Viola Fletcher was just seven years old when her family was displaced by the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the violence she witnessed that day haunted her for over a century.

Viola Ford Fletcher, one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, died on Monday, Nov. 24, 2025, surrounded by family at a Tulsa hospital. She was 111.

“She had a beautiful smile on her face,” her grandson Ike Howard told CNN . “She loved life, she loved people.”

Fletcher had spent her later years seeking justice for the massacre, a deadly attack by a white mob on the once-thriving Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She was seven years old when the assault on her neighborhood began on May 31, 1921, after local news outlets released sensationalized reports about a young Black man accused of

See Full Page