![]() That hasn’t happened just yet - Fletcher and two other centenarian survivors are currently plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the city of Tulsa. Victims’ descendants believed that, once the conspiracy of silence around it was pierced decades later, justice and reparations for Tulsa’s Black community would follow. “Some of them had their eyes open, as though they were still alive, but they weren’t.” “We passed piles of dead bodies heaped in the streets,” she writes in the book. The shooter had also fired his shotgun at her family’s buggy. She witnessed a Black man being executed, his head exploded like “a watermelon dropped off the rooftop of a barn.” In her memoir, Fletcher writes of the bumpy ride out of town in a horse-drawn buggy, as her family escaped the chaos. ![]() (Universal HIstory Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) Black residents escaping Tulsa in a truck during the racist massacre of 1921. More than 35 city blocks were leveled, an estimated 191 businesses were destroyed, and roughly 10,000 Black residents were displaced. The death toll has been estimated to be as high as 300. Over 18 hours, between May 31 and June 1, the enlarged mob carried out a scorched-earth campaign against Greenwood. Then, a separate violent clash between Black and white residents sparked an all-out war. With the shoeshine under arrest, a Black militia gathered at a local jail to prevent a lynch mob from kidnapping and murdering him. Tensions between Tulsa’s Black and white residents inflamed when, on May 31, 1921, the white-owned Tulsa Tribune published a sensationalized news report of an alleged assault by a 19-year-old Black shoeshine on a 17-year-old white girl working as an elevator operator. “As it turns out, we were victims of a lie,” she writes. “We decided to do a book about it and maybe that would help.” “Now that I’m an old lady, there’s nothing else to talk about,” Fletcher said. In a recent interview with The Associated Press, she said fear of reprisal for speaking out had influenced years of near-silence about the massacre. Part of the Greenwood district that was burned in the Tulsa massacre of 1921. on Tuesday and becomes widely available for purchase on Aug. The book will be published by Mocha Media Inc. ![]() Now, at age 109, Fletcher is releasing a memoir about the life she lived in the shadow of the massacre, after a white mob laid waste to the once-thriving Black enclave known as Greenwood. In the last couple of years, Fletcher has traveled internationally, testified before Congress and supported a lawsuit for reparations - all part of a campaign for accountability over the massacre that destroyed Tulsa, Oklahoma’s original “Black Wall Street” in 1921, when she was a child. Being a centenarian hasn’t slowed down Viola Ford Fletcher’s pursuit of justice. ![]()
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