Viola Fletcher, the oldest survivor of the Tulsa race massacre, has passed away at 111.
In 1921, when the Black neighbourhood of Greenwood in Oklahoma was destroyed by white mobs, Fletcher was a kid.
In the massacre, considered as one of the brutal chapters in US history, over 300 African Americans were killed.
On May 31, 1921, a group of Black men went to the local courthouse to defend a young African American man accused of assaulting a white woman. However, they retreated to Greenwood after facing a furious white mob and gunfire.
White men looted, torched Greenwood, leaving thousands of people homeless. Greenwood was one of the US's most successful and efficient Black enclaves.
It was so affluent that it was called as 'Black Wall Street'.
However, following the massacre, Fletcher dropped out of elementary school, struck by poverty. She worked as a housekeeper for white families for years, later.
AFP reported Fletcher saying, "I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street... I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear the screams," in a House Judiciary Committee hearing that took place in 2021.
"Our country may forget this history, but I cannot. I will not, and other survivors do not, and our descendants do not," she had said.
The commission recommended that Greenwood residents and their descendants be compensated, but the effort failed. Starkingly, the commission had also asserted that that Tulsa authorities themselves had armed some of the white rioters.
In May 2021, Joe Biden was the first US president to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the attack.
"For much too long, the history of what took place here was told in silence, cloaked in darkness. My fellow Americans, this was not a riot. This was a massacre, and among the worst in our history. But not the only one," BBC quoted him as saying. Notably, he also proclaimed a day of remembrance.
Fox23 reported that the City of Tulsa began its fifth and largest excavation at Oaklawn Cemetery in search of mass graves. The search comes after the city identified three victims in the mass graves over the past 15 months. They are identified as George Gillepsie, James Goings, and C.L. Daniel.
With over 105 years since the massacre, racism still embroils the US, aggravated by the killing of African American George Floyd, who was suffocated to death under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.