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On a spring afternoon more than a century after she fled a burning city with nothing but the clothes on her back, Viola Ford Fletcher sat before a college audience in Illinois and did what she has done, again and again, in the twilight of her life: she told the story America tried to forget.
“I remember seeing how cruel they were,” she said quietly, describing the night in 1921 when white mobs torched the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma — a place the world once knew as Black Wall Street. “They burned houses, buildings and everything on the street… I remember seeing people falling from being shot and killed. It was just terrible.”
At 111 years old, Fletcher — widely known as “Mother Fletcher” — was the oldest known living survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and one of the last direct witnesses to one of the most devastating episodes of racial violence in U.S. history.
Her life stretched from Jim Crow sharecropping fields to the Black Lives Matter era; from nights spent sleeping upright with the lights on, afraid of the dark, to standing under bright television lights in Washington as she urged Congress to finally confront what was taken from Greenwood. She lived most of her years in relative obscurity — cleaning houses, raising children, building a life on the margins of American prosperity — only to become, in her tenth decade, a central figure in the national debate over historical memory and reparations.
And she had done all this while insisting on one simple demand, now the title of her 2023 memoir: Don’t Let Them Bury My Story.
Viola Ford Fletcher died on November 24, 2025. She was 111.
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By KOLUMN Magazine
On a spring afternoon more than a century after she fled a burning city with nothing but the clothes on her back, Viola Ford Fletcher sat before a college audience in Illinois and did what she has done, again and again, in the twilight of her life: she told the story America tried to forget.
“I remember seeing how cruel they were,” she said quietly, describing the night in 1921 when white mobs torched the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma — a place the world once knew as Black Wall Street. “They burned houses, buildings and everything on the street… I remember seeing people falling from being shot and killed. It was just terrible.”
At 111 years old, Fletcher — widely known as “Mother Fletcher” — was the oldest known living survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and one of the last direct witnesses to one of the most devastating episodes of racial violence in U.S. history.
Her life stretched from Jim Crow sharecropping fields to the Black Lives Matter era; from nights spent sleeping upright with the lights on, afraid of the dark, to standing under bright television lights in Washington as she urged Congress to finally confront what was taken from Greenwood. She lived most of her years in relative obscurity — cleaning houses, raising children, building a life on the margins of American prosperity — only to become, in her tenth decade, a central figure in the national debate over historical memory and reparations.
And she had done all this while insisting on one simple demand, now the title of her 2023 memoir:
Viola Ford Fletcher died on November 24, 2025. She was 111.
Growing Up Between Red Dirt and Black Wall Street
Viola Ford was born on May 10, 1914, in Comanche, Oklahoma, the second-oldest of eight children in a family of Black sharecroppers. Her parents, Lucinda Ellis and John Wesley Ford, worked land that they did not own in a rural landscape that still bore the scars of forced Native and Black migration. The family’s home had no electricity.
Like many Black families in Oklahoma in the early 20th century, the Fords migrated in search of opportunity to Tulsa, and specifically to Greenwood — an all-Black district that had grown into one of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States. Greenwood’s main thoroughfares were lined with hotels, theaters, groceries, law firms, doctor’s offices, restaurants, and churches. At its height, the community boasted more than 35 blocks of thriving Black-owned businesses, making it a national symbol of Black economic possibility.
For young Viola, the move meant more than economic promise. She has recalled a childhood of safety and community: a “beautiful home,” good neighbors, friends to play with, and a sense that her future might be brighter than the fields her parents had left behind. The family attended St. Andrew, a Black Baptist church in Greenwood, anchoring their lives in a spiritual community that would help them endure what came next.
She was only seven years old when the night that would define her life began.