109-year-old Viola Ford Fletcher is the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race massacre. After testifying before Congress to help make a case for reparations and call for accountability for the brutal attack on “Black Wall Street” in 1921, Fletcher has published a memoir about her life.
Don’t Let Them Bury My Story, published on Tuesday, July 4, is an inside look
forwp-incontent-custom-banner ampforwp-incontent-ad1">Fletcher and her family were one of the families who managed to make it out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, alive.
“We passed piles of dead bodies heaped in the streets,” she writes in the book. “Some of them had their eyes open, as though they were still alive, but they weren’t.” Like many survivors of the massacre, Fletcher believed that recognizing what happened would open the door for proper reparations for those affected; however, the city of Tulsa has never sought to compensate its Black community. As a centenarian, Fletcher has lived through some of this country’s brightest and darkest days, but now she has lived to see her own historical account light up billboards in New York’s Times Square. It is her own way of assuring Black Wall Street is never forgotten.