Viola Fletcher

Fletcher was born May 5, 1914, in Comanche, Oklahoma, to Lucinda Ellis and John Wesley Ford.[1][2] She was the second oldest of eight children.[1] She had a younger brother, Hughes Van Ellis, who was a newborn at the time of the massacre.[1][2] He died on October 9, 2023, at the age of 102.[3] The house had no electricity.[1] Before moving to Tulsa the family were sharecroppers.[1] In Tulsa the family attended St. Andrew, a Black Baptist church.[4]

Fletcher told Congress that due to family circumstances after the massacre, she left school after the 4th grade.[2]

Her family, including four of her siblings, was living in Greenwood, a wealthy Black neighborhood of Tulsa known as the Black Wall Street, at the time of the massacre.[1][4][5] Fletcher was seven years old at the time of the massacre.[1] She was in bed asleep on May 31, 1921, when the massacre began; her mother woke the family and they fled.[1][4] The family lost everything but the clothes they were wearing.[4] She is the oldest known survivor of the massacre.[4] She sleeps sitting up on her couch with the lights on.[4]

In 2020 Fletcher and the other survivors filed suit against the city of Tulsa, the Tulsa Board of Commissioners and the Oklahoma Military Department, seeking reparations. The suit was dismissed by Tulsa County District Judge Caroline Wall in July 2023.[5]

Fletcher testified about reparations before the U.S. Congress on May 19, 2021, along with her 100-year-old brother Hughes and Lessie Benningfield Randle, who was 106.[1]

Fletcher told Congress:[6]

"I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home,” she said, “I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams."

She testified that the city of Tulsa had used the names of victims and images of the massacre to generate money for the city.[2]

In 2022, Fletcher, her brother, and Randle received $1M from New York philanthropist Ed Mitzen.[7]

In August 2021, Fletcher and her brother Hughes visited Ghana.[8] They met with Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo.[8] She was crowned a queen mother and given several Ghanaian names, including Naa Lamiley, which means, “Somebody who is strong. Somebody who stands the test of time”, Naa Yaoteley, which means “the first female child in a family or bloodline”, and Ebube Ndi Igbo.[8]

Fletcher was interviewed in 2014 for an oral history project conducted by the Oklahoma Oral History Research program and the Oklahoma State University College of Human Sciences.[1][9]

Fletcher wrote a memoir, Don’t Let Them Bury My Story, with her grandson in 2023.[5][10]

In 1932, at the age of 18, she married Robert Fletcher and moved with him to California, where they both worked in shipyards, Viola as an assistant welder.[1] They returned to Oklahoma after World War II and raised three children while she worked cleaning houses.[1] Fletcher worked until she was 85.[1][9]

Fletcher is also known as Mother Fletcher or Mother Viola Fletcher.[2]