(NCS) — Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, died at 111 years old Monday, her grandson Ike Howard instructed NCS.
“She had a beautiful smile on her face,” Howard stated. “She loved life, she loved people.”
Oklahoma State Senator Regina Goodwin stated she was with the household at an area hospital and likewise confirmed the information.
“Mother Fletcher,” as she was identified, sat with NCS a number of instances for interviews in latest years as she and different living survivors pursued a lawsuit in opposition to town of Tulsa and different associated departments, alleging they have been complicit within the 1921 bloodbath and that its results have been nonetheless being felt at this time.
On May 31, 1921, a White mob laid waste to Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, a thriving Black-owned enterprise district, NCS previously reported. They destroyed about 35 blocks of the neighborhood inside 16 hours, arresting hundreds of Black residents, whereas robbing, beating and killing others.
Lessie Benningfield Randle, 111, is now the one living survivor of the bloodbath. When Fletcher received sick within the days earlier than her passing, Randle despatched a message by means of her granddaughter to the Fletcher household saying, “She was sorry it was happening and that she loved her,” Randle’s granddaughter LaDonna Penny stated.
After listening to the information Fletcher had handed, Randle responded, “That breaks my heart. I will miss her dearly,” Penny instructed NCS.
“Mother Fletcher called my grandmother her little sister,” Penny stated, as she mirrored on her personal relationship with Fletcher.
“It’s like I lost my grandmother,” Penny instructed NCS. “My heart is broken, I keep trying to stop crying.”
Fletcher’s brother Hughes Van (*111*) or “Uncle Redd,” additionally a bloodbath survivor, died in October 2023 at 102 years old.
In June 2024, the Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit from the survivors, arguing they need to be compensated by town for damages — dealing a blow to their ongoing battle for reparations greater than 100 years after the assault.
“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 stated as half of an announcement to NCS. He was the lead lawyer representing the survivors of 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 stated.
Fletcher instructed NCS she “never got over” what she skilled that day and nonetheless 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 along with her grandson titled: “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story,” representing a historical past she and household believed the nation was desperate to overlook.
“As I grew up, I had to work with White people, but we didn’t dare mention that,” she stated of the bloodbath. “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 bloodbath unfolded
The occasions main as much as the bloodbath started on May 30, 1921, when Dick Rowland, a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner, ran from an elevator in a downtown constructing after the elevator’s teen operator set free a scream. Rumors of a rape then circulated, Rowland was arrested, and White Tulsans fashioned a lynch mob.
Black Tulsans arrived at the jail to defend Rowland, scuffles ensued, a gun went off, and as then-Sheriff William McCullough instructed Literary Digest, “All hell broke loose.”
Historic pictures present total blocks gutted by flame and Black folks mendacity on the street.
Exacerbating issues have been insurance coverage firms that denied many claims for what at this time can be tens of tens of millions of {dollars} in property harm, together with the destruction of two Black hospitals and 1,256 residences, in response to the Greenwood Cultural Center.
Seeking justice over 100 years later
Over 100 years later, victims of the bloodbath are nonetheless looking for justice.
The Department of Justice opened a civil rights investigation in September 2024, however in the end concluded in January there was not an avenue to pursue a legal 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,” stated a report on the investigation. The DOJ had launched the investigation beneath the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, which permits the company to look into civil rights crimes earlier than 1980 that resulted in loss of life.
In June, Tulsa’s mayor proposed an over $100 million personal belief as half of reparation plans for the bloodbath, which focuses on funding initiatives within the metropolis as an element of a “road to repair.”
The belief would spend money on a housing fund, a cultural preservation fund and a legacy fund devoted to schooling and native companies within the space, the announcement stated.
The fund wouldn’t present direct funds to survivors or their descendants, the Associated Press reported.
NCS’s Abby Phillip, Yon Pomrenze and Taylor Romine contributed to this report.
This is a creating story and will probably be up to date.
The-NCS-Wire
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