From bitter to better to Beast

Pam Grier circa (1973)

Lauryn Hill and Nina Simone

Source: Zaad al-Ma’aad (4/304-305)

(2000)

EVE & DMX, 1999.

Shawnna.

‘Don’t Let Them Bury My Story’: The Long Life and Unfinished Fight of Viola Fletcher, Tulsa’s Oldest Race Massacre Survivor, Dies at 111 On a spring afternoon more than a century after she fled a burning city with nothing but the clothes on her back, Viola Ford Fletcher sat before a college audience in Illinois and did what she has done, again and again, in the twilight of her life: she told the story America tried to forget. “I remember seeing how cruel they were,” she said quietly, describing the night in 1921 when white mobs torched the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma — a place the world once knew as Black Wall Street. “They burned houses, buildings and everything on the street… I remember seeing people falling from being shot and killed. It was just terrible.” At 111 years old, Fletcher — widely known as “Mother Fletcher” — was the oldest known living survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and one of the last direct witnesses to one of the most devastating episodes of racial violence in U.S. history. Her life stretched from Jim Crow sharecropping fields to the Black Lives Matter era; from nights spent sleeping upright with the lights on, afraid of the dark, to standing under bright television lights in Washington as she urged Congress to finally confront what was taken from Greenwood. She lived most of her years in relative obscurity — cleaning houses, raising children, building a life on the margins of American prosperity — only to become, in her tenth decade, a central figure in the national debate over historical memory and reparations. And she had done all this while insisting on one simple demand, now the title of her 2023 memoir: Don’t Let Them Bury My Story. Viola Ford Fletcher died on November 24, 2025. She was 111.