Mother Fletcher
And the silent history of Greenwood, Tulsa
Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest known survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, died on Monday. She was 111 years old. Mother Fletcher, as she came to be known, was only 7 years old when members of the Ku Klux Klan, the Tulsa Police Department and the Oklahoma National Guard began what many believe to be the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.
On May 31st, 1921, in the Black business district of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, nearly 300 people were killed, 714 wounded, 1,256 homes were burned to the ground along with 36 blocks of Greenwood. They shot, stabbed, beat and even dropped bombs from planes onto the Black neighborhood and Mother Fletcher spent decades making sure the Massacre was not forgotten. She published her memoir, Don’t Let Them Bury My Story and testified to Congress and even sued the city of Tulsa in pursuit of reparations. The Oklahoma Supreme Court dismissed her lawsuit last year.
But, to truly understand Mother Fletcher’s fight, you should know that shortly after the Massacre, Greenwood was actually rebuilt.
And then it was destroyed again.
White leaders in Tulsa had been trying to take Greenwood for years before the Massacre, so it would only make sense that they did everything they could to stop the Black community from rebuilding. Fire code restrictions were changed. Greenwood was re-zoned. Insurance companies refused to pay out. They even blamed the Massacre on the victims, charging 55 Black men with ”inciting a riot”. They were eventually cleared, but not until 1996.
There wasn’t a crooked tactic in the book the white leadership of Tulsa wouldn’t try to stop the folks of Greenwood. None of it worked. Construction happened at night, while a court battle went on during the day and by the end, county judges sided with the Black citizens of Greenwood. The City of Tulsa couldn’t stop them from rebuilding. And according to Tulsa survivor Juanita Alexander Lewis Hopkins, “The North Tulsa after the (massacre) was even more impressive than before.”
This is when Greenwood got the nickname Black Wall Street and it flourished for the next 45 years.
But then came “urban renewal” and the Federal-Aid Highway Acts of 1965 and 1968.
“An Old Tulsa Street is Slowly Dying” was the headline of a May 4, 1967 article in the Tulsa Tribune. “Greenwood Fades Away Before Advance of Expressway” was the subhead. The article itself explained, “The Crosstown Expressway slices across the 100 block of North Greenwood Avenue, across those very buildings that Edwin Lawrence Goodwin, Sr. (publisher of the Oklahoma Eagle) describes as ‘once a Mecca for the Negro businessman—a showplace.’ There still will be a Greenwood Avenue, but it will be a lonely, forgotten lane ducking under the shadows of a big overpass.”
Highway construction was completed in 1971, as the Daily Oklahoman reported, “by 1979, little remained of the original district but a few boarded-up brick buildings at Greenwood and Archer and a small group of businessmen who comprised the Greenwood Chamber of Commerce.”
According to a 2020 report by Human Rights Watch, “The effects of the Greenwood massacre and subsequent discrimination continue to be felt in the present day. Black neighborhoods remain underdeveloped and under resourced. Mistrust of police is a legacy of the massacre. Aggressive policing in the present serves as a reminder and even an extension of the past.”
This was Mother Fletcher’s fight.
“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,” Damario Solomon-Simmons, an attorney for the survivors and the founder of the Justice for Greenwood Foundation, said in a statement after Mother Fletcher’s passing.
“She would not want her passing to be the end of the fight,” he said. “She would want it to light a fire under all of us.”
https://www.okhistory.org/learn/tulsaracemassacre
https://blackwallstreet.org/violafletcher
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dont-let-them-bury-my-story-viola-ford-fletcher/1143600583
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/10/26/us/oklahoma-clears-black-in-deadly-1921-race-riot.html
https://digitalcollections.tulsalibrary.org/digital/collection/p16063coll1/id/439/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/29/case-reparations-tulsa-oklahoma
https://www.newspapers.com/image-view/451654993/?match=1&terms=greenwood
I hadn’t known about the rebuilding and subsequent highway zoning. Thank you.
Thank you for this educational extension of true history which I will share. Another disgusting event of white suppression!