Viola Ford Fletcher, a living witness to the Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma has died, aged 111.
As a child in Greenwood — known as the Black Wall Street — she lived in one of the most affluent African American communities in the United States in the 1920s.
But her world changed in 1921, when white attackers killed as many as 300 Black residents and reduced the thriving district to ruins.
The violence marked her childhood and shaped the entire course of her life. Here's a look back at her life in her own words.
'Don't let them bury my story': The massacre through the eyes of a child
On May 31, 1921, seven-year-old Fletcher went to bed in her family home in Greenwood.
She fell asleep in a neighbourhood rich in culture and community, with over 30 restaurants and 45 grocers and meat makers.
"We had children in the neighbourhood to play with," she told the Guardian in an interview.
"We had schools, churches, hospitals, theatres and anything that people enjoyed. It was a strong community.
"I had everything a child could need. I had a bright future ahead of me," she said testifying before the US Congress in 2021.
"Greenwood represented what was possible for Black people in America."
But within a few hours, all of that was gone.
She was woken up by her parents and five siblings and forced to leave.
"I'll never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home," she said.
In her memoir, Fletcher writes of witnessing a Black man being executed and then her family's horse-led buggy being fired on.
"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."
What was the Tulsa Race Massacre?
In the events leading up to the massacre, a 19-year-old Black shoe shiner allegedly whistled at a white woman in an elevator, she screamed.
And by the end of the day, he was arrested by police.
Black and white armed mobs formed around the courthouse as the details spread throughout Tulsa, varying from person to person.
A shot was fired into the crowd and the outnumbered Black Tulsans began retreating to the Greenwood District.
By the early hours of the morning, a riot was born.
White lynchers looted and burned around 35 blocks of Greenwood.
Initial estimates of the death toll varied, however modern investigations have found the death toll may have been up to 300, with thousands of Black residents arrested, robbed and beaten.
Her life after the massacre
After her family fled the massacre, they spent the next decade moving from town to town.
"I didn’t know where we were going. Being a child, they didn’t tell us everything. We had to follow."
Fletcher and her siblings helped their parents sharecrop, a legal arrangement where a landowner allowed a tenant to farm their land in exchange for a share of the crop.
"We wasn’t able to go to school. The days we should be in school was time to harvest a crop or something."
Fletcher never finished school past fourth grade.
"When my family was forced to leave Tulsa, I lost my chance at an education," she said.
"Greenwood could've given me a chance to truly make it in this country."
She never made much money.
Retiring in her 80s, she spent most of her life as a domestic worker serving white families.
The taboo subject in Tulsa
Fletcher and her family were told to leave and never tell anyone of what happened.
"Don't tell anyone why or anything. So we grew up like that, not talking about what happened," she said.
"Like we didn't see it with our own eyes," she said.
In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, she said fear of reprisal for speaking out had influenced years of near-silence about the massacre.
The history of the Tulsa massacre was absent from school teachings for generations.
It would take 70 years for the massacre to be investigated, when Oklahoma formed a commission in 1997.
More than a century later, the city of Tulsa found dozens of unmarked mass graves.
It is now believed to be the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.
Fletcher dedicated her life to victims of the massacre
Fletcher; her younger brother, Hughes Van Ellis, and Leslie Benningfield Randle, sued Tulsa in 2020 for reparations, including a 99-year tax holiday for residents who are descendants of victims of the massacre.
100 years after the attacks, Fletcher relived the massacre in a testimony before Congress in 2021.
"I still see Blackmen being shot, Black bodies lying in the street, I still smell smoke and see fire," she said.
"I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear aeroplanes flying over head. I hear the screams."
In a first-time visit to Washington DC, Fletcher asked her country to acknowledge what happened in Tulsa in 1921.
"I have lived through the massacre every day," she said.
"Our country may forgive this history but I cannot. I will not. And other survivors do not. And our descendents do not."
A Justice Department review released in January 2024, said that federal prosecution may have been possible a century ago, but there was no longer an avenue to bring a criminal case.
In June, Tulsa announced a $US105 million ($162 million) trust to address the enduring impacts of the massacre.
Fletcher wrote in her book that the questions she had back in 1921 remain today.
"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?" she wrote.
"I pray that one day I will see justice."
