The oldest Tulsa Race Riot survivor, Viola Fletcher , turned 111

The Gerontology Research Group (GRG) is delighted to report that Mrs Viola Fletcher has celebrated her 111 birthday on 10.05.2025.

Viola Fletcher was born in Comanche, Oklahoma, USA on 10 May 1914, the second oldest of eight children of John Wesley Ford and Lucinda (née Ellis) Ford. She had four brothers and three sisters.

Before moving the family to Tulsa, her parents were sharecroppers. She had just turned 7 years old when a White mob descended on her all-Black neighborhood in a murderous rage. Her family fled Tulsa during the massacre but eventually returned.

In 1932, she married her husband, Robert, and the couple moved to California to work in the shipyards during World War II. After the war, she and her husband returned to Oklahoma, where they raised their three children: two sons and one daughter in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Fletcher worked cleaning houses, while her husband worked as a truck driver and at a filling station. She worked until the age of 85.

In May 2021 in Washington, D.C., she appeared before the subcommittee to push for reparations for 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, together her then-100-year-old brother, Hughes “Uncle Red” Van Ellis, and a third survivor, then-106-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle. Van Ellis died in October 2023 at the age of 102. On 2 April 2024, Fletcher and Randle, both 109, attended a court hearing at the supreme court of Oklahoma.

Viola Fletcher currently lives in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, USA, at the age of 111 years 2 days