Viola Fletcher, Last Survivor of Tulsa Massacre Dies at 111

Viola Ford Fletcher was one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. She spent the last part of her life fighting for justice and reparations for a deadly and unprovoked attacked by the white citizenry of Tulsa on a thriving Black community.

Flecther was 7 when the two day attack occurred in Tulsa. The attack stemmed from a false report that a Black man had assaulted a white woman. Whites gathered outside the ourthouse and armed Blacks worked to prevent the lynching of a Black citizen. Whites responded with overwhelming force. They murdered and maimed hundreds of Blacks and destroyed a 30 block area of the Black community known as Black Wall Street.

"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,” Fletcher wrote in her recently published memoir.

As her family left in a horse-drawn buggy, 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, then fired toward her family.

Additional information from Historianspeaks on the Tulsa Massacre

Fire on the Land: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

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