By Jasper Ward
(Reuters) -Viola Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, died on Monday at the age of 111, the city’s mayor said.
“Today, our city mourns the loss of Mother Viola Fletcher – a survivor of one of the darkest chapters in our city’s history,” Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols wrote on social media.
“Mother Fletcher endured more than anyone should, yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with purpose.”
Fletcher was born in Comanche, Oklahoma, just south of Oklahoma City, moving to Tulsa with her family during her childhood.
She was seven at the time of the massacre that began on May 31, 1921, when white attackers killed as many as 300 people, most of them Black, in Tulsa’s prosperous Greenwood neighborhood. The mob also burned and looted Greenwood homes and businesses.
In 2021, during testimony before the U.S. Congress, Fletcher recalled the violence she witnessed the night of the attacks, saying she could still see bodies in the street and smell the smoke nearly 100 years later.
“I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead,” she said. “I hear the screams. I live through the massacre every day.”
Fletcher; her younger brother, Hughes Van Ellis, who died in 2023 at the age of 102; and Leslie Benningfield Randle, now the last known living survivor, sued Tulsa in 2020 for reparations, including a 99-year tax holiday for residents who are descendants of victims of the massacre.
The case was dismissed by Oklahoma’s Supreme Court. In June, Tulsa announced a $105 million trust to address the enduring impacts of the massacre.
Then-President Joe Biden met with Fletcher, Van Ellis and Randle during a 2021 visit to Tulsa to mark the 100th anniversary of the massacre.
“We should know the good, the bad, everything,” Biden said in a speech during that visit. “That’s what great nations do. They come to terms with their dark sides. And we’re a great nation.”
Similar violence in the aftermath of the Civil War includes attacks by whites against Black communities in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, Atlanta in 1906 and Chicago in 1919. In many cases, perpetrators were not prosecuted, the trauma of the victims was not publicly acknowledged and the history of the attacks was buried.
(Reporting by Jasper Ward; editing by Donna Bryson and Bill Berkrot)
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