Olivia Hooker Witnessed the Tulsa, OK Race Riot As A Child & Grew Up To Make Military History
'Before Making History She Witnessed One Of History's Worst Race Riots,' NPR, Feb. 28. 2020.
Olivia Hooker was a 6-year-old in Tulsa, Okla., when a race riot destroyed her community as well as her own home. In less than 24 hours, mobs of white men destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses in the Greenwood District, an affluent African American neighborhood of Tulsa. It's estimated as many as 300 people were killed. As they wrecked her own home, she and her three siblings quietly hid under a dining room table, careful not to make a sound. The Tulsa Race Riot is considered one of the worst race riots in American history. Living through it inspired Hooker to fight for civil rights.
Hooker was also the first African American woman to join the Coast Guard. She talked about that part of her life in an interview at StoryCorps in 2018; she died just two months after it was recorded, at 103 years old.
-- Olivia Hooker (front) with Aileen Anita Cooks (behind) are seen in March 1945 on the USS Commodore, during boot training at Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn, N.Y. (U.S. Coast Guard).
"I had not yearned for military life," she admitted. "The only reason I was there was that we had campaigned for women in military and nobody seemed to be joining." While at Ohio State University, she and her sorority sisters championed to get the Navy to open its doors to African American women. Hooker applied to the women's branch of the U.S. Navy, also known as the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), but she was rejected. The Navy began allowing women of color to join in 1944. Even though the ban was lifted, the composition of Navy was slow to change. Hooker figured, "it's a shame to battle for our civil rights and then have no one take advantage of it," she told the American Psychological Association's Monitor magazine.
So she did. She joined the Coast Guard a few months after the military branch officially let in African American women. She served until her unit disbanded the following year. When she applied for Coast Guard, she says, she didn't know anything about boats...
More, https://www.npr.org/2020/02/28/809759133/before-making-military-history-she-witnessed-one-of-historys-worst-race-riots
-- In her StoryCorps interview in September 2018, Olivia Hooker talked about her experience as the first black woman to enter the Coast Guard.
- Tulsa Race Massacre, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
-- Fires burning across Archer and Greenwood during the Tulsa race riot in 1921.
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