TULSA, Okla. - Stacey Abrams, who has become a leading national voice on ballot access, will deliver the keynote address at the “Remember & Rise” event during the Memorial Day holiday commemorating

the 100-year anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

Ms. Abrams, whose work on voter access and political infrastructure is credited with helping flip the state of Georgia for Democrats in 2020, will speak at the nationally televised event Monday, May 31, the 1921 Race Massacre Centennial Commission stated.

“Her tireless efforts to create equity and access for Black Georgia voters has inspired the entire country to re-envision what inclusive structures, systems and communities should look like,” said Phil Armstrong, the commission’s project director.

A series of events and activities are scheduled across Tulsa over Memorial Day weekend to commemorate the anniversary, including a performance by Grammy-award winning singer and songwriter John Legend.

On May 19, three survivors of the 1921 bloody and violent massacre testified before a U.S. House subcommittee that is discussing potential legal remedies to compensate survivors and their descendants. Attorneys for victims and their descendants have sued the City of Tulsa and other defendants seeking reparations for the destruction of the city’s once thriving Black district by a white mob.

During roughly 16 hours from May 31 to June 1, 1921, a white mob decimated the city’s once thriving Black district.

Around 300 people were killed, 800 were wounded and more than 8,000 people were left homeless.

“I’m here seeking justice and I’m asking my country to acknowledge what happened in Tulsa in 1921,” 107-year-old Viola Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre testified last week before the House subcommittee.

Ms. Fletcher recounted how she went to sleep in her family’s home that night and was awakened and told they had to leave. “I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home,” she described. “I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I have lived through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I cannot, I will not and other survivors do not and our descendants do not.”