The oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Massacre is a key witness for a national movement gaining momentum
Viola Fletcher, 109, inside Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library on Aug. 24. (Gioncarlo Valentine for The Washington Post)
TULSA — Her mother’s scream awoke the 7-year-old girl just moments after she’d drifted off to sleep. “Vi! Get up, child. If we don’t leave right now, we could end up dead.”
What Viola Fletcher witnessed that night in 1921 has haunted her for a century. Her entire childhood had been set ablaze. Families fled Tulsa’s bustling Greenwood district as torches flew through their windows. Explosives rained from low-flying planes that cut across a smoke-darkened sky above. Bodies piled along the roadside — some eyes still open, forever frozen on the terror — as soot stuck to the air like dark bitter snowflakes. Fletcher watched a man with a shotgun blow a neighbor’s head from his shoulders, she writes in “Don’t Let Them Bury My Story,” a memoir published this year.
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