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NY Times, Nov. 24, 2018
Olivia Hooker, 103, Dies; Witness to an Ugly Moment in History
By Neil Genzlinger
Olivia Hooker, who after surviving a race-related attack on a black
section of Tulsa, Okla., in 1921 went on to become the first black woman
to enlist in the Coast Guard and a distinguished psychology professor at
Fordham University, died on Wednesday at her home in White Plains, N.Y.
She was 103.
The Coast Guard announced her death on Twitter.
U.S. Coast Guard
✔
@USCG
On behalf of the men and women of the #USCG, we extend our sincere
condolences to the family of Dr. Olivia Hooker, who passed away today at
103. In 1945, she was the first African-American female to enlist in the
#USCG. Read more about Dr. Hooker's life: http://goo.gl/xsjPNg
Admiral Karl Schultz
✔
@ComdtUSCG
It is with great sadness to learn of the passing of Dr. Olivia Hooker,
103, a pioneer in the history of women & minorities in the @USCG & the
Nation. On behalf of the #USCG, we’d like to extend our sincere
condolences to Dr. Hooker’s family.
Dr. Hooker was 6 when white mobs stormed through the Greenwood District
of Tulsa, destroying homes and businesses in a wave of violence often
labeled the Tulsa race riot, although that term has fallen into disfavor
among many. Dr. Hooker, in an oral history recorded in 2015 for the
White Plains Public Library, instead called it “the terrible catastrophe
in Tulsa.”
“Other people call it the Tulsa riot,” she explained. “It really wasn’t
a riot — we were the victims.”
The rampage was touched off by false rumors that a black teenager had
assaulted a white woman. A state report compiled decades after the fact
estimated that 100 to 300 people died. Dr. Hooker was thought to be
among the last surviving witnesses to the attacks.
Olivia Juliette Hooker was born on Feb. 12, 1915, in Muskogee, Okla., to
Samuel and Anita (Stigger) Hooker. She remembered that when the attacks
started, she saw men with torches storming into the family’s backyard
and her mother acting to protect her and her three siblings.
“Our mother put us under the table,” she recently told NPR. “She took
the longest tablecloth she had to cover four children and told us not to
say a word.”
The marauders entered the house and took an ax to the family piano. In
the business district, her father’s clothing store was destroyed.
“I guess the most shocking thing was seeing people, to whom you had
never done anything to irritate, who just took it upon themselves to
destroy your property because they didn’t want you to have those
things,” she said. “And they were teaching you a lesson. Those were all
new ideas to me.”
After the destruction, her parents moved the family to Topeka, Kan., and
later to Ohio. In 1937 Dr. Hooker received a bachelor’s degree at Ohio
State University and became an elementary-school teacher.
With the international situation growing more ominous, she tried to
enlist in the Navy but was rejected for reasons never made clear to her.
Instead she tried the Coast Guard, which in 1942 had been authorized to
create a women’s reserve unit that it called the Spars. (“Spar” is the
first letter of the first word and the first three letters of the second
word of the Coast Guard’s Latin motto, Semper Paratus, meaning “always
ready”).
“The Coast Guard recruiter was just so welcoming,” she told Coast Guard
Compass, the service’s official blog, in 2013. “She wanted to be the
first one to enroll an African-American.”
She was accepted in 1945 and is generally identified as the Coast
Guard’s first black woman, although she herself qualified the distinction.
“I was the first one in active duty,” she said in the library oral
history. “There may have been others that were planning to go in, but I
was the first one that actually arrived.”
She was assigned to the “separation center” in Boston, where she typed
discharges and other paperwork. After World War II had ended and the
women’s reserve was disbanding, she typed her own discharge papers, in 1946.
In 2015 the Coast Guard named a building at its Staten Island complex
after her.
She received a master’s degree in psychological services at Columbia
University in 1947 and a doctorate in psychology at the University of
Rochester in 1961.
Dr. Hooker was on the Fordham faculty from 1963 to 1985. Her areas of
expertise included people with developmental and intellectual
disabilities. She helped found the American Psychological Association’s
Division 33, which focuses on the needs of those populations.
Information about Dr. Hooker’s survivors was not immediately available.
In 2015, at age 100, Dr. Hooker was in the audience when President
Barack Obama, giving the commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy
in New London, Conn., singled her out.
“She has been a professor and mentor to her students,” Mr. Obama said,
“a passionate advocate for Americans with disabilities, a psychologist
counseling young children, a caregiver at the height of the AIDS
epidemic, a tireless voice for justice and equality.”
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