DALLAS (AP) — Viola Ford Fletcher, who as one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma spent her final years seeking justice for a deadly white mob attack 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. Supported by a strong faith, she raised three children, worked as a shipyard welder during World War II, and spent decades caring for families as a housekeeper.
She was 7 years old when the two-day attack on Tulsa's Greenwood neighborhood began on May 31, 1921, after a local newspaper published a sensational report about a black man accused of attacking a white woman. As the white crowd grew outside the courthouse, black Tulsans with guns began to appear, hoping to prevent the man from being lynched. White residents responded with overwhelming force. Hundreds of people were killed, homes burned and looted, leaving more than 30 city blocks destroyed in a thriving community known as Black Wall Street.
“I will never be able to forget the charred remains of our once thriving community, the plumes of smoke in the air and the horror-stricken faces of my neighbors,” she wrote in her 2023 memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story.”
As her family drove away in a horse-drawn wagon, 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 and then opened fire on her family.
In an interview with The Associated Press the year her memoir was published, she said 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 convince her to tell her story.
“We don't want history to repeat itself, so we need to educate people about what happened and try to get people to understand why you need to be cured, why you need to be restored,” Howard told the AP in 2024. “Generations of wealth that were lost, the house, all the possessions, everything was lost overnight.”
The attack went undetected for decades. In Oklahoma, broader debate began when the state formed a commission to investigate the violence in 1997.
Fletcher, who testified before Congress in 2021 about her ordeal, joined her younger brother Hughes Van Ellis and fellow massacre survivor Lessie Benningfield Randle in suing for damages. The Oklahoma Supreme Court rejected it in June 2024, saying their complaints did not fall under the state's public nuisance law.
“As long as we remain in this life, 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 the previous year at the age of 102.
A Justice Department review initiated under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act and released in January 2024 outlined the scope and impact of the massacre. He concluded that federal prosecution may have been possible a century ago, but the ability to bring a criminal case was no longer possible.
The city is looking for ways to help descendants of massacre victims without making direct cash payments. Some of the last survivors, including Fletcher, received donations from groups but received no payments from the city or state.
Fletcher was born in Oklahoma on May 10, 1914, and spent most of her early years in Greenwood. “It was an oasis for blacks 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, restaurants and banks.
Forced to flee during the massacre, her family became nomads, living in a tent and working in the fields as sharecroppers. She didn't finish school after the fourth grade.
At 16, she returned to Tulsa, where she took a job cleaning and window dressing at 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 as a welder in a Los Angeles shipyard, she wrote.
She eventually left her physically abusive husband and gave birth to a son, Robert Ford Fletcher, she wrote. Wanting to be closer to her family, she returned to Oklahoma and settled north of Tulsa in Bartlesville.
Fletcher wrote that her faith and close-knit black community gave her the support she needed to raise her children. She also had a son, James Edward Ford, and a daughter, Debra Stein Ford, from another relationship.
She worked as a housekeeper for decades, doing everything from cooking to cleaning to childcare in these homes, Howard said. She worked until she was 85 years old.
She eventually returned to Tulsa to live. Howard said his grandmother hopes the move will help her fight for justice.
Howard said his grandmother's reaction when she began speaking out was therapeutic for her.
“This whole process has been rewarding,” Howard said.
