RIP Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, has died at 111
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1921 Tulsa Race Massacre survivor dies at 111
One of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma, Viola Ford Fletcher, who spent much of her life pursuing justice for the attack she and her community experienced, has died at the age of 111. She was 7 years old when the two-day attack began on Tulsa's Greenwood district...
Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, died at 111 years old Monday, her grandson Ike Howard told CNN.
“She had a beautiful smile on her face,” Howard said. “She loved life, she loved people.”
Oklahoma State Senator Regina Goodwin said she was with the family at a local hospital and also confirmed the news.
“Mother Fletcher,” as she was known, sat with CNN multiple times for interviews in recent years as she and other living survivors pursued a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa and other related departments, alleging they were complicit in the 1921 massacre and that its effects were still being felt today.
On May 31, 1921, a White mob laid waste to Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, a thriving Black-owned business district, CNN previously reported. They destroyed about 35 blocks of the neighborhood within 16 hours, arresting thousands of Black residents, while robbing, beating and killing others.
Lessie Benningfield Randle, 111, is now the only living survivor of the massacre. When Fletcher got sick in the days before her passing, Randle sent a message through her granddaughter to the Fletcher family saying, “She was sorry it was happening and that she loved her,” Randle’s granddaughter LaDonna Penny said.
After hearing the news Fletcher had passed, Randle responded, “That breaks my heart. I will miss her dearly,” Penny told CNN.
“Mother Fletcher called my grandmother her little sister,” Penny said, as she reflected on her own relationship with Fletcher.
“It’s like I lost my grandmother,” Penny told CNN. “My heart is broken, I keep trying to stop crying.”
Fletcher’s brother Hughes Van Ellis or “Uncle Redd,” also a massacre survivor, died in October 2023 at 102 years old.
In June 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit from the survivors, arguing they should be compensated by the city for damages — dealing a blow to their ongoing fight for reparations more than 100 years after the attack.
“When I think about Mother Fletcher, I don’t just see a historic figure or a symbol. I see a woman I sat with, prayed with, laughed with, and went to court with,” Damario Solomon-Simmons said as part of a statement to CNN. He was the lead attorney representing the survivors in their lawsuit.
“Spending this past Friday night by her hospital bed, I saw that Mother Fletcher didn’t talk like someone who was ready to go. She wasn’t done. She was tired — because this fight is exhausting — but her spirit was still in it,” Solomon-Simmons said.
Fletcher told CNN she “never got over” what she experienced that day and still remembers “people getting killed, houses, property, schools, churches, and stores getting destroyed with fire.”
“It just stays with me, you know, just the fear. I have lived in Tulsa since but I don’t sleep all night living there.”
Fletcher was 7 years old at the time.
In 2023 she co-authored a memoir with her grandson titled: “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story,” representing a history she and family believed the country was eager to forget.
“As I grew up, I had to work with White people, but we didn’t dare mention that,” she said of the massacre. “I didn’t know why it happened, or why they would be so cruel to do a thing like that to the Black people.”
How the massacre unfolded
The events leading up to the massacre began on May 30, 1921, when Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner, ran from an elevator in a downtown building after the elevator’s teen operator let out a scream. Rumors of a rape then circulated, Rowland was arrested, and White Tulsans formed a lynch mob.CONTINUED:
RIP
She was blessed to live a long life, A full century and some. Now she can join the ancestors and Rest In Heaven
RIP to her
REST IN POWER! Thank you!
It is our obligation to make sure her story is never forgotten.
Video 109-year-old survivor of the Tulsa race massacre writes memoir
In Viola Ford Fletcher’s book "Don't Let Them Bury My Story,” she shares her first hand experiences during the tragic, Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921.abcnews.go.com
Indeed, brotha!
We wil never forget.
RIP
Folks in Tulsa know the real enemy, get active.
theblackwallsttimes.com
Folks in Tulsa know the real enemy, get active.
Meet Caroline Wall: The Tulsa Judge who denied justice to Massacre survivors
Judge Caroline Wall is a self-described "Constitutional Conservative" who dismissed the Tulsa Race Massacre lawsuit.
theblackwallsttimes.com
I cant begin to imagine what she lived through and experienced at 4 years old. The flew planes over black wall street and dropped bombs. Rip
R.I.P.
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