Tulsa Race Massacre survivors given Ghana citizenship
In a ceremony Tuesday at the Embassy of Ghana in Washington, two of the last known survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre received citizenship of the Republic of Ghana, where they had previously been crowned Ghanaian royalty.
The two survivors — Viola Fletcher, 108, and her brother Hughes Van Ellis, 102 — sat in golden print robes in the front row at the ceremony, where they were serenaded with drumming, dancing and a ballad: “Welcome home. You’ve been kept down for much too long. Don’t forget you are welcome home.”
Fletcher and Ellis were children when a white mob descended on the all-Black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa on May 31, 1921, destroying one of the country’s most prosperous Black communities. When the massacre ended, as many as 300 Black people had been killed, and a 35-square-block area of Greenwood was destroyed.
Fletcher and Ellis visited Ghana in 2021, on the centennial of the massacre, one of the worst incidents of racist terror violence committed against Black Americans. During that visit, they were given royal Ghanaian names: Ellis was crowned a chief and called Bio Lantey, and Fletcher was crowned a queen mother and named Naa Lameley, meaning a strong person who stands the test of time.
On their trip, they also met Ghana’s president, Nana Akufo-Addo, who approved the process for granting them Ghanaian citizenship and gave Fletcher a plot of land in the capital, Accra.
Akufo-Addo had issued an invitation to members of the African diaspora to visit Ghana to mark the “Year of Return,” commemorating 400 years since the first Africans arrived in the Virginia colony.
After that meeting, Akufo-Addo told reporters that he recognized Fletcher and Ellis’s resilience in surviving the Tulsa massacre. “They lived to tell the story,” he said.
At the embassy on Tuesday, the survivors completed the citizenship process by swearing an oath of allegiance and signing certification documents.