![A final chance for the survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre: ‘This is it’](https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/20240401-lessie-viola-split.jpg?c=16x9&q=w_800,c_fill)
A final chance for the survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre: ‘This is it’
CNN
There are only two people alive who remember firsthand what the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was like.
There are only two people alive who remember firsthand what the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre was like. One of them is 109-year-old Viola Ford Fletcher, otherwise known as “Mother Fletcher.” She specifically remembers “people getting killed, houses, property, schools, churches, and stores getting destroyed with fire,” she told CNN. “It just stays with me, you know, just the fear. I have lived in Tulsa since but I don’t sleep all night living there.” “I’ll just never get over that,” she added. It’s part of why she’s at the center of what’s been a yearslong court battle for reparations alongside fellow survivor 109-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle and the estate of Fletcher’s late brother Hughes Van Ellis, also a survivor, who died at 102. If Fletcher and her family had not been forced to leave their home and community with essentially just the clothes on their backs, she told CNN, “I would’ve gotten an education, to where I could get a better job, especially being a nurse.”
![](/newspic/picid-6252001-20240725164452.jpg)
A Justice Department watchdog has found that former Attorney General Bill Barr was personally involved in the decision to publicize an incident from the 2020 election – nine mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being discarded in a dumpster in Pennsylvania – that flamed the false narrative of widespread voter fraud.
![](/newspic/picid-6252001-20240725153537.jpg)
President Joe Biden is expected to be as forceful as he has ever been in urging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire agreement when the two leaders meet privately at the White House Thursday afternoon, sources tell CNN, as US officials believe that a deal may be on the cusp.