Oldest Living Tulsa Race Massacre Survivor Viola Ford Fletcher Dies

Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, has died. She was 111 years old.

Fletcher’s grandson Ike Howard told CNN and the Associated Press that she died on Monday, Nov. 24, surrounded by family.

“She had a beautiful smile on her face,” Howard said. “She loved life, she loved people.”

Oklahoma Sen. Regina Goodwin also confirmed the news, sharing that she was with Fletcher’s family at a local hospital.

Known as “Mother Fletcher,” the 111-year-old was just 7 when a two-day attack led by a White mob began in Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood on May 31, 1921, per CNN. The massacre resulted in the deaths of as many as 300 Black people, according to the Oklahoma Historical Society. Thirty-five city blocks were burned to the ground and decades of segregation, trauma and financial hardship followed for the city’s Black community.

“Mother Fletcher endured more than anyone should, yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with purpose,” Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols told the AP.

Fletcher was born in Oklahoma on May 10, 1914, and spent most of her early years in Greenwood. According to AP, she remembered her time there before the massacre as idyllic, as the neighborhood served as an oasis for Black people during segregation.

Her family was forced to flee during the massacre, and they spent time living in a tent as they worked as sharecroppers. She received a fourth-grade education, the CNN reported.

“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.

Fletcher eventually returned to Tulsa at age 16 and began working at a department store. She met Robert Fletcher, and they married and moved to California. According to her memoir, she worked as a welder in Los Angeles During World War II.

She eventually left her husband, who was physically abusive, and gave birth to their son, Robert Ford Fletcher. To be closer to her family, she moved back to Oklahoma and settled in Bartlesville, just north of Tulsa. She went on to have another son, James Edward Ford, and a daughter, Debra Stein Ford, from other relationships.

She worked as a housekeeper until she was 85, and eventually returned to Tulsa to live. Howard told AP that his grandmother hoped the move would help in her fight for justice.

When she began speaking out about what she had experienced decades earlier, she found the experience therapeutic, he said.

“This whole process has been helpful,” Howard told the outlet.

Fletcher was joined by two other survivors, Hughes Van Ellis and Lessie Benningfield Randle, in a 2021 lawsuit seeking reparations from the city of Tulsa for what the survivors endured, though The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed it in June 2024, saying their grievances did not fall within the scope of the state’s public nuisance statute, per AP.

“For as long as we remain in this lifetime, 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 of the dismissal.

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,” she said. “I have lived in Tulsa since but I don’t sleep all night living there.”

The Tulsa Race Massacre was one of the deadliest events of racist violence in American history.

On May 30, 1921, a young Black man named Dick Rowland, a shoe shiner, ended up in an elevator in Tulsa’s Drexel Building with a White woman named Sarah Page, en route to the bathroom. From here, the details of exactly what happened vary, but it is said that Rowland bumped into Page in the elevator and she started to scream. Chaos ensued and the Tulsa police arrested Rowland, according to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum.

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The following day, May 31, the Tulsa Tribune released a report claiming that Rowland had attacked Page in the elevator, which caused a confrontation between Black and White residents surrounding the courthouse where Rowland was being held.

The report was seen as a tactic to keep the Black community down, and gave the White residents an excuse to lash out and act on their resentment at how the Black community had started to thrive in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, a vibrant and prosperous epicenter of Black business and culture at the time. The flourishing enclave was deemed the Black Wall Street, and was home to many businesses, homes, schools, churches, a public library and more. Shots began to ring out and the Black residents retreated to Greenwood. By the early hours of June 1, Greenwood had been burned to the ground and hundreds had been murdered.

“It really is a bloody, shameful stain on American history,” MSNBC’s Trymaine Lee recently told PEOPLE. “Some people have struggled to recoup what was stolen from them, and others have inherited pain and trauma from the massacre that continues to bear down on them today.”