A final chance for the survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre: ‘This is it’

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.”