Affirm Black Women Portrait Series: Olivia Hooker
Olivia Hooker died at the age of 103 in 2018 and was one of the last survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre. During WWII she became the first Black woman to join the US Coast Guard and later went on to become a psychologist who worked with incarcerated women with learning disabilities, and a professor at Fordham University.
As a young child Ms. Hooker lived in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma which was known as the “Black Wall Street” because of its concentration of Black wealth and Black-owned businesses. In 1921, after a Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman, thousands of white residents attacked the Greenwood District setting fire to Black businesses and shooting Black men, women, and children as they fled the mob looting and destroying their homes. Planes circling overhead fired bullets and dropped firebombs. Within the span of two days the attack destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district, murdered a still disputed number of Black people ranging from 36 to 300 or more, and left 10,000 Black residents homeless. Black citizens never received insurance payments for the property lost and damaged. To this day they have not received restitution.
Ms. Hooker was 6 years old at the time of the massacre and later described the memory of white men carrying torches and destroying her home. When she asked her mother about the hail she heard despite the sunny day, her mother pulled her to the window, pointed to machine guns and said, “That is not hail. Those are bullets. Your country is shooting at you.”
View the complete Affirm Black Women portrait series here