Race massacre survivor became an enduring witness to shameful episode
Olivia Hooker, who has died aged 103, called it The Catastrophe, the notorious 48 hours of fire and death that levelled ‘‘Black Wall Street’’ in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She was 6 at the time of the Tulsa Race Massacre, which erupted on May 31, 1921, when a white lynch mob descended on the courthouse where a black teenager was being held.
A group of black war veterans tried to protect the teen and, in the ensuing violence, as many as 300 black people died and thousands more saw their homes and livelihoods destroyed by torch. Some people were burned alive, and 40 square blocks of business and residential property – valued then at more than $1 million – were destroyed.
Hooker, who later was among the first black women to serve in the Coast Guard and became an associate professor at Fordham University in New York, was one of the last known survivors, and an enduring witness to what is often regarded as the deadliest episode of racial violence in American history – and one that was long an afterthought in history texts.
In interviews, she recalled the details of the rampage through a young girl’s frightened eyes. Her father had been an owner of a department store in the community of Greenwood, a centre of commerce known as Black Wall Street. When the mob marched on Greenwood, burning houses and shooting people in the street, her mother hid her and her siblings under a big oak dining table as their home was being ransacked.
‘‘We could see what they were doing,’’ she told the in June this year. ‘‘They took everything they thought was valuable. They smashed everything they couldn’t take. My mother had [opera singer Enrico] Caruso records she loved. They smashed the Caruso records.
‘‘It took me a long time to get over my nightmares. I was keeping my family awake screaming.’’
Her most searing memory of the massacre was what the mob did to her doll. ‘‘My grandmother had made some beautiful clothes for my doll. It was the first ethnic doll we had ever seen . . . She washed them and put them on the line. When the marauders came, the first thing they did was set fire to my doll’s clothes. I thought that was dreadful.’’
Her family all survived the massacre. Her father temporarily relocated her mother and the five children to Kansas, while he remained in Oklahoma attempting to rebuild his business. He later went on a speaking tour to black Methodist churches to bear witness to the murders.
Olivia returned to Tulsa to attend high school. During World War II, she was part of her sorority’s efforts to integrate the US Navy, which had started accepting women, so she applied. ‘‘They wrote back and said there is a
massacre survivor b February 12, 1915 d November 21, 2018
Rowland stepped on Page’s foot as he entered the elevator, causing her to scream,’’ the Oklahoma Historical Society reported.
The Tulsa Tribune published a news story with the headline ‘‘Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator’’, which many historians say prompted the massacre.
In 1997, Hooker worked on the Tulsa Race Riot Commission, which investigated the massacre and issued a report in 2001 ‘‘detailing for the first time the extent of the city and state government’s involvement in the riot and in the cover-up that followed, and the total lack of remedy available in the courts at the time,’’ according to a congressional report.
In 2003, more than 100 survivors and about 300 descendants of those who lost property or were killed in the massacre filed a civil rights lawsuit against the city of Tulsa and the state of Oklahoma, seeking compensation for damages. In 2005, the US Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit without comment.
Survivors were crestfallen. ‘‘I was glad so many of us were still there, still in the world trying to do good,’’ Hooker told the Post in June. ‘‘There are a lot of answers I was never able to figure out.’’
As she sat in the front row at a Coast Guard ceremony in 2015, she watched as President Barack Obama honoured her, recounting her life story. He described her as a ‘‘tireless voice for justice and equality’’. –
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