The oldest survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre has died at 111 years old.

Viola Ford Fletcher was a child when the attack happened, but she fought for justice for the victims of the massacre in her later years.

Her death was announced by Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nicols, who did not say when or how she died, The New York Times reported.

When Fletcher was 7 years old, a white mob attacked the Black community of Greenwood on May 31, 1921. A newspaper had published a sensationalized report of a Black man allegedly attacking a white woman, The Associated Press reported.

The woman would say that the man did nothing wrong and charges were dropped, the Times reported.

But white residents who were armed went to where he was being held. Black veterans of World War I, also armed with guns, tried to prevent the man’s lynching. A shot was fired and fighting started.

When it was over, hundreds of people were dead, and more than a thousand homes and businesses were looted and burned. More than 30 city blocks were wiped out in an area that had been known as Black Wall Street because of its successful businesses and prosperity of the families before the attack, the AP and the Times reported. After the massacre, the entire neighborhood was homeless, according to data compiled by the American Red Cross in 1921.

“The neighborhood I fell asleep in that night was rich — not just in terms of wealth, but in culture, community, heritage — and my family had a beautiful home,” Fletcher testified in front of lawmakers in 2021, according to the Times. “Within a few hours, all that was gone.”

“I could never forget the charred remains of our once-thriving community, the smoke billowing in the air, and the terror-stricken faces of my neighbors,” Fletcher wrote in her memoir “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story.”

She and her family escaped the violence in a horse-drawn buggy, but not before they were targeted by a white man who had shot a Black man in the head, then fired at her family, she said.

They took refuge in a tent 30 miles northeast of Tulsa. They snared rabbits for food and used lightning bugs in jar for light at night, she said, according to the Times.

She worked as a maid for white families in Bartlesville before getting married and moving to Los Angeles, where she worked in a shipyard during World War II.

She left her husband when he got physically abusive, she said, and raised their son, along with two other children she had from other relationships, as a single mother.

Fletcher had stayed mostly quiet, telling the AP she feared being retaliated against, but wrote the book with her grandson.

“We don’t want history to repeat itself so we do need to educate people about what happened and try to get people to understand why you need to be made whole, why you need to be repaired,” Ike Howard told the AP in 2024. “The generational wealth that was lost, the home, all the belongings, everything was lost in one night.”

In 1997, a commission formed by the Oklahoma state government probed the attack. Years later, Fletcher testified before Congress, describing what happened. She, along with her brother and another survivor, sued for reparations, but the state Supreme Court said their case did not meet the state’s public nuisance statute.

The Justice Department found in 2024 that there could have been a federal prosecution at the time of the massacre, but a criminal case was no longer possible.

“The fact that she died without any meaningful redress — not for herself, her family, or her community — isn’t just a legal failure. It’s a moral one,” attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons said. Solomon-Simmons founded the Justice for Greenwood Foundation.

“She would not want her passing to be the end of the fight,” he told the AP. “She would want it to light a fire under all of us.”

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