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107-year-old Tulsa Race Massacre survivor’s dream to visit Ghana comes true! Now she’s a queen mother
Viola Fletcher, who is 107, and her brother, Hughes Van Ellis, who is 100, boarded a plane in August and flew 6,300 miles from Oklahoma to Ghana.
It isn’t just their ages and the distance they traveled that made the trip remarkable. It’s who they are: two of the three oldest known survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre who are still alive.The devastation of the Tulsa Race Massacre
They’d been invited to Ghana to be recognized for what they endured a century ago and to celebrate the African roots of their resilience.
The siblings were greeted by royalty and met with the nation’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, who granted them Ghanaian citizenship and gave Fletcher a plot of land in the capital city, Accra.
“Medaase,” Fletcher said, using a Ghanaian dialect for “thank you,” during a meeting with the president, “We accept it with great joy, and we thank the president for this great honor.”
Several ceremonies yielded a bounty of honors: At one, she was crowned a queen mother. In another, dressed in white, she received a new name, “Naa Lamiley,” which in another Ghanaian dialect means, “Somebody who is strong. Somebody who stands the test of time.”
She received a red, bejeweled crown displaying another of her new names, “Ebube Ndi Igbo.” From the Ga Kingdom in Ghana, she received the name “Naa Yaoteley” Fletcher, which means “the first female child in a family or bloodline.”
Speaking to Ghanaian YouTuber, Wode Maya, Viola Fletcher said it had been a lifelong dream to visit Ghana and since she’s been in the country the experience has been more amazing than she imagined it to be.
The Tulsa race massacre took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, some of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and destroyed homes and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, US. Alternatively known as the Tulsa race riot[13] or the Black Wall Street massacre, the event is considered one of “the single worst incident[s] of racial violence in American history”.