DALLAS — Viola Ford Fletcher, who as one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma spent her later years seeking justice for the deadly attack by a white mob on the thriving Black community where she lived as a child, has died. She was 111.
Her grandson Ike Howard said Monday that she died surrounded by family at a Tulsa hospital. Sustained by a strong faith, she raised three children, worked as a welder in a shipyard during World War II and spent decades caring for families as a housekeeper.
Tulsa was mourning her loss, said Mayor Monroe Nichols, the first Black leader of Oklahoma’s second-largest city. “Mother Fletcher endured more than anyone should, yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with purpose,” she said.
Fletcher was 7 years old when the two-day attack began on Tulsa’s Greenwood district on May 31, 1921, after a local newspaper published a sensationalized report about a Black man accused of assaulting a white woman. As a white mob grew outside the courthouse, Black Tulsans with guns who hoped to prevent the man’s lynching began showing up. White residents responded with overwhelming force. Hundreds of people were killed and homes were burned and looted, leaving more than 30 city blocks decimated in the prosperous community known as Black Wall Street.
“I could never forget the charred remains of our once-thriving community, the smoke billowing in the air, and the terror-stricken faces of my neighbors,” she wrote in her 2023 memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story.”
As her family left in a horse-drawn buggy, her eyes burned from the smoke and ash, she wrote. She described seeing piles of bodies in the streets and watching as a white man shot a Black man in the head, then fired toward her family.
She told the Associated Press in an interview the year her memoir was published that fear of reprisals influenced her years of near-silence about the massacre. She wrote the book with Howard, her grandson, who said he had to persuade her to tell her story.
“We don’t want history to repeat itself so we do need to educate people about what happened and try to get people to understand why you need to be made whole, why you need to be repaired,” Howard told the Associated Press in 2024. “The generational wealth that was lost, the home, all the belongings, everything was lost in one night.”
The attack went largely unremembered for decades. In Oklahoma, wider discussions began when the state formed a commission in 1997 to investigate the violence.
Fletcher, who in 2021 testified before Congress about what she went through, joined her younger brother, Hughes Van Ellis, and another massacre survivor, Lessie Benningfield Randle, in a lawsuit seeking reparations. The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed it in June 2024, saying their grievances did not fall within the scope of the state’s public nuisance statute.
“For as long as we remain in this lifetime, we will continue to shine a light on one of the darkest days in American history,” Fletcher and Randle said in a statement at the time. Van Ellis had died a year earlier at the age of 102.
A Justice Department review, launched under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act and released in January 2024, outlined the massacre’s scope and impact. It concluded that federal prosecution may have been possible a century ago, but there was no longer an avenue to bring a criminal case.
The city has been looking for ways to help descendants of the massacre’s victims without giving direct cash payments. Some of the last living survivors, including Fletcher, received donations from groups but have not received payments from the city or state.
Fletcher, born in Oklahoma on May 10, 1914, spent most of her early years in Greenwood. It was an oasis for Black people during segregation, she wrote in her memoir. Her family had a nice home, she said, and the community had everything from doctors to grocery stores to restaurants and banks.
Forced to flee during the massacre, her family became nomadic, living out of a tent as it worked in the fields as sharecroppers. She didn’t finish school beyond the fourth grade.
At 16 she returned to Tulsa, where she got a job cleaning and creating window displays in a department store, she wrote in her memoir. She then met Robert Fletcher, and they married and moved to California. During World War II, she worked in a Los Angeles shipyard as a welder, she wrote.
She eventually left her husband, who was physically abusive, she wrote, and gave birth to their son, Robert Ford Fletcher. Longing to be closer to her family, she returned to Oklahoma and settled north of Tulsa in Bartlesville.
Fletcher wrote that her faith and the close-knit Black community gave her the support she needed to raise her children. She had another son, James Edward Ford, and a daughter, Debra Stein Ford, from other relationships.
She worked for decades as a housekeeper, doing everything in those homes from cooking to cleaning to caring for children, Howard said. She worked until she was 85.
She eventually returned to Tulsa to live. Howard said his grandmother hoped the move would help her fight for justice.
Howard said the reaction his grandmother got when she started speaking out was therapeutic for her.
“This whole process has been helpful,” Howard said.
Stengle writes for the Associated Press.
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