Tulsa

It cost the black community everything, and not a single dime of restitution--no insurance claims--has been awarded to the victims to this day. Nonetheless, they rebuilt.

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We estimate 1,500 to 3,000 people were killed, and we know that a lot of them were buried in mass graves all around the city. Some were thrown into the river.

As a matter of fact, at 21st Street and Yale Avenue, that corner used to be a coal mine. They threw a lot of the bodies into the shafts.

Unmarked Graves, Tulsa, Oklahoma (CNN)

Beulah Smith and Kenny Booker, two elderly Oklahomans, lived through one of the worst race riots in U.S. history, the rarely mentioned 1921 Tulsa blood bath that officially took thousands of African American lives.

Almost sixteen years ago, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission was formed to determine exactly what happened and deal with the controversial issue of what, if any, reparations should be paid to the known survivors of the riot,

At that time, a group of less than 100 included Beulah Smith, who was 92 at the time, and Kenny Booker, who was 86.

'The gun went off--the riot was on.' On the night of May 31, 1921, mobs called for the lynching of dick Rowland, a black man who shined shoes, after hearing reports that on the previous day, he had assaulted Sarah Page, a white woman, in the elevator she operated in a downtown building.