobby Eaton Jr., a native of Tulsa, lived in California in the 1970s and early ’80s, he had a career as a professional musician. Eaton played bass guitar alongside music legends including Natalie Cole, Bobby Womack, and Ike and Tina Turner, he says. He returned to his hometown about five years ago after living in Houston with the mission of bolstering the Black community in Tulsa.

“I’ve got the radio station KBOB 89.9 FM, and we serve the community,” he says.

Eaton, Dwight’s older brother, is a member of a multigenerational family of descendants who have rooted their family businesses in Tulsa, including his grandfather, Joseph Eaton, he says.

“My grandfather was an entrepreneur all his life,” says Eaton, the eldest of four children. His father, Bobby Eaton Sr., continues to run the family business. Adjacent to the historic barbershop is a space where Joseph Eaton allowed family members to conduct their own businesses over the years. It’s now the headquarters of the online radio station Bobby Eaton Jr. helms.

From giving food to community members in need to donating school supplies to raising funds for funerals, the radio station is a “community hub for Black Tulsa,” he says.

“We still suffer from a lot of trauma from the 1921 massacre,” Eaton says. “A lot of African Americans here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, are traumatized.”

The Black community worked to rebuild the ravaged Greenwood District in the years following the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. By 1942, Greenwood Avenue had 242 Black-owned-and-operated business establishments, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society. Born in 1954, Bobby Eaton Jr. recalls growing up at a time when Black entrepreneurship was prevalent, but the economic empowerment he witnessed as a kid has been drastically reduced, he says.

“A lot of this is due to gentrification,” Eaton says. “Urban renewal became what I call urban removal. Today, on Greenwood Avenue, there’s only a small section of Black-owned businesses.”

KBOB 89.9 FM is hosting centennial events, including a community festival with activities for children, says Eaton. 

“We really need some fun here because we’ve been hit hard,” he says. 

Seth Bryant

Seth Bryant was born in Buffalo in 1970, nine years after his great-grandfather, A.J. Smitherman died. Smitherman, known to many Tulsans and historians as an influential figure from the time of the Tulsa massacre, was the founder of the Tulsa Star newspaper and an organizer of Black Tulsan resistance against a mob of white people that burned down the Greenwood District and killed hundreds.

But to Bryant growing up, Smitherman was just the newspaper-owning ancestor he knew little about.

As an adult, however, he learned far more about the Tulsa massacre and his great-grandfather’s response to it. With that knowledge came respect, sadness, and a sense of pride, he says. 

“I’m so humbled by what he has done, and it makes me want to step up my game and be a better man,” Bryant tells Fortune.

Bryant grew up in Buffalo in part because after the massacre, Smitherman had to flee to the city after being indicted in Tulsa for allegedly inciting a riot, charges that weren’t lifted until 2007.

Of the many qualities that attracted Smitherman to Buffalo, family lore has it that the city’s proximity to Canada was likely among them, Bryant says. Smitherman was technically a wanted man until his death.

Bryant hadn’t been to Tulsa until a business trip brought him to the city when he was a few years out of law school. Instead of relaxing at the hotel, he went out to explore the place his ancestors had called home.

An older Black taxi driver kindly drove him around Greenwood, or at least what was left of the biggest Black economic powerhouse in the country.

As the taxi took him to the half-a-block–long historic business district and he saw how Interstate 244 bisected Greenwood, Bryant was hit with a barrage of emotions.

“It was really a profound and really deep spiritual experience, just touching those streets and being in that area,” Bryant recalls.

On the anniversary of the massacre, Bryant will visit Tulsa for a second time, now with his wife and extended family, all of whom will attend a memorial service and an economic empowerment event planned to commemorate the centennial of the tragedy.

Bryant says he and his family aren’t taking the trip just to remember the calamity but also to offer a sense of hope.

“It’s somber. It’s difficult,” Bryant says. “But we’re going with a spirit of empowerment, and of survival.”

Glory Wells

Located in the middle of the Greenwood Historic District, Wanda J’s Next Generation Restaurant carries on the legacy of once-thriving Black Wall Street.

It’s also the place where Glory Wells spends a lot of her time.

Wells has been working at the restaurant since it opened and has seen it grow from vision to reality. Her family has been in the restaurant business a long time, serving homestyle Southern food in the tradition of Wells’ grandmother, Wanda J. Armstrong, but the restaurant in Greenwood opened only in 2016.

Fueled by a passion for cooking, Armstrong opened her first restaurant in 1974 in North Tulsa. The restaurant in Greenwood is owned by Glory’s father and operated by the family, hence the “Next Generation.”

