Viola Floyd Fletcher passed away on Nov. 24. At 111, she was the oldest known survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a pogrom and an act of ethnic cleansing perpetrated by thousands of white people that took place over the course of two days in the spring of 1921. The white mob killed at least 300 Black people in the prosperous neighborhood of Greenwood, Oklahoma, which was known as the “Black Wall Street,” and destroyed more than 1,200 homes and at least 60 businesses. Machine guns were used; airplanes dropped bombs. Survivors were forced into a concentration camp. In today’s money, the total damages are estimated at up to $200 million.

Black prosperity is a threat, a provocation and a collective narcissistic injury to what W. E. B. Du Bois famously described as the “psychological wages of

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