Dallas — Viola Ford Fletcher, one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma, who spent her final years seeking justice for a deadly attack by a white mob on the thriving black community where she lived as a child, has died. It was 111.
Note: Video from a previous report.
Her grandson, Ike Howard, said Monday that she died surrounded by her family at a Tulsa hospital. Thanks to her 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 Mayor Monroe Nichols said the city was mourning her loss. “Mother Fletcher endured more than anyone should, and yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with purpose,” he said in a statement.
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 assaulting a white woman. As the white mob grew outside the courthouse, black Tulsans who hoped to prevent the man’s lynching began to appear. The white population responded with overwhelming force. Hundreds of people were killed and homes were burned and looted, destroying more than 30 apartment buildings in the thriving community known as “Black Wall Street.”
Tulsa Race Massacre: The story behind Black Wall Street, the racist mob that burned it to the ground
Exactly 100 years ago, a white mob stormed Tulsa’s Greenwood District – the legendary black street of Wall Street.
“I can never forget the charred remains of our once-thriving community, the smoke in the air, and the terrified faces of my neighbors,” she wrote in her 2023 memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story.”
She wrote that when her family left in a horse-drawn carriage, her eyes burned from smoke and ash. She described seeing piles of bodies in the streets and watching a white man shoot a black man in the head, then shoot her family.
She told The Associated Press in an interview the year her memoir was published that fear of retaliation influenced her years of near silence about the massacre. She wrote the book with her grandson Howard, 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 heal, why you need to fix,” Howard told the AP in 2024. “Generational wealth, the house, all the possessions, everything was lost in one night,” he added.
The attack went largely unmentioned for decades. In Oklahoma, broader discussions began when the state formed a commission in 1997 to investigate the violence.
Fletcher, who testified before Congress in 2021 about what she went through, joined her younger brother, Hughes Van Ellis, and another massacre survivor, Lacey Benningfield Rundle, in a lawsuit seeking damages. The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed it in June 2024, saying their complaints did not fall within the scope of the state’s public nuisance law.
“As long as we live on, we will continue to shine a light on one of the darkest days in American history,” Fletcher and Rundle said in a statement at the time. Van Ellis died a year ago at the age of 102.
The Justice Department’s review, launched under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act and released in January 2024, determined the scope and impact of the massacre. It concluded that federal prosecution might have been possible a century ago, but there was no longer a way to bring a criminal case.
The city is looking for ways to help descendants of massacre victims without making direct cash payments. Some living 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 apartheid, she wrote in her memoirs. She said her family had a beautiful home, and the community had everything from doctors to grocery stores to restaurants and banks.
Her family was forced to flee during the massacre, and she became nomadic, living in a tent where they worked in the fields as farmers. She did not finish her studies after the fourth grade.
At 16, she returned to Tulsa, where she got a job cleaning and setting up displays at a department store, she wrote in her memoir. She then met Robert Fletcher, 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 physically abusive husband, 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 close-knit black community provided her with 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 taking care of the children, Howard said. She worked until she was 85 years old.
She eventually returned to Tulsa to live. Howard said his grandmother hopes this step will help her in her fight for justice.
Howard said the reaction his grandmother received when she started speaking out was therapeutic for her.
“This whole process has been helpful,” Howard said.
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