It’s too bad that when each Memorial Day rolls around, the tune of bullets battering a rooftop ring louder than the national anthem in Olivia Hooker’s mind.

That’s because Hooker, who is now 90, was six during the May 31, 1921 Tulsa, Okla., race riot. That riot, which left scores of black people dead and wiped out the thriving black business community of Greenwood, is now known as the worse race riot in U.S. history.

According to the Washington Post, Hooker told members of the Congressional Black Caucus during a recent house hearing on reparations that she thought the bullets was hail from a Midwest storm until her mother explained that what she was hearing was bullets from a machine gun. She even said she remembered seeing a machine gun on a hill with an American flag on it.

That Hooker saw a racist confusing bigotry with patriotism doesn’t shock me. That happened all the time. Still does, in fact. But what angers me is that nowadays, even as that flag is being touted as a symbol of our responsibility to spread freedom around the world, people like Hooker still can’t get this country to live up to its collective responsibility to own up to the centuries of brutal oppression that made it impossible for black people to prosper from the freedoms that same flag is supposed to represent.

And it’s not as if they haven’t been trying.

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld, without comment, a ruling by the Denver-based U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that dismissed a class action suit against the city of Tulsa, its police department and the state of Oklahoma filed by survivors of the Tulsa riots. That riot, like many others, started with a white woman accusing a black man of assaulting her –- accusations which racists often used as a subterfuge to destroy black people whose success upset their sense of what they thought the racial social order should be.

But the court ruled that if the descendants were going to make a claim, they should have done so before 1923, the year that the two-year statute of limitations expired. It also said that other avenues had opened up in the 1960s and 1980s for claims to be filed.

Tragically, this is a case in which the law doesn’t jibe with the realities that black people faced during those times. I mean, these black people were living in times when a white woman’s lie was all that racists needed to carry out mass lynchings and to destroy black homes. Had any one of them tried to sue Oklahoma or Tulsa in 1923, I’m sure they would have wound up twisting at the end of a rope.

And suggesting that claims could have been brought in the 1960s or 1980s by people who had lost their homes, or who had spent decades trying to recover financially and mentally from that trauma is to ignore black reality. Again.

Yet, what’s really outrageous here is that the riot survivors were forced to pursue their claims in court. Just as the state of Florida did in 1994 with the Rosewood Claims Bill –- a bill that allows for up to $150,000 to be paid to survivors of the 1923 Rosewood slaughter, a massacre in which angry whites killed hundreds of black people and left their town in ruins. Oklahoma could do something similar.

But it doesn’t appear that it will. Michael Hausfeld, one of the attorneys who was part of the riots survivors’ legal team, told the Post that they heard remarks by Tulsans such as “It’s time that you people let this rest.”

Obviously, Tulsa officials aren’t in the business of justice. They’re in the business of denial.