Oldest living survivor of Tulsa Race Massacre dies at 111 years old

Tulsa Race Massacre survivor Viola Ford Fletcher speaks during an interview with The Associated Press, Friday, June 16, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, died at 111 years old Monday, her grandson Ike Howard told CNN.

“She had a beautiful smile on her face,” Howard said. “She loved life, she loved people.”

Oklahoma State Senator Regina Goodwin said she was with the family at a local hospital and also confirmed the news.

“Mother Fletcher,” as she was known, sat with CNN multiple times for interviews in recent years as she and other living survivors pursued a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa and other related departments, alleging they were complicit in the 1921 massacre and that its effects were still being felt today.

On May 31, 1921, a White mob laid waste to Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, a thriving Black-owned business district, CNN previously reported. They destroyed about 35 blocks of the neighborhood within 16 hours, arresting thousands of Black residents, while robbing, beating and killing others.

Lessie Benningfield Randle, 111, is now the only living survivor of the massacre. When Fletcher got sick in the days before her passing, Randle sent a message through her granddaughter to the Fletcher family saying, “She was sorry it was happening and that she loved her,” Randle’s granddaughter LaDonna Penny said.

After hearing the news Fletcher had passed, Randle responded, “That breaks my heart. I will miss her dearly,” Penny told CNN.

“Mother Fletcher called my grandmother her little sister,” Penny said, as she reflected on her own relationship with Fletcher.

“It’s like I lost my grandmother,” Penny told CNN. “My heart is broken, I keep trying to stop crying.”

Fletcher’s brother Hughes Van Ellis or “Uncle Redd,” also a massacre survivor, died in October 2023 at 102 years old.

In June 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit from the survivors, arguing they should be compensated by the city for damages — dealing a blow to their ongoing fight for reparations more than 100 years after the attack.

“When I think about Mother Fletcher, I don’t just see a historic figure or a symbol. I see a woman I sat with, prayed with, laughed with, and went to court with,” Damario Solomon-Simmons said as part of a statement to CNN. He was the lead attorney representing the survivors in their lawsuit.

“Spending this past Friday night by her hospital bed, I saw that Mother Fletcher didn’t talk like someone who was ready to go. She wasn’t done. She was tired — because this fight is exhausting — but her spirit was still in it,” Solomon-Simmons said.

Fletcher told CNN she “never got over” what she experienced that day and still remembers “people getting killed, houses, property, schools, churches, and stores getting destroyed with fire.”

“It just stays with me, you know, just the fear. I have lived in Tulsa since but I don’t sleep all night living there.”

Fletcher was 7 years old at the time.

In 2023 she co-authored a memoir with her grandson titled: “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story,” representing a history she and family believed the country was eager to forget.

“As I grew up, I had to work with White people, but we didn’t dare mention that,” she said of the massacre. “I didn’t know why it happened, or why they would be so cruel to do a thing like that to the Black people.”

How the massacre unfolded

The events leading up to the massacre began on May 30, 1921, when Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner, ran from an elevator in a downtown building after the elevator’s teen operator let out a scream. Rumors of a rape then circulated, Rowland was arrested, and White Tulsans formed a lynch mob.

Black Tulsans arrived at the jail to defend Rowland, scuffles ensued, a gun went off, and as then-Sheriff William McCullough told Literary Digest, “All hell broke loose.”

Historic photos show entire blocks gutted by flame and Black people lying in the street.

Exacerbating matters were insurance companies that denied many claims for what today would be tens of millions of dollars in property damage, including the destruction of two Black hospitals and 1,256 residences, according to the Greenwood Cultural Center.

Seeking justice over 100 years later

Over 100 years later, victims of the massacre are still trying to find justice.

The Department of Justice opened a civil rights investigation in September 2024, but ultimately concluded in January there was no longer an avenue to pursue a criminal investigation, the Associated Press reported.

“Now, the perpetrators are long dead, statutes of limitations for all civil rights charges expired decades ago, and there are no viable avenues for further investigation,” said a report on the investigation. The DOJ had launched the investigation under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which allows the agency to look into civil rights crimes before 1980 that resulted in death.

In June, Tulsa’s mayor proposed an over US$100 million private trust as part of reparation plans for the massacre, which focuses on funding initiatives in the city as a part of a “road to repair.”

The trust would invest in a housing fund, a cultural preservation fund and a legacy fund dedicated to education and local businesses in the area, the announcement said.

The fund would not provide direct payments to survivors or their descendants, the Associated Press reported.

CNN’s Abby Phillip, Yon Pomrenze and Taylor Romine contributed to this report.

Omar Jimenez, CNN