Hey everyone, you're listening to Code Switch.

I'm B.A. Parker.

And I'm Gene Demby.

Okay, let me tell you about this woman.

Okay, her name is Lesie Benningfield Randall, and she's 111 years old.

That's right, 111.

And her people call her mother Randall as they should.

And Mother Randall was born in Grace in Oklahoma before World War I. She grew up on a farm and they got around by horse and buggy.

When she was very, very young in 1921, her family's house was looted and destroyed during the

Tulsa Race Massacre. A mob of thousands of white folks descended on her neighborhood and over three days burned it to the ground.

As many as 300 people were thought to have been killed in that massacre,

thousands of Black Tulsa's left the city and never came back.

And while it could never be fully proven,

many people believe that Tulsa's elected officials were the people who set the massacre in motion.

Yeah, and that whole calamity was rather purposely unremembered. Mother Randall, by the way, is now the last known living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre. And that the people who live through it have been petitioning for some kind of redress for decades, no money, no compensation, has ever been paid

to her or any of the people who survived that pogrom.

Last year, a Texas congressman named Al Green introduced a bill that would pay Mother Randall

directly out of a federal pot of money called

the Judgment Fund. Now, that bill has been sitting in committee for the better part of a year.

It hasn't had a floor vote, and it probably won't get one.

Fast forward to last month when the Trump administration's Department of Justice announced

that it was going to set aside $1.8 billion out of that

...