(A brief moment of silence, then the music subtly shifts to the instrumental of “Why Should We Demand Reparations?”)

She was a classic trend. A trailblazer. From her beginning to her end, she was a survivor.

She endured near-death situations that would make most souls despair. The massive infernos. The haunted cries. The tarnished screams that no child should ever have to hear… and no child should ever have to endure.

In 1921, in a place referred to as a village—a village that raised children to merge into a prosperous community called Black Wall Street, in the heart of Tulsa, Oklahoma—a seven-year-old girl named Viola Ford Fletcher saw the world burn. She saw the burning flashes, saw women and children running for their lives in a mass riot, a race war, fought over a lie. A tragedy for something her people did not do.

But ...