Not only are Wells’ relatives the next generation in a family of entrepreneurs but also the new protagonists in a business district that before the Tulsa massacre was home to one of the most prominent concentrations of Black-owned businesses in the U.S.

Of this fact, Wells is acutely aware.

“This particular location is a good fit for our family, given that we possess the entrepreneurial spirit that has always been present in this historic area,” she tells Fortune.

Wells’ grandma had owned a restaurant in the Greenwood District in the early ’90s, but business was slow in Greenwood then, and the restaurant eventually closed. When her grandma had the chance in 2016 to open a new restaurant in Greenwood, she jumped on the opportunity.

Like many other restaurants, Wanda J’s Next Generation struggled during the early stages of the pandemic. But everyone who works at the restaurant is either family or a close family friend, so it was important to not let anyone go, Wells says.

Glory Wells was still in college when the pandemic began and graduated later that year. She remembers one of the projects she worked on in a business class focused on finding ways to help companies during the pandemic. 

Her team chose Wanda J’s Next Generation as their subject. They analyzed the restaurant’s business strategy, and Wells proposed cross-training as a way to help retain staff. 

“There were times when the cooks were doing dishes, or the dish person was cooking, or the server was putting plates together or making the bread for the day,” Wells says.

The cross-training helped the restaurant maintain its employees’ hours and is still in place today as the restaurant now faces a shortage of workers.

As the Tulsa massacre centennial approaches, Wanda J’s finds itself at the center of the festivities, serving as a reminder that the entrepreneurial spirit of Black Wall Street lives on in the next generation.

Nehemiah Frank

Nehemiah Frank’s ancestors in the Cherry and Clark families were prominent business owners in Greenwood before the Tulsa massacre.

A century later, despite the 1921 tragedy, the tradition of education and entrepreneurship his ancestors passed on is still alive in him, he says.

“I’m thankful for their strength and their resilience,” Frank says. “I’m thankful for their excellence.”

Though he has strong ties to Tulsa, Frank left with his family when he was 6 years old. He has lived in several different cities, attended college in Chicago, and was planning to apply to Howard University. 

But when he heard Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, give a sermon about the Tulsa massacre, he knew he had to come back to the city.

Wright spoke about the successful community of Greenwood and Black Wall Street that day, before painting a picture of bombs falling from the sky and a mob of white people burning houses.

“I just remember feeling like I was in a tunnel,” Frank tells Fortune. “I’m like, ‘That’s where I’m from; that’s my home.’”

Soon after, he enrolled at Oklahoma State University.

After college, Frank worked as a teacher and a gymnastics coach before starting his own publication. In an homage to Greenwood, he called it the Black Wall Street Times. 

Frank says he saw a gap in the media when it came to Black representation. A gap which, Frank notes, the Black Wall Street Times filled during the trial of Betty Shelby, a white police officer who in 2016 shot an unarmed Black man, Terence Crutcher, in Tulsa. After seeing some of the public discourse and media coverage, Frank was disheartened.

“They were demonizing the hell out of someone from my community, and it was really painful and hurtful to hear that,” Frank says.

He wrote an opinion piece criticizing people for disparaging Crutcher’s character and was interviewed on TV and by major news outlets. That article propelled him and the Black Wall Street Times forward, Frank says, and now the outlet has grown from just himself to include several other writers and photographers who produce news for Tulsa’s Black community.

Despite the growth, Frank says he and his staff still remember their roots. The newsroom is located on Archer Street in Greenwood and is releasing a commemorative magazine for the centennial.

For Frank, the fact that he has a business in the same area his ancestors did 100 years ago means a lot to him.

“It makes me beam and feel honored to know that after 100 years I still have a space in the same place where they had had a space, where they had their businesses and built their dreams and lives,” Frank tells Fortune.

Brandon Oldham

When his wife got a job in Tulsa and persuaded him to move back to his hometown, Brandon Oldham had to kick the preconceived notions telling him that coming back to Tulsa didn’t represent success.

Yet as he explored the city as an adult, Oldham discovered that Tulsans had a sense of pride in their city that wasn’t there when he was a kid, he says.

“We quickly found a strong community here,” Oldham tells Fortune.

He and his wife bought a home in the city, and even after she was offered a better job in Oklahoma City, the pair stayed in Tulsa, and his wife commuted to the office.

Oldham is now giving back to his hometown and community as the cultural tourism chair for the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission.

Even though he isn’t certain if his family are direct descendants of 1921 Greenwood residents, he knows everybody in Tulsa has been affected in some way by the massacre.

“This is still Tulsa, and this is still the place where people have been grappling with this history their entire lives, whether they’ve admitted it or not,” Oldham says.

