ATLANTA — The oldest living survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre will be speaking in Atlanta on Tuesday evening at an event at the King Center.
Viola "Mother" Fletcher, 109, will be speaking with Dr. Bernice A. King, the King Center CEO as part of the Beloved Community Talks series. Fletcher's grandson and co-author for her memoir "Don’t Let Them Bury My Story,” published this year, Ike Howard, will also be on hand.
The talk will be held at 6 p.m. and a book signing will follow at 7 p.m.
The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre perpetrated by a white mob devastated the thriving "Black Wall Street" section of the city, and has gained more prominence in recent years as an example of the terror that continued to be inflicted on Black Americans long after the end of slavery.
It was sparked when a white-owned newspaper published a sensationalized account of an assault on a white 17-year-old girl, allegedly by a Black 19-year-old. According to the Associated Press, the 18-hours-long assault on Tulsa's prosperous Greenwood neighborhood, the home of Black Wall Street, left as many as 300 people dead, displaced 10,000 more Black residents, leveled 35 city blocks and destroyed 191 business.
“We passed piles of dead bodies heaped in the streets,” Fletcher wrote in her book, according to an AP account. “Some of them had their eyes open, as though they were still alive, but they weren’t.”
Fletcher has spoken to Congress, telling them her family was forced to leave Tulsa after the massacre, halting her education at fourth grade.
A lawsuit filed by Fletcher and two other survivors seeking reparations was dismissed earlier this year, though the Oklahoma Supreme Court said in August it would hear an appeal in the suit.
“The questions I had then remain to this day,” Fletcher wrote in her book, according to the AP. “How could you just give a mob of violent, crazed, racist people a bunch of deadly weapons and allow them — no, encourage them — to go out and kill innocent Black folks and demolish a whole community?”
