Olivia Hooker called it The Catastrophe, the notorious 48 hours of fire and death that leveled Black Wall Street in Tulsa. 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. Dr. Hooker later was among the first black women to serve in the Coast Guard and retired as an associate professor of psychology at Fordham University in New York. But at the time of her death on Nov. 21 at 103, she had also become one of the last known survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre 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, if mentioned at all. In interviews, she recalled the details of the rampage through a young girls frightened eyes. Her father had been an owner of a department store in the community of Greenwood, a center 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-room table as their home was being ransacked. We could see what they were doing, she told The Washington Post in June. They took everything they thought was valuable. They smashed everything they couldnt take. My mother had [opera singer Enrico] Caruso records she loved. They smashed the Caruso records.
They also poured oil over her grandmothers bed but didnt light it because members of the white mob were still in the house. It took me a long time to get over my nightmares, she told The Post. I was keeping my family awake screaming. As a little girl, 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 dolls clothes. I thought that was dreadful.
Incredible that she made it to 103 after having to endure that catastrophe at such a young age.
CElute! It's nice to know she was able to become successful after having to endure that tragedy. I couldn't imagine having to deal with those nightmares. ---