Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, dead at 111
Viola Ford Fletcher passed away Monday at the age of 111, surrounded by her loved ones in a hospital. According to her grandson, the lifelong resident of Tulsa, she died peacefully in the company of family members.
Mayor Monroe Nichols, Oklahoma’s first Black mayor, said of the elder: “Mother Fletcher endured more than anyone should, yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with purpose.” His comments followed the announcement of Fletcher’s death.
The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre struck when Viola was just seven years old. A sensational headline in a local paper about a white woman’s alleged assault by a Black man sparked a showdown between Tulsa’s Black community and a white mob outside a courthouse.
Shots were fired, the white townspeople responded with brutal force, and the neighborhood now known as “Black Wall Street” was left in ruins—hundreds were killed, and over thirty city blocks suffered looting and arson.
In 2023, she recalled the horrors in her memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story,” describing the scorched homes, thick smoke, and the frightened faces of neighbors.
The massacre remained largely forgotten until an Oklahoma commission launched an investigation in 1997. In 2021, Fletcher testified before Congress, joined by her brother Hughes Van Ellis and survivor Lessie Benningfield Randle, in a lawsuit seeking reparations.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed the case in June 2024, ruling the claims fell outside the state’s public‑nuisance statute.
Fletcher was born on May 10, 1914, and spent her early years in Golden, a booming Black enclave in Tulsa’s Greenwood district. After the violence forced her family southward into sharecropping, she never returned to the school beyond the fourth grade.
At sixteen, she was back in Tulsa, met Robert Fletcher, and later moved to California where she worked as a welder in a shipyard. She left an abusive husband, bore a son named Robert Ford Fletcher, and eventually settled in Bartlesville, where she had additional children—sons James Edward Ford and Debra Stein Ford—from other relationships.
She kept working into her eight‑teens, serving as a housekeeper and caretaker, and finally returned to Tulsa to spend her later years. Ike Howard, her grandmother, remembered how the act of telling her story had become a form of therapy for her, and said, “This whole process has been helpful.”
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