Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, died at the age of 111 on Monday, in a hospital surrounded by her family, according to her grandson. 

“Mother Fletcher endured more than anyone should, yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with purpose,” said Mayor Monroe Nichols, the first Black leader of Oklahoma’s second-largest city, after Fletcher’s passing.

She was only 7 years old when a white mob stormed Tulsa’s prosperous, largely black Greenwood district on May 31, 1921, after a local newspaper published a sensationalized report about a black man accused of assaulting a white woman. 

The inflammatory report sparked a confrontation between black Tulsans and a white mob outside a courthouse. Shots were fired, and white residents responded with overwhelming force. 

Hundreds of people were killed, and Greenwood was looted and burned, leaving over 30 city blocks in the community known as “Black Wall Street” destroyed.

Fletcher described seeing the terror and bloodshed during the massacre in her 2023 memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story.”

“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. 

The massacre went largely unremembered for decades. In 1997, Oklahoma formed a commission to investigate the violence. 

Fletcher testified before Congress in 2021 alongside her younger brother, Hughes Van Ellis, and another massacre survivor, Lessie Benningfield Randle, in a lawsuit seeking reparations. 

The Oklahoma Supreme Court eventually dismissed the lawsuit in June 2024, saying their grievances did not fall within the scope of the state’s public nuisance statute.

Fletcher was born on May 10, 1914, and spent most of her early years in Greenwood, which was blossoming with opportunities for black families in a time of segregation. 

Her family was forced to flee during the massacre and became nomadic sharecroppers. Fletcher was unable to complete school beyond the fourth grade. 

At age 16, she returned to Tulsa and met her husband, Robert Fletcher. The two moved to California, where she worked in a shipyard as a welder. 

She eventually left her husband, whom she described as physically abusive, and gave birth to their son, Robert Ford Fletcher.

Fletcher returned to Oklahoma and settled north of Tulsa in Bartlesville, and had another son, James Edward Ford, and a daughter, Debra Stein Ford, from other relationships.

She worked until the age of 85 as a dedicated housekeeper and caretaker, and eventually returned to Tulsa to live once again. 

Fletcher’s grandmother, Ike Howard, said the reaction his grandmother got when she started speaking out about the violence she witnessed was therapeutic for her.

“This whole process has been helpful,” Howard said.

With Post wires