By Jamie Stengle
Viola Ford Fletcher, who as one of many final survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Bloodbath in Oklahoma spent her later years searching for justice for the lethal assault by a White mob on the thriving Black neighborhood the place she lived as a baby, has died. She was 111.
Her grandson Ike Howard mentioned Nov. 24 that she died surrounded by household at a Tulsa hospital. Sustained by a powerful religion, she raised three kids, labored as a welder in a shipyard throughout World Battle II and spent many years caring for households as a housekeeper.
Tulsa was mourning her loss, mentioned Mayor Monroe Nichols, the primary Black chief of Oklahoma’s second-largest metropolis. “Mom Fletcher endured greater than anybody ought to, but she spent her life lighting a path ahead with objective.”
She was 7 years outdated when the two-day assault started on Tulsa’s Greenwood district on Could 31, 1921, after a neighborhood newspaper printed a sensationalized report a couple of Black man accused of assaulting a White lady. As a White mob grew exterior the courthouse, Black Tulsans with weapons who hoped to stop the person’s lynching started displaying up. White residents responded with overwhelming drive. Lots of of individuals have been killed and houses have been burned and looted, leaving over 30 metropolis blocks decimated within the affluent neighborhood generally known as Black Wall Avenue.
“I may always remember the charred stays of our once-thriving neighborhood, the smoke billowing within 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 household left in a horse-drawn buggy, her eyes burned from the smoke and ash, she wrote. She described seeing piles of our bodies within the streets and watching as a White man shot a Black man within the head, then fired towards her household.
She advised The Related Press in an interview the yr her memoir was printed that concern of reprisals influenced her years of near-silence in regards to the bloodbath. She wrote the ebook with Howard, her grandson, who mentioned he needed to persuade her to inform her story.
“We don’t need historical past to repeat itself so we do want to coach folks about what occurred and attempt to get folks to know why it’s essential be made entire, why it’s essential be repaired,” Howard advised the AP in 2024. “The generational wealth that was misplaced, the house, all of the belongings, the whole lot was misplaced in a single night time.”
The assault went largely unremembered for many years. In Oklahoma, wider discussions started when the state fashioned a fee in 1997 to analyze the violence.
Fletcher, who in 2021 testified earlier than Congress about what she went by way of, joined her youthful brother, Hughes Van Ellis, and one other bloodbath survivor, Lessie Benningfield Randle, in a lawsuit searching for reparations. The Oklahoma Supreme Courtroom dismissed it in June 2024, saying their grievances didn’t fall inside the scope of the state’s public nuisance statute.
“For so long as we stay on this lifetime, we are going to proceed to shine a lightweight on one of many darkest days in American historical past,” Fletcher and Randle mentioned in a press release on the time. Van Ellis had died a yr earlier, on the age of 102.
A Justice Division overview, launched beneath the Emmett Until Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act and launched in January 2024, outlined the bloodbath’s scope and influence. It concluded that federal prosecution could have been attainable a century in the past, however there was not an avenue to deliver a felony case.
Town has been on the lookout for methods to assist descendants of the bloodbath’s victims with out giving direct money funds. A number of the final dwelling survivors, together with Fletcher, acquired donations from teams however haven’t acquired any funds from the town or state.
“The truth that she died with none significant redress — not for herself, her household, or her neighborhood — isn’t only a authorized failure. It’s an ethical one,” Damario Solomon-Simmons, an legal professional for the survivors and the founding father of the Justice for Greenwood Basis, mentioned in a press release.
“She wouldn’t need her passing to be the tip of the battle,” he mentioned. “She would need it to mild a fireplace beneath all of us.”
Fletcher, born in Oklahoma on Could 10, 1914, spent most of her early years in Greenwood. It was an oasis for Black folks throughout segregation, she wrote in her memoir. Her household had a pleasant dwelling, she mentioned, and the neighborhood had the whole lot from medical doctors to grocery shops to eating places and banks.
Pressured to flee throughout the bloodbath, her household grew to become nomadic, dwelling out of a tent as they labored within the fields as sharecroppers. She didn’t end faculty past the fourth grade.
On the age of 16, she returned to Tulsa, the place she bought a job cleansing and creating window shows in a division retailer, she wrote in her memoir. She then met Robert Fletcher, and so they married and moved to California. Throughout World Battle II, she labored in a Los Angeles
shipyard as a welder, she wrote.
She finally left her husband, who was bodily abusive, and gave start to their son, Robert Ford Fletcher, she wrote. Longing to be nearer to her household, she returned to Oklahoma and settled north of Tulsa in Bartlesville.
Fletcher wrote that her religion and the close-knit Black neighborhood gave her the help she wanted to boost her kids. She had one other son, James Edward Ford, and a daughter, Debra Stein Ford, from different relationships.
She labored for many years as a housekeeper, doing the whole lot in these properties from cooking to cleansing to caring for kids, Howard mentioned. She labored till she was 85.
She finally returned to Tulsa to reside. Howard mentioned his grandmother hoped the transfer would assist in her battle for justice.
Howard mentioned the response his grandmother bought when she began talking out was therapeutic for her.
“This entire course of has been useful,” Howard mentioned.
This text was initially printed by The Related Press.
