Happy and sad tears.

Viola Fletcher, Oldest Survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Dies at 111

At 7, she bore witness to one of American history’s most violent spasms of racial violence. She was 106 when the nation reckoned with the crime.

By Alex Traub
Nov. 24, 2025Updated 7:20 p.m. ET

Viola Fletcher, who as a child in 1921 saw her affluent Black neighborhood torched by white citizens in what became known as the Tulsa Race Massacre — one of the most violent acts of racial violence in American history — and who, a century later, testified in Congress to the terror she witnessed in the hope of winning reparations, has died. She was 111 and the oldest survivor of the attack.

Her death was announced on Monday in a statement by Mayor Monroe Nichols of Tulsa. It did not say where or when she died. Her death leaves just one surviving witness to the massacre, Lessie Randle, who is also 111, six months younger than Ms. Fletcher.

The Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Okla., home to about 10,000 people in the early 20th century, became known colloquially as “Black Wall Street” for the successful entrepreneurship of its residents and the prosperity of many families who lived there. The neighborhood was destroyed in the massacre, which led to as many as 300 deaths and mass homelessness.

Ms. Fletcher grew up as a working-class resident of Greenwood. Her stepfather, Henry Ellis, held several jobs at once, from breaking in horses to selling clothes. Viola went to school in Greenwood and attended Wednesday night and Sunday services at a Baptist church. She remembered watching Greenwood men gather to make homemade ice cream on special occasions while women prepared pies and layer cakes.

Early on the morning of June 1, 1921, Viola woke up to a banging sound. She thought it was someone beating a rug, she said, until her mother hollered for her to get out of bed, immediately.

The day before, word had spread in Tulsa that a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner, Dick Rowland, had attempted to rape a 17-year-old white elevator operator, Sarah Page, in the building where she worked.

Ms. Page later denied that Mr. Rowland had done anything wrong, and the case was dropped. But by then, inflamed by the rumors, many of Tulsa’s white citizens were already set on imposing their own idea of justice. Hundreds of heavily armed white men gathered outside the courthouse where Mr. Rowland was being held. Soon, armed Black veterans of World War I arrived as well, seeking to prevent a lynching. A scuffle ensued, and a shot was fired. The next morning, the assault began.

Over 16 hours, nearly three dozen blocks in Greenwood were looted and set ablaze. More than 1,000 homes were destroyed, as were almost all of the district’s Black-owned businesses: theaters, restaurants, hotels, barbershops and the offices of doctors and lawyers and real estate brokers, according to a 2001 report by an Oklahoma commission that had examined the riot.

In December 1921, the American Red Cross determined that close to the entire population of the neighborhood had become homeless. There is still no consensus about the death toll; the Red Cross put it at 55 to 300 people.

Viola’s family fled in a horse and buggy. As they were leaving Tulsa, she recalled, she saw ash falling on the streets, reminding her of snow. She also saw, as other witnesses did, an airplane dropping what looked like firebombs. She passed piles of corpses. She saw a white man blow off a Black man’s head with a shotgun, she said.

Nobody was held legally responsible for the destruction and deaths.

In the years to come, the Tulsa massacre was not widely taught in American history classes. In Tulsa itself, memory was suppressed. Police records vanished, newspaper archives were tampered with, and victims were buried in unmarked graves. Some residents reached adulthood unaware that the massacre had happened. But its 100th anniversary, in 2021, brought it renewed attention, coming a year after the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white Minneapolis police officer, had sparked nationwide protests.

By then, Ms. Fletcher, a retired maid, was just one of three remaining survivors. The two others were her brother Hughes Ellis, then 100, and Ms. Randle, then 106. They began telling their stories to national media outlets, testified before Congress and also joined a lawsuit demanding reparations.

With the help of a grandson, Ike Howard, Ms. Fletcher wrote a memoir, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story: The Oldest Living Survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre in Her Own Words” (2023).

“The neighborhood I fell asleep in that night was rich — not just in terms of wealth, but in culture, community, heritage — and my family had a beautiful home,” Ms. Fletcher told a House Judiciary subcommittee in May 2021 as it considered reparations for the survivors and their descendants. “Within a few hours, all that was gone.”

Viola Ford was born on May 5, 1914, in rural Comanche County, Okla. Her parents, Lucinda and John Wesley Ford, were sharecroppers who divorced not long after her birth. Her mother married Henry Ellis, and the couple, along with Lucinda’s children, moved to Greenwood, where Mr. Ellis built the family a home.

The family’s flight from the massacre concluded 30 miles northeast of Tulsa in a wooded area called Claremore, where they found safety, living in a tent. The women went to the bathroom in the woods, three at a time for safety. The family used sticks, string and rocks to catch rabbits for food. They trapped lightning bugs in a jar for a light at night.

Viola never received more than an elementary school education. Instead, she worked alongside her relatives as a sharecropper, picking cotton and tending to livestock for $1 a day.

In 1929, while her family was traveling in search of work, Viola ran into a school friend from Greenwood.

“It was one of the happiest moments I’d experienced since our escape from the catastrophe,” Ms. Fletcher recalled in her memoir. “We both wanted to know if either had seen any of the other boys and girls from our school, but we were the first and only ones both of us had seen in eight long years.”

As an adult, Ms. Fletcher spent most of her life working as a maid for white families in Bartlesville, a town north of Tulsa.