"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."
""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."
Viola Ford Fletcher, a survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, died at age 111 surrounded by family in a Tulsa hospital. She was seven when a white mob attacked the Greenwood district after a sensationalized newspaper report, killing hundreds and destroying over 30 city blocks of the prosperous Black community known as Black Wall Street. Fletcher raised three children, worked as a welder in a World War II shipyard, and spent decades working as a housekeeper, sustained by strong faith. She spent later years seeking justice and preserving memories, publishing a 2023 memoir titled Don't Let Them Bury My Story, and Tulsa's mayor said the city mourned her loss.
Read at ABC7 Los Angeles
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