11/25/2025
Long Post.
LET US NEVER FORGET May 31-June 1, 1921. The Black Wall Street Massacre should be taught globally. The Tulsa race massacre (also called the Tulsa race riot, the Greenwood Massacre, or the Black Wall Street Massacre) of 1921 took place on May 31- June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has been called ""the single worst incident of racial violence in American history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
The night’s carnage left over 300 African Americans dead, over 600 successful businesses lost, 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores, two movie theaters, schools, libraries, hotels, doctors’ offices, law offices, a half dozen private airplanes and a bus system. The K*K and the city officials were behind the Black Wall Street Incident.
Don’t Let Them Bury My Story’: The Long Life and Unfinished Fight of Viola Fletcher, Tulsa’s Oldest Race Massacre Survivor, died on Monday 11/24/25 at the age of 111.
"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.
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 in Tulsa's prosperous Greenwood neighborhood. The mob also burned and looted Greenwood homes and businesses.
Mother Fletcher endured more than anyone should, yet she spent her life lighting a path forward with purpose. 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 on Amazon: ‘Don't Let Them Bury My Story: The Oldest Living Survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre In Her Own Words’.
Viola Ford Fletcher died on November 24, 2025. She was 111.
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