By Alexis Taylor,
AFRO Managing Editor
Viola Ford Fletcher was a mere seven years old when she was forced to reckon with hatred and racism in America.
The date was May 31.
The place was the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Okla., and at the time it was known as the “Black Wall Street.” African-American entrepreneurs and leaders from every walk of life called the area home as they worked to build and sustain the safe haven they created.
From churches to libraries, schools and –yes–even a hospital, the Black people of Greenwood stood tall on their accomplishments. They were a proud people, carving out the best life they could in Jim Crow’s America. But in 1921, being African American and thriving– not just surviving–was an offense paid for in blood.
“On the morning of May 30, 1921, a young Black man named Dick Rowland was riding in the elevator in the Drexel Building at Third and Main with a White woman named Sarah Page,” according to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum. What happened next is debatable.
The National Archives Museum reports that on May 31, 1921, Rowland, a shoe shiner, was arrested and locked inside of the Tulsa courthouse for an alleged assault. The same day, word of the alleged attack hit the local newspaper, inciting residents to gather “outside the courthouse to either witness or prevent Rowland’s possible lynching.”
“During this gathering, shots rang out,” reports the National Archives Museum. “White mobs invaded the Greenwood District…mobs bombed, looted, set fire to buildings and shot at random while Black residents defended their homes and businesses.”
The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 had begun.
“We were frightened and rushed, scared,” Fletcher told the AFRO. “I saw people getting killed and I could smell and see housing burning.”
Dr. Robert R.A. Turner, pastor of Empowerment Temple, gives Viola Ford Fletcher her flowers, more than 100 years after she survived one of the worst race massacres in American history. (AFRO Photo / Stephen Hopkins )
The June 3 edition of the AFRO-American Newspapers included telegraphs from Tulsa reporting “every colored church, business house and home destroyed,” with a damage estimate of $5,000,000.
“We had churches, we had parks, stores and almost anything a family could use,” said Fletcher, recalling the area formerly known as Black Wall Street.
The Associated Negro Press at the time reported that the burning of Greenwood’s New Mt. Zion Baptist Church alone netted an $85,000 loss– or $1,481,098.59 in today’s time, according to the inflation calculator made available by the National Bureau of Labor Statistics.
African Americans around the country condemned the attack, and called on James Brooks Ayres Robertson, governor of Oklahoma at the time, to do something about the droves of arrests of “colored men, not Whites, giving the Whites an unfair fighting advantage.”
At least 100 people were reported killed in the days immediately after the massacre, but today, that number is believed to be closer to 300, according to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum. More than 30 blocks of the Black community in Tulsa were razed. Roughly 800 were injured, and after the National Guard was called in, approximately 6,000 Black Tulsans were “held at the Convention Hall and the Fairgrounds, some for as long as eight days.”
While the smoke faded, the memories never could– especially because the terror faced by the survivors of the massacre continued for those who fled into the Ku Klux Klan territory of Claremore, Okla., roughly 29 miles from Tulsa.
“They were afraid to go back to Tulsa so they became sharecroppers– on the road like gypsies going from this farm to this farm to that farm. Claremore wasn’t very safe,” said Ike Howard, Fletcher’s grandson. “They were running for their lives and ended up in an area that harbored and nurtured the Ku Klan Klan. They didn’t know that and had to keep moving.”
The AFRO documented the trauma of the Tulsa Race Massacre affected her mother, Lucinda Ellis, for decades.
Fletcher said her mother “couldn’t sleep at night and she would walk the floor and scream and holler from a dream that they were burning our houses.”
Eventually, the family had to make a tough decision tied directly to the terrorism they survived so many years prior.
“Her mother had to be put into a nursing home because she would wake up everybody in the house and say ‘Fire! They are burning down the house!’” said Howard. “She reacted to it in real time like it was happening again. Eventually, she had to put her mother into a nursing home because she was a young woman with children, had to work and had to get some sleep.”
But sleep didn’t come easy for anyone who escaped the massacre with their lives and the clothes on their back. Howard said that to this day, Fletcher’s body doesn’t get true rest. She too struggles to sleep, as the brutality of that massacre returns at night. After all, when the rioting reached her doorstep she was asleep, like most other elementary school students her age.
“I know she was traumatized,” said Howard, noting that his grandmother still wrestles with post traumatic stress disorder.
Still, less than three months shy of her 110 birthday, Fletcher is adamant about telling her story– no matter what it takes. On May 30, 2023 she released a book titled, “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story.” Howard, who helped write the book, accompanied her to Baltimore to worship on Feb. 25 inside of West Baltimore’s Empowerment Temple.
“This is one story of a lady who persevered through the ignorance and the atrocities of Black Wall Street, but there are plenty other stories out there to be told,” said Howard. “Her perseverance is off the charts– to survive that event, work as long as she did and still hold her head up high as a beacon for every woman and every Black American to emulate.”
While Fletcher was in Charm City, Baltimore City Council President Nick Mosby was on hand to honor her with a citation from the City of Baltimore for “being the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre and a key witness and advocate in the national movement to honor those whose lives were unjustly taken.”
Rev. Dr. Robert R.A. Turner, pastor of Empowerment Temple, celebrated Fletcher as “someone who is living Black history– not someone you read about– but someone that you can actually see, touch and observe in present form, not in book form.”
“She is here and she is proud,” said Turner.
When asked what true reparations would look like for her, Fletcher said even in 2024, “there’s a lot to be done about it.”
After the massacre, African Americans who escaped faced a harsh reality. Many dreams– including those of Fletcher– were dashed. As Fletcher fled Tulsa in 1921 with her family, she left behind her childhood dreams of being a nurse.
“They had hospitals, but we couldn’t afford to go to them so they had little old ladies called ‘midwives’ and families helped each other,” said Fletcher, confirming that her own grandmother was a midwife of Cherokee and Black descent named Dora Love.
Howard said if his grandmother had been given an opportunity to go to school she could have made those dreams come true. Instead, according to her book, Fletcher ended up serving others as a maid for years. Her family also lost the opportunity to build wealth by passing down through homeownership.
“Real estate is the key to generational wealth,” said Howard. “She could have sold that house that they had. They could have flipped that house and leveled up. You can do the math on that with yesterday’s dollars and today’s equivalent.”
Lawyers for both Fletcher and Lessie Benningfield Randle, born Nov. 14, 1914, have fought in court for the two women, now the only survivors of the massacre after Fletcher’s brother, Hugh Van Ellis, died in 2023 at age 102.
The women say they are owed reparations for the trauma they still carry, as a result of the public nuisance that took place during the massacre. Last year their claims were dismissed. However, on Feb. 20 the Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed to allow lawyers for the women to present their case in oral argument for 30 minutes.
A hearing will be held April 2, at 1:30 p.m. at the Oklahoma Supreme Court. There will be a live stream of the proceedings. Tune in to see lawyers defend Fletcher’s right to reparations for the massacre by going to the Oklahoma Supreme Court website, clicking on the “resources” tab and selecting the date for April 2 on the calendar.
