The oldest survivor of the Tulsa race massacre, one of the worst episodes of racist violence in US history, has died aged 111, a local official said on Tuesday.
Viola Fletcher was a child in 1921 when her Black neighbourhood of Greenwood in Oklahoma was torched by white mobs. Historians say as many as 300 African American residents were killed.
“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 said in a statement.
“Fletcher carried 111 years of truth, resilience, and grace and was a reminder of how far we’ve come and how far we must still go.”
The violence began after a group of Black men went to the local courthouse on May 31, 1921, to defend a young African American man accused of assaulting a white woman.
They found themselves facing a furious white mob and retreated to Greenwood when shots were fired.
White men looted and burned the neighbourhood, then one of America’s most successful Black enclaves and so affluent it was known as Black Wall Street, at dawn the next day.
Much of the neighbourhood was burned to the ground, buildings were destroyed, and businesses were looted. Thousands of people were left homeless.
Fletcher, who dropped out of elementary school and suffered decades of poverty, working mostly as a housekeeper for white families, later said she had “lived through the massacre every day” for the past century.
Still hear the screams
She was one of the survivors of the massacre who testified before Congress a century later to the horrors she witnessed, calling for reparations.
