Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Death of One of the Last Survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 2018: Olivia Hooker (1915-2018)


From the November 29, 2018, Chicago Tribune  by DeNeen L. Brown of the Washington Post.

Olivia Hooker called it "The Catastrophe," the notorious 48 hours of fire and death that leveled "Black Wall Street" in Tulsa, Oklahoma when she was six-years-old.

The Tulsa Race Massacre erupted on May 31, 1921, when a white lynch mob descended on the courthouse where a young black teenager was being held.

A group of black World War I 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 businesses and residential property -- valued then at more than $1 million -- were destroyed.

Dr. Hooker later was among the first black women to serve in the U.S. Coast Guard and retired as an associate professor of psychology at Fordham University in New York.  But by the time of her death on Nov,. 21, at the age of 103, she had also become one of the last known survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

An Amazing Woman.

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