Viola Fletcher was six when her parents woke her in the middle of the night to flee the Tulsa Race Massacre. At 110, she was the oldest woman in the world to publish a memoir. Amid current attacks on Black history in education, she refused to let the details of the massacre get “lost” in history.
“I never finished school past the fourth grade,” she said. “For most of my life, I was a domestic worker serving white families. But ... the City of Tulsa has unjustly used the names and stories of victims like me to enrich itself while I continue to live in poverty.”
The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed reparations. But while critics claim it isn’t the city’s responsibility to pay and that simply acknowledging the massacre is enough, Fletcher insisted on putting the responsibility where it belongs.
The massacre left $27 million in uncompensated damages. Three hundred lives were stolen. From mass violence and enslavement to redlining and “urban renewal,” generations of Black people in Tulsa and the entire U.S. suffer financially — and are then criminalized for that suffering.
By insisting on reparations, indicting the systems responsible, and expressing what happened and what continues to happen to us, Viola Fletcher subverted a status quo that blamed us for being targets of white terrorism. Her life celebrated our richness and taught us always to tell the truth.