Washington (AFP) – 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 neighborhood of Greenwood in Oklahoma state 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 neighborhood, 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 neighborhood was burned to the ground, buildings were destroyed, and businesses 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. “I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street…I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear the screams,” Fletcher told a House Judiciary Committee hearing in 2021. “Our country may forget this history but I cannot. I will not, and other survivors do not, and our descendants do not,” she said.
The commission concluded that Tulsa authorities themselves had armed some of the white rioters. It also recommended that Greenwood residents and their descendants be compensated, but the effort failed. In 2021, Joe Biden became the first US president to commemorate the massacre in a Tulsa service honoring the forgotten victims. The city also began to excavate mass graves, where many Black victims of the massacre were buried, in an effort to shed more light on its dark past.
The last surviving witness to the massacre is 111-year-old Lessie Evelyn Benningfield, six months younger than Fletcher. The United States has been embroiled in a debate over racism in recent years, fuelled by the 2020 killing of African American George Floyd, who suffocated under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.
© 2024 AFP
