Viola Fletcher, Oldest Survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Dies at 111
Viola Fletcher, Oldest Survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Dies at 111
At 7, she bore witness to one of American history’s most violent spasms of racial violence. She was 106 when the nation reckoned with the crime.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/us/viola-fletcher-dead.html
Viola Fletcher, who as a child in 1921 saw her affluent Black neighborhood 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, has died. She was 111 and the oldest survivor of the attack.
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The Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Okla., 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.
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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 and lawyers and real estate brokers, according to a 2001 report by an Oklahoma commission that had examined the riot.
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Viola’s family fled in a horse and buggy. As they were leaving Tulsa, she recalled, she saw ash falling on the streets, reminding her of snow. She also saw, as other witnesses did, an airplane dropping what looked like firebombs. She passed piles of corpses. She saw a white man blow off a Black man’s head with a shotgun, she said.
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