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 on 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 the second world war and spent decades caring for families as a housekeeper.
Tulsa’s mayor, Monroe Nichols, said the city was mourning her loss. “Mother Fletcher endured more than anyone should, yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with purpose,” he said in a statement.
She was seven years old when the two-day attack began on Tulsa’s Greenwood district on 31 May 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 about 35 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.