on his finger, causing his sister to throw her hand over his mouth to prevent the men from hearing his screams. George Monroe lived out the rest of his life in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He became a musician, owner of a Tulsa nightclub, and the first black man in Tulsa to sell Coca-Cola. George Monroe died in 2001. Mary E. Jones Parrish Mary Elizabeth Jones Parrish (1892–1972) was born in 1892 in Yazoo City, Mississippi. She moved to Tulsa around 1919 and worked teaching typing and shorthand at a branch of the YMCA. Parrish was reading in her home when the Tulsa race massacre began on the evening of May 31, 1921. Parrish's daughter, Florence Mary, called the young journalist and teacher to the window. "Mother," she said, "I see men with guns." The two eventually fled into the night under a hail of bullets. Mary Parrish wrote a first-person account and collected eye-witness statements from dozens of others and published them immediately following the tragedy under the title The Events of the Tulsa Disaster. Parrish documented the magnitude of the loss of human life and property at the hands of white vigilantes. Parrish hoped that her book would "open the eyes of the thinking people to the impending danger of letting such conditions exist and in the 'Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.' A new edition was published in 2021 by Trinity University Press under the title, The Nation Must Awake: My Witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.The new edition includes a new afterword by Anneliese M. Bruner, Parrish's great-granddaughter. The New York Times called Parrish's "a story of survival... remains relevant a century later" while The New Yorker called it "The first and most visceral long-form account of how Greenwood residents experienced the massacre." Lessie Benningfield ("Mother Randle") Lessie Benningfield, also known as Mother Randle, was born in Morris, Oklahoma on November 10, 1914. Her parents were farmers; she had three sisters and a brother. Benningfield does not recall much due to her young age during the massacre. She remembers a mob of white men barging into her home and then destroying her family's house. She has memories of feelings of intense fear while trying to evacuate her home and get somewhere safe with her family. She spent the rest of her childhood and young adulthood in Tulsa and graduated from Booker T.