Viola Fletcher and her once prosperous community experienced the harm of collective blame and collective punishment, for a crime that never happened. That did not matter for the residents, the beautiful homes, the “Black Wall Street” of Tulsa, Okla.

The false accusation that a Black 19-year-old had assaulted a young white woman was enough to precipitate events that began the night of May 31, 1921, and stretched into June 1. White mobs — deputized by law enforcement — descended on the African American Greenwood neighborhood in a violent and, according to a Justice Department review published in the last month of the Biden administration, “coordinated, military-style attack.”

After the looting, the fires, the makeshift bombs that survivors said they witnessed being dropped from planes, Greenwood was destroyed, with the death toll put as high as 300.

Seven-year-old Fletcher survived but never forgot. She lived long enough to testify before a congressional panel 100 years later: “I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire.”

“Mother Fletcher,” a name bestowed on this keeper of memory, died last month at the age of 111.

Though whites in the community and beyond tried to erase this event, in the same way the current White House is trying to erase any stories that paint anything except a triumphant picture of American exceptionalism, the........

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