One hundred years after the massacre, it is still a contentious issue in the city. Oldham says this tension is best exemplified by a mural painted to commemorate the massacre that had to be continually repaired after being constantly vandalized in 2019.

To have a healthier relationship with Tulsa’s past, all of its residents need to reckon with what happened in 1921 and how the city can change the outcomes for those who were affected, Oldham says.

The centennial events play a big role in that reckoning, Oldham notes.

Tickets sold out for the “Remember and Rise” event, featuring activist Stacey Abrams and musician John Legend, the centerpiece of celebrations put on by the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission. More than 2,000 seats were reserved for descendants and community members, and 3,500 more sold out in 30 minutes after they went on sale at midnight on May 21. 

“Hopefully it’s indicative of the attendance at all of the events,” Oldham says. “Whether that be the John Hope Franklin Center for Reconciliation symposium that’s happening, whether that’s the legacy fest to commemorate the centennial, as well as any of the other community events that are happening around that time frame.”

Venita Cooper

Venita Cooper had been working as an educator for a decade when she was offered the opportunity to become a school administrator in Tulsa. After relocating to the area three years ago and serving in the role for some time, Cooper’s career soon pivoted to entrepreneurship. She now connects with youth through her shop, Silhouette Sneakers & Art, located on Greenwood Avenue.

“I was really attracted to being a part of the legacy of the area,” says Cooper, 37. “Even though I went to high school in Oklahoma, and Oklahoma history was mandatory, I never learned about Black Wall Street, the massacre, and the subsequent rebuild. As I dug deeper, I became really inspired by the stories of success, the origins of the community, the resilience post-massacre.”

Cooper’s foray into entrepreneurship was sparked by a friend who suggested she open a sneaker boutique. 

“I’ve never worked in a sneaker store, never been an entrepreneur,” she says. But Cooper was a sneaker collector.

Once she decided to go forth with the idea, Cooper began networking within the Tulsa community. Everyone Cooper met shared contacts, she says. 

“All these people ended up being very integral to opening the space…with the kind of momentum that we had,” Cooper says. 

Her boutique, which opened in November 2019, carries limited-edition sneakers like Air Jordans and Kanye West’s Yeezy footwear as well as local apparel brands and vintage clothing.

“I think there were people who were just really hungry for this kind of culture in a physical space,” Cooper says. “Sneaker culture has real roots in Black culture.”

Cooper’s shop survived the economic downturn for retailers amid the coronavirus pandemic. This is “another sign of the strength of the community,” she says. “We established relationships, and those people kind of stuck with us.”

National interest in the centennial is going to bring economic opportunity to Tulsa, but Cooper wants the focus to be on “what’s next for the Black community. And how do we get there?” 

“Who will reap the benefits?” she asks.

“I know for sure, I will, in some way,” Cooper says. “But I don’t represent the entire Black community, right? There are only 10 or 15 Black-owned businesses left on Greenwood. How do we make sure the economic gains get to more people in the Black community?” 

LaToya Rose

“I think Greenwood really chose me,” says LaToya Rose, 35, a native of Tulsa and owner of Rose Tax Solutions, a full-service boutique tax firm. 

“My dad’s presence on Greenwood Avenue since 2005 was an inspiration for operating my tax business,” Rose says. Her father, Walter Armstrong Jr., owner of Big “A” Bail Bonds, provides community outreach and hosts fundraising events for individuals in need of medical assistance, she says.

As a certified tax accountant, Rose opened her firm in September 2017. Rose negotiated the terms of her office lease to enable the next generation of her family to use the space for their own business endeavors.

“If my kids don’t want to have a tax firm and they want to do something else, I negotiated accordingly,” she says. 

Rose says national interest in the Tulsa Race Massacre centennial may support Black entrepreneurial growth spurred by outside investors who only recently learned about the atrocities of 1921 and want to help. Along with providing tax services, she’s also trying to assist others in realizing their entrepreneurial potential and in how to receive funding, she says.

“This is the time to really think about how you want to leave a legacy and allow for some of these groups who are out here, who have grants and funding opportunities, to fund your idea,” notes Rose, who created the Black Wall Street Exchange. She says she tells community members, “Make sure that you’re in a position to apply and make it happen.”

Rose also encourages community members to “allow someone to invest in your future. I wouldn’t call it pity money,” she explains. “I wouldn’t call it reparations. But I would call it a gift of hope, because now they’re aware of what’s been going on.”

Greenwood businesses can have a successful future, Rose says. And a big part of that success is in bringing the community together and building generational wealth. 

“My hope is that these businesses will thrive in a way that they can have multiple locations,” Rose says. “And their financial stability is so strong that they can actually leave a legacy.”