Viola Fletcher Survived Tulsa Race Massacre

Viola Fletcher, who witnessed the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre as a child and was its eldest known survivor, has died. She was 111. In announcing her death Monday, Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols said, "Mother Fletcher endured more than anyone should, yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with purpose." Fletcher, who was 7 at the time, spent much of her later life recounting her memories of the massacre and advocating for reparations, the Washington Post reports. In 2021, she told a congressional panel: "I have lived through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I cannot. I will not."

Fletcher's mother woke her up on May 31, 1921, in their home to flee in a horse and buggy after a white mob that had been deputized and armed by law enforcement stormed the affluent Greenwood neighborhood. Tension had built over the false accusation that a 19-year-old Black shoeshine worker had sexually assaulted a white female elevator operator. The attack went on for two days. "I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home," Fletcher testified. "I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams." The neighborhood known as "Black Wall Street" was destroyed and as many as 300 people were killed. The destruction caused mass homelessness, per the New York Times. No one was ever held accountable.

For years, the massacre was not widely taught in schools. Many in Tulsa didn't know of it: Police records and newspaper archives were tampered with or destroyed, and victims were buried in unmarked graves. The killing of George Floyd in 2021 led to renewed attention, and Fletcher wrote a memoir in 2023 with her grandson, Don't Let Them Bury My Story: The Oldest Living Survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre in Her Own Words. In recent years, Fletcher, with her brother and another survivor, became plaintiffs in a lawsuit seeking reparations from local governments and the Oklahoma National Guard. The case was ultimately dismissed, with the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruling the issue was one for policymakers, not the courts.

Fletcher worked as a maid for white families in Bartlesville, north of Tulsa, for most of her life. "The neighborhood I fell asleep in that night was rich—not just in terms of wealth, but in culture, community, heritage—and my family had a beautiful home," she said in her testimony supporting reparations. "Within a few hours, all that was gone." The founder of the Justice for Greenwood Foundation said in a statement that it's a moral failure that Fletcher died "without any meaningful redress" for herself and other victims of the attack. "She would not want her passing to be the end of the fight," Damario Solomon-Simmons said. "She would want it to light a fire under all of us." Lessie Benningfield Randle, also 111, now is the only known living survivor of the massacre.