Press Remembers Oldest Survivor of Tulsa Massacre—But Not Press's Role in Massacre

Janine Jackson

Joe Torres (Free Press, 5/27/21): "As Tulsa observes the 100th anniversary of the massacre, it’s crucial that we remember the role the city’s newspapers played in weaponizing anti-Black narratives."

The New York Times (11/24/25), Washington Post (12/24/25), CBS News (11/24/25), USA Today (11/24/25)—seems as though everyone had space to acknowledge the passing, at age 111, of Viola Ford Fletcher, the oldest known survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre.

That’s when 300 overwhelmingly Black women, men and children were murdered, their killings sparked by a sensationalized front-page article in the local Tulsa Tribune (5/31/1921) about a 19-year-old Black shoeshiner, Dick Rowland, falsely accused of assaulting a 17-year-old white girl. A white mob destroyed businesses, churches, doctor’s offices and groceries in Greenwood, a prosperous neighborhood known as Black Wall Street or Little Africa, along with the homes of more than 10,000 Black Tulsans.

As Joe Torres (Free Press, 5/27/21), co-author of News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, recounted, the local white-owned press didn't just fuel the massacre; it also helped cover it up. The other main local paper, the Tulsa World, provided the white narrative of the massacre in its headline (6/1/1921) the next day: "Two Whites Dead in Race Riot."

The World (6/15/1921) explained the situation by quoting Tulsa Mayor T.D. Evans:

Let the blame for this Negro uprising lie right where it belongs—on those armed Negros and their followers who started this trouble and who instigated it. And any persons who seek to put half the blame on the white people are wrong, and should be told so in no uncertain language.

The newspaper (6/4/1921) called on “the innocent, hardworking colored element of Tulsa” to “cooperate fully and with vast enthusiasm” with officials, and “band themselves together for their own protection against this element of non-working, worthless Negros.” (The World is still published today, and is Oklahoma's second-biggest paper.)

The right-wing New York Post (11/24/25) was one of the few outlets writing about Viola Fletcher that remembered the press's role in the massacre: "She was only 7 years old when a white mob stormed Tulsa’s prosperous, largely Black Greenwood district on May 31, 1921, after a local newspaper published a sensationalized report about a Black man accused of assaulting a white woman."

The Tribune (6/5/1921), in an editorial replete with racial epithets, likewise blamed Black residents. It urged against the rebuilding of the neighborhood:

The bad elements among the negroes, long plotting and planning and collecting guns and ammunition, brought this upon Tulsa just as the winds gather into a cyclone and sweep upon a city. This bad element among the negroes must learn this is not a city of, for and by their kind. NEVER.

Torres reflected:

No one was ever held responsible for the murders committed during the massacre, or for the destruction of Greenwood. Instead, public and private institutions in Tulsa tried to erase the massacre from public consciousness. The Tribune didn’t even mention the massacre in its paper until 1971.

In its obituary, the New York Times (11/24/25) was moved to poignantly recall how “Viola never received more than an elementary school education. Instead, she worked alongside her relatives as a sharecropper, picking cotton and tending to livestock for $1 a day.” But still, to this day, they and others have no room at all for serious examination of the role of the press in the racist nightmare that shaped her life—much less for any discussion of what they’re doing to prevent such a nightmare’s recurrence—beyond, that is, preparing sad obituaries for the victims.