Civil-rights trailblazer turns 102
When you’re GREENBURGH Olivia Hooker, it’s OK to talk about age, especially since she’s achieved so much and still has an engaging smile and strong mind.
Hooker turned 102 on Sunday — sharing a birthday with President Abraham Lincoln and an incredible history of being a great American patriot.
Hooker was born in 1915 in Muskogee, Okla.
Today, she talks about not having the hand strength she used to for playing piano concertos and no longer being able to live independently. Yet this centenarian has had a front seat to some of America’s most challenging moments, fighting racial injustice and becoming a female trailblazer.
Among her many honors, Hooker is featured in a new book, Aging Gracefully by Karsten Thormaehlen. It profiles 52 people all over the world who are 100 or older.
At just 6 years old, Hooker lived through the 1921 Tulsa race riots — which she calls a massacre. White rioters destroyed 35 city blocks of the prosperous Greenwood district, known as Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, over a 24-hour period.
The seminal race riot resulted in 300 deaths, injuries of more than 800 people and displaced more than 10,000 black people from their homes.
Ku Klux Klan members destroyed Hooker’s family home.
She remembers the sky bright with hailing bullets.
The family moved to Topeka after the riots.
In 1945, she became the first African-American woman to join the U.S. Coast Guard SPARs.
Hooker earned a master’s degree in psychological services in 1947 from Columbia University, where she was one of just two black female students. In 1961, she earned her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Rochester and worked with women with disabilities.
She’s been celebrated by presidents including Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And there’s another book, Tulsa Girl, by Shameen Anthanio-Williams about her Oklahoma experience. And her accomplishments? “You get strength from within from believing you can do something and sometimes you get a real surprise,” Hooker said.