Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Bloodbath, died on the age of 111 on Monday, in a hospital surrounded by her household, in line with her grandson.
“Mom Fletcher endured greater than anybody ought to, but she spent her life lighting a path ahead with function,” stated Mayor Monroe Nichols, the first Black chief of Oklahoma’s second-largest metropolis, after Fletcher’s passing.
She was solely 7 years outdated when a white mob stormed Tulsa’s affluent, largely black Greenwood district on Might 31, 1921, after an area newspaper printed a sensationalized report a few black man accused of assaulting a white lady.
The inflammatory report sparked a confrontation between black Tulsans and a white mob exterior a courthouse. Pictures have been fired, and white residents responded with overwhelming power.
Tons of of individuals have been killed, and Greenwood was looted and burned, leaving over 30 metropolis blocks in the neighborhood referred to as “Black Wall Avenue” destroyed.
Fletcher described seeing the phobia and bloodshed in the course of the bloodbath in her 2023 memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story.”
“I might always remember the charred stays of our once-thriving group, the smoke billowing within the air, and the terror-stricken faces of my neighbors,” she wrote.
The bloodbath went largely unremembered for many years. In 1997, Oklahoma fashioned a fee to research the violence.
Fletcher testified earlier than Congress in 2021 alongside her youthful brother, Hughes Van Ellis, and one other bloodbath survivor, Lessie Benningfield Randle, in a lawsuit looking for reparations.
The Oklahoma Supreme Courtroom ultimately dismissed the lawsuit in June 2024, saying their grievances didn’t fall inside the scope of the state’s public nuisance statute.
Fletcher was born on Might 10, 1914, and spent most of her early years in Greenwood, which was blossoming with alternatives for black households in a time of segregation.
Her household was compelled to flee in the course of the bloodbath and have become nomadic sharecroppers. Fletcher was unable to finish college past the fourth grade.
At age 16, she returned to Tulsa and met her husband, Robert Fletcher. The 2 moved to California, the place she labored in a shipyard as a welder.
She ultimately left her husband, whom she described as bodily abusive, and gave start to their son, Robert Ford Fletcher.
Fletcher returned to Oklahoma and settled north of Tulsa in Bartlesville, and had one other son, James Edward Ford, and a daughter, Debra Stein Ford, from different relationships.
She labored till the age of 85 as a devoted housekeeper and caretaker, and ultimately returned to Tulsa to stay as soon as once more.
Fletcher’s grandmother, Ike Howard, stated the response his grandmother obtained when she began talking out in regards to the violence she witnessed was therapeutic for her.
“This entire course of has been useful,” Howard stated.
With Put up wires
