One of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre's last survivors, Viola Ford
Fletcher, dies at age 111
[November 25, 2025]
By JAMIE STENGLE
DALLAS (AP) — Viola Ford Fletcher, who as one of the last survivors of
the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma spent her later years seeking
justice for the deadly attack by a white mob on the thriving Black
community where she lived as a child, has died. She was 111.
Her grandson Ike Howard said Monday that she died surrounded by family
at a Tulsa hospital. Sustained by a strong faith, she raised three
children, worked as a welder in a shipyard during World War II and spent
decades caring for families as a housekeeper.
Tulsa was mourning her loss, said Mayor Monroe Nichols, the first Black
leader of Oklahoma’s second-largest city. “Mother Fletcher endured more
than anyone should, yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with
purpose.”
She was 7 years old when the two-day attack began on Tulsa’s Greenwood
district on May 31, 1921, after a local newspaper published a
sensationalized report about a Black man accused of assaulting a white
woman. As a white mob grew outside the courthouse, Black Tulsans with
guns who hoped to prevent the man’s lynching began showing up. White
residents responded with overwhelming force. Hundreds of people were
killed and homes were burned and looted, leaving over 30 city blocks
decimated in the prosperous 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,” she wrote in her 2023 memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My
Story.”
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.
She told The Associated Press in an interview the year her memoir was
published that fear of reprisals influenced her years of near-silence
about the massacre. She wrote the book with Howard, her grandson, who
said he had to persuade her to tell her story.
“We don’t want history to repeat itself so we do need to educate people
about what happened and try to get people to understand why you need to
be made whole, why you need to be repaired,” Howard told the AP in 2024.
“The generational wealth that was lost, the home, all the belongings,
everything was lost in one night.”
The attack went largely unremembered for decades. In Oklahoma, wider
discussions began when the state formed a commission in 1997 to
investigate the violence.
Fletcher, who in 2021 testified before Congress about what she went
through, joined her younger brother, Hughes Van Ellis, and another
massacre survivor, Lessie Benningfield Randle, in a lawsuit seeking
reparations. The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed it in June 2024,
saying their grievances did not fall within the scope of the state’s
public nuisance statute.
“For as long as we remain in this lifetime, we will continue to shine a
light on one of the darkest days in American history,” Fletcher and
Randle said in a statement at the time. Van Ellis had died a year
earlier, at the age of 102.
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Tulsa Race Massacre survivor Viola Ford Fletcher listens during a
rally marking centennial commemorations of a two-day assault by
armed white men on Tulsa's prosperous Black community of Greenwood,
May 28, 2021, in Tulsa, Okla. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)
A Justice Department review, launched under the Emmett Till Unsolved
Civil Rights Crime Act and released in January 2024, outlined the
massacre's scope and impact. It concluded that federal prosecution
may have been possible a century ago, but there was no longer an
avenue to bring a criminal case.
The city has been looking for ways to help descendants of the
massacre's victims without giving direct cash payments. Some of the
last living survivors, including Fletcher, received donations from
groups but have not received any payments from the city or state.
“The fact that she died without any meaningful redress — not for
herself, her family, or her community — isn’t just a legal failure.
It’s a moral one,” Damario Solomon-Simmons, an attorney for the
survivors and the founder of the Justice for Greenwood Foundation,
said in a statement.
“She would not want her passing to be the end of the fight,” he
said. “She would want it to light a fire under all of us.”
Fletcher, born in Oklahoma on May 10, 1914, spent most of her early
years in Greenwood. It was an oasis for Black people during
segregation, she wrote in her memoir. Her family had a nice home,
she said, and the community had everything from doctors to grocery
stores to restaurants and banks.
Forced to flee during the massacre, her family became nomadic,
living out of a tent as they worked in the fields as sharecroppers.
She didn't finish school beyond the fourth grade.
At the age of 16, she returned to Tulsa, where she got a job
cleaning and creating window displays in a department store, she
wrote in her memoir. She then met Robert Fletcher, and they married
and moved to California. During World War II, she worked in a Los
Angeles shipyard as a welder, she wrote.
She eventually left her husband, who was physically abusive, and
gave birth to their son, Robert Ford Fletcher, she wrote. Longing to
be closer to her family, she returned to Oklahoma and settled north
of Tulsa in Bartlesville.
Fletcher wrote that her faith and the close-knit Black community
gave her the support she needed to raise her children. She had
another son, James Edward Ford, and a daughter, Debra Stein Ford,
from other relationships.
She worked for decades as a housekeeper, doing everything in those
homes from cooking to cleaning to caring for children, Howard said.
She worked until she was 85.
She eventually returned to Tulsa to live. Howard said his
grandmother hoped the move would help in her fight for justice.
Howard said the reaction his grandmother got when she started
speaking out was therapeutic for her.
“This whole process has been helpful,” Howard said.
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