Viola Fletcher, oldest survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, dies at 111

Viola Fletcher, who as a child in 1921 saw her affluent Black neighborhood in Oklahoma torched by white citizens in what became known as the Tulsa Race Massacre – one of the most violent acts of racial violence in American history – and who, a century later, testified in Congress to the terror she witnessed in the hope of winning reparations, died Monday in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She was 111 and the oldest survivor of the attack.

Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Tiffany Crutcher, a close family friend. Her death leaves just one surviving witness to the massacre, Lessie Randle, who is also 111, six months younger than Fletcher.

The Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, home to about 10,000 people in the early 20th century, became known colloquially as “Black Wall Street” for the successful entrepreneurship of its residents and the prosperity of many families who lived there. The neighborhood was destroyed in the massacre, which led to as many as 300 deaths and mass homelessness.

Fletcher grew up as a working-class resident of Greenwood. Her stepfather, Henry Ellis, held several jobs at once, from breaking in horses to selling clothes. Viola went to school in Greenwood and attended Wednesday night and Sunday services at a Baptist church. She remembered watching Greenwood men gather to make homemade ice cream on special occasions while women prepared pies and layer cakes.

Early on the morning of June 1, 1921, Viola woke up to a banging sound. She thought it was someone beating a rug, she said, until her mother hollered for her to get out of bed, immediately.

The day before, word had spread in Tulsa that a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner, Dick Rowland, had attempted to rape a 17-year-old white elevator operator, Sarah Page, in the building where she worked.

Page later denied Rowland had done anything wrong, and the case was dropped. But by then, inflamed by the rumors, many of Tulsa’s white citizens were already set on imposing their own idea of justice. Hundreds of heavily armed white men gathered outside the courthouse where Rowland was being held. Soon, armed Black veterans of World War I arrived as well, seeking to prevent a lynching. A scuffle ensued, and a shot was fired. The next morning, the assault began.

Over 16 hours, nearly three dozen blocks in Greenwood were looted and set ablaze. More than 1,000 homes were destroyed, as were almost all of the district’s Black-owned businesses: theaters, restaurants, hotels, barbershops and the offices of doctors, lawyers and real estate brokers, according to a 2001 report by an Oklahoma commission that had examined the riot.

In December 1921, the American Red Cross determined that close to the entire population of the neighborhood had become homeless. There is still no consensus about the death toll; the Red Cross put it at 55 to 300 people.

Nobody was held legally responsible for the destruction and deaths.

In the years to come, the Tulsa massacre was not widely taught in American history classes. In Tulsa itself, memory was suppressed. Police records vanished, newspaper archives were tampered with, and victims were buried in unmarked graves. Some residents reached adulthood unaware that the massacre had happened. But its 100th anniversary, in 2021, brought it renewed attention, coming a year after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer, had sparked nationwide protests.

By then, Fletcher, a retired maid, was just one of three remaining survivors. The two others were her brother Hughes Ellis, then 100, and Randle, then 106. They began telling their stories to national media outlets, testified before Congress and also joined a lawsuit demanding reparations.

With the help of a grandson, Ike Howard, Fletcher wrote a memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story: The Oldest Living Survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre in Her Own Words” (2023).

“The neighborhood I fell asleep in that night was rich – not just in terms of wealth, but in culture, community, heritage – and my family had a beautiful home,” Fletcher told a House Judiciary subcommittee in May 2021 as it considered reparations for the survivors and their descendants. “Within a few hours, all that was gone.”

Viola Ford was born May 5, 1914, in rural Comanche County, Oklahoma. Her parents, Lucinda and John Wesley Ford, were sharecroppers who divorced not long after her birth. Her mother married Henry Ellis, and the couple, along with Lucinda’s children, moved to Greenwood, where Ellis built the family a home.

The family’s flight from the massacre concluded 30 miles northeast of Tulsa in a wooded area called Claremore, where they found safety, living in a tent. The women went to the bathroom in the woods, three at a time for safety. The family used sticks, string and rocks to catch rabbits for food. They trapped lightning bugs in a jar for a light at night.

Viola never received more than an elementary school education. She worked alongside her relatives as a sharecropper, picking cotton and tending to livestock for $1 a day.

As an adult, Fletcher spent most of her life working as a maid for white families in Bartlesville, a town north of Tulsa.

“As she washed their dishes and tucked their little ones into bed,” journalist Wesley Lowery wrote in a 2023 profile of Fletcher for the Washington Post, “she wondered whether they were among those responsible, yet never held accountable, for her own childhood’s destruction.”

She married Robert Fletcher, and they had a son, Ronald. The family lived in Los Angeles, where Viola Fletcher worked in a shipyard during World War II. She left Robert Fletcher when he became physically abusive, she wrote in her memoir.

From a relationship with Leroy Anderson, she had a son, James Ford, and from a relationship with Alzena Stein, she had a daughter, Debra Ford. She raised her children as a single mother.

She is survived by her son, Ronald Fletcher, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

In 2020, the local news media in Oklahoma wrote about Fletcher’s 106th birthday. The story caught the attention of a lawyer, Damario Solomon-Simmons, who had long been interested in finding legal redress for victims of the massacre.

He became her lawyer. Their lawsuit demanding reparations was dismissed by a district court judge and the Oklahoma Supreme Court. In June 2025, Monroe Nichols, Tulsa’s first Black mayor, announced that the city itself would seek to fund reparations by forming a private trust tasked with raising $105 million by 2026, the 105th anniversary of the attack.

In 2021, to honor the centennial, Fletcher met President Joe Biden in Tulsa. A year later, she, her brother Hughes and Randle split a $1 million donation from entrepreneur and philanthropist Ed Mitzen. Hughes Ellis died in 2023.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.