I just read today that one of the last survivors (and the oldest) of the Tulsa Race Massacre has died.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/us/viola-fletcher-dead.ht...

Viola Fletcher, who as a child in 1921 saw her affluent Black neighborhood torched by white citizens in what became known as the Tulsa Race Massacre — one of the most violent acts of racial violence in American history — and who, a century later, testified in Congress to the terror she witnessed in the hope of winning reparations, has died. She was 111 and the oldest survivor of the attack.
…
Viola’s family fled in a horse and buggy. As they were leaving Tulsa, she recalled, she saw ash falling on the streets, reminding her of snow. She also saw, as other witnesses did, an airplane dropping what looked like firebombs. She passed piles of corpses. She saw a white man blow off a Black man’s head with a shotgun, she said.

…

The family’s flight from the massacre concluded 30 miles northeast of Tulsa in a wooded area called Claremore, where they found safety, living in a tent. The women went to the bathroom in the woods, three at a time for safety. The family used sticks, string and rocks to catch rabbits for food. They trapped lightning bugs in a jar for a light at night.
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As an adult, Ms. Fletcher spent most of her life working as a maid for white families in Bartlesville, a town north of Tulsa.
“As she washed their dishes and tucked their little ones into bed,” the journalist Wesley Lowery wrote in a 2023 profile of Ms. Fletcher for The Washington Post, “she wondered whether they were among those responsible, yet never held accountable, for her own childhood’s destruction.”
…

I used these events as background for my story Winnie Winkle Flies Again, where the main character Louie/Winnie rescues a young girl, Molly.

I didn’t give Molly an age, but she would have been about the same age as Viola. I had Winnie fly Molly west to Langston. While Molly’s family fled east to “a wooded area called Claremore”. Claremore was incorporated in 1883. The town and its area were the setting for the musical Oklahoma.

I’m not sure why the family stayed in the woods. They may simply have felt safer camping out with other black families. But many towns barred blacks from residing there.

It’s interesting that she lived and worked in Bartlesville. I have a picture of my Great Aunt Lillian and another woman, possibly my Aunt Nevella, from 1919 when they lived in Bartlesville. But I think they had moved to Tulsa by the time Viola was working there as a maid.

Langston University, a land grant college and the westernmost of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities now has a branch on North Greenwood Avenue. This is across the freeway and just north of the Greenwood District.

I have ideas for another little adventure for Winnie partly set in Bartlesville with some more historical tie-ins. Got to get writing!