The Tulsa Race Massacre, 1921-- Part 6: What Could Have Been

 At Tulsa's Greenwood Leadership Academy school, classrooms are named after teh Dreamland movie theater and other black businesses that white Tulsans burned down, said Kristi Williams, operations manager at the school.  Her great aunt fled with her date from one theater when armed whites came to destroy the black part of town in 1921.

Williams, whose family descended from Blacks enslaved by the Oklahoma-based Muscogee (Creek) Indian nation, emphasizes to her students the joint power and financial resources that communities like Tulsa's Black Wall Street once embodied.

"I just always imagine -- what would Greenwood look like if the massacre never happened?  We had an economy within an economy," says Williams.  "What could have happened?  What could we be."

Never Forget Or Overlook the Past.  

The Tulsa Race Massacre, 1921-- Part 5: Educating the Young About It

 After generations of determined public silence on the massacre -- long dismissed by white Tulsans dismissively as a race "riot" -- black and white  Tulsans are increasingly trying to tell the story of Black Wall Street, including its fiery and deadly ending.

Teaching about the massacre is being added by state and city school standards, so that this fall third graders will learn about it. (I think third grade is a bit young, though.)  Even preschoolers in some districts are being told about -- not about how it ended, but what it was, said Danielle Neves, deputy chief of academics for Tulsa public schools.

"Four-year-olds can understand that people like them once owned movie theaters and hotels and had a thriving community," Neves said.

The Tulsa Race Massacre, 1921-- Part 3: Part of a Surge of White Attacks on Blacks in the Country

 The Tulsa rampage was part of a surge of white attacks on black communities-- from Washington, D.C., to Chicago to the Pacific Northwest--  at the time, said Scott Ellsworth, a historian who has worked for decades to bring the Tulsa massacre to light.

The Ku Klux Klan was surging as well, putting many of its members in public office and other influential positions.

In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson gave a White House screening and praise to "The Birth of a Nation," a tremendously influential and viciously racist film on the South.

You sure don't read much about these sad happenings from history, but they should be better known so they don't happen again.  It is horrible that Whites could do something like that to Blacks.  And, for no reason apparently.

I need to temper my anger at black rioting and looting with remembrances of things like this.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre-- Part 2: To Be Lynched for Stepping on a White Girl's Foot?

 Historians say that the trouble began after a Tulsa newspaper drummed up a furor over a black man who allegedly stepped on a white girl's foot.  When black Tulsans showed up to prevent his lynching, white Tulsans responded with overwhelming force.

A grand jury investigation at the time concluded, without evidence, that unidentified agitators had given Tulsa's Blacks firearms and what was described as their mistaken belief "in equal rights, social equality and their ability to demand the same."

Back in June of this year, President Trump was planning to hold a giant rally in Tulsa, which brought national interest back on this race riot.  That, and it was also originally planned for Juneteenth.

The black Greenwood District which was hit hard was once known as Tulsa's "Negro Wall Street."  Today, visitors from all over the country and of all races journey to the site.

Seriously?  To Be Lynched for Stepping on a White Girl's Foot?

Death of Olivia Hooker-- Part 7: The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and An Honor

Tulsa was racially segregated and reeling from a recent lynching when Dick Rowland, a black 19-year-old shoe-shiner, walked to the Drexel Building, which had the only toilet downtown available to black people.

Rowland stepped into an elevator.  Sarah Page, a white elevator operator, began to shriek.

"While it is still uncertain as to precisely what happened in the Drexel Building on May 30, 1921, the most common explanation is that Rowland stepped on Page's foot as he entered the elevator, causing her to scream," the Oklahoma Historical Society reported.

This was what caused the Tulsa Race Riot.

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As Hooker sat in the front row at a Coast Guard ceremony in 2015, she watched as President Barack Obama honored her, recounting her life story.  He described her as a "tireless voice for justice and equality."

I agree, she is one amazing woman.

Death of Tulsa Race Massacre Survivor Olivia Hooker-- Part 6: Education and the Commission

Olivia Juliet Hooker was born in Muscogee, Oklahoma, on February 12, 1915, and was one of five children.  She graduated from Ohio State University in 1937, then taught elementary school in Columbus, Ohio.

In 1947, she received a master's degree in psychology from Teachers College at Columbia University.  In 1961, she earned a doctorate from the University of Rochester.

In 1997, she 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 the cover up that followed and the total lack of remedy available in the courts at the time," according to a congressional report.

Death of Olivia Hooker-- Part 3: What Happened to Her Doll

One of her most searing memories 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 survived the massacre.  Her father temporarily located the family, including her mother and five children, to Topeka, Kansas, while her father remained in Oklahoma attempting to rebuild his business.

He later went on a speaking tour to black Methodist churches to bear witness to the murder and incineration in Tulsa.

When the family returned to Tulsa, she attended Booker T. Washington High School.  "The teachers were scholars, and they were determined every child would do his best,  every child would be taught the King's English."

Death of Olivia Hooker-- Part 2: Survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre

She was one of the last-known survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre in what is often regarded as the deadliest episode of racial violence in American history.

This event, and others like it, are rarely mentioned mentioned in history books.

In interviews about it, she recalled the rampage through the eyes of a child.  Her father had been the owner of a department store in the community of Greenwood, a center of commerce known as the 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 room table as their home was being ransacked.

"We could see what they were doing, she recalled.  They took everything they thought was valuable.  They smashed everything they couldn't take.  My mother has [opera singer Enrico] Caruso records she loved.  They smashed the Caruso records."

They also poured oil over her grandmother's bed but didn't light it because members of the white mob were still in the house.

"It took me a long time to get over the nightmares.  I was keeping my family awake screaming."

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.