Viola Fletcher, the oldest known survivor of the Tulsa race massacre, has died at the age of 111, local officials confirmed on Tuesday. Fletcher was a child when the devastating attack on Greenwood, Oklahoma, famously known as Black Wall Street occurred in 1921, leaving hundreds of African American residents dead.
“Today, our city mourns the loss of Mother Viola Fletcher a survivor of one of the darkest chapters in our city’s history,” Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols said in a statement. “Fletcher carried 111 years of truth, resilience, and grace and was a reminder of how far we’ve come and how far we must still go.”
The massacre erupted after a group of Black men went to the local courthouse on May 31, 1921, to defend a young African American man accused of assaulting a white woman. Shots were fired, prompting the men to retreat to Greenwood, where enraged white mobs looted, burned, and destroyed one of America’s most prosperous Black communities.
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Historians estimate that as many as 300 residents were killed and thousands were left homeless.
Fletcher, who dropped out of elementary school and spent decades working mostly as a housekeeper for white families, said she had “lived through the massacre every day” for the past century.
In 2021, she joined other survivors in testifying before Congress, recounting the horrors she witnessed and calling for reparations. “I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street… I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear the screams,” she told a House Judiciary Committee hearing.
“Our country may forget this history, but I cannot. I will not, and other survivors do not, and our descendants do not.”
A commission investigating the massacre concluded that Tulsa authorities had armed some of the white rioters and recommended compensation for Greenwood residents and their descendants, though the effort ultimately failed.
In 2021, President Joe Biden became the first U.S. president to officially commemorate the massacre in a Tulsa service honoring its forgotten victims. The city also began excavating mass graves where many victims were buried, seeking to shed more light on the tragedy.
Lessie Evelyn Benningfield, who is six months younger than Fletcher, now stands as the last surviving witness to the massacre.
The massacre remains a potent symbol in the United States amid ongoing national conversations about systemic racism, intensified in recent years by the 2020 killing of George Floyd, an African American man who suffocated under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.
