One hundred years ago this coming Monday (May 31st), a White mob descended on the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street and, armed with weapons provided by city officials, attacked Black residents and businesses.
By the time it ended, two days later, the Tulsa Race Massacre had left 300 Black Tulsans dead and more than 40 homes and businesses destroyed. In the wake of the attack, martial law was imposed, and thousands of Black residents were imprisoned.
Watch the videotaped message that Olivia Hooker recorded in 2016 when she received TC's Distinguished Alumni Award.
The immediate “provocation” for the worst mass attack on Black Americans in the nation’s history was a spate of sensationalized newspaper stories claiming that a 19-year-old Black man had offended a 17-year-old White female elevator attendant. But that pretext clearly served broader racist aims: As reported on a recent National Public Radio segment, the massacre obliterated one of the nation’s most affluent and culturally influential Black communities, and much of the property in the Greenwood District ended up — and remains — in White hands. (Listen to the NPR segment “A Century After the Race Massacre, Tulsa Confronts Its Bloody Past.”)
The late Teachers College alumna Olivia Hooker (M.A. ’47) was one of the last survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre. When she died in 2018 at the age of 103, NPR ran a clip of an interview in which she recalled the terror she endured with her family when she was six years old.
It would be a lovely world if everybody was peaceful in their efforts and aims.
—The late Olivia Hooker (M.A. ’47)
Two years earlier, at Teachers College’s Academic Festival, Hooker was honored with the College’s Distinguished Alumni Award for her outstanding contributions as a psychologist, educator and pioneering member of the United States Coast Guard. Though she was unable to attend, she sent a videotaped message (above) in which she reflected that “It would be a lovely world if everybody was peaceful in their efforts and aims.”
Teachers College salutes the memory of Olivia Hooker and all who have endured and triumphed over racism and injustice.