Eyewitness to the Desolation of 'Black Wall Street'

[JHan]

"Her name is Olivia J. Hooker, and she is a sharp and glorious 103 years old. Not only was she the first African-American woman to join the Coast Guard, not only was she a psychology professor and activist, but she is one of the last known survivors of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. During the riot, white residents destroyed the prosperous black neighborhood of Greenwood, which had come to be known as “Black Wall Street.” A report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot said, “It is estimated that approximately 11,000 blacks resided in Tulsa in 1921, most living in the area of the Greenwood section.” As many as 300 people were killed and 8,000 left homeless.

As The New York Times wrote in 2011 on the 90th anniversary, the Tulsa riot “may be the deadliest occurrence of racial violence in United States history.” And yet, as the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum points out, not one act of violence that occurred that day “was then or ever has been prosecuted or punished by government at any level: municipal, county, state, or federal.”"American history is full of stories of black people doing precisely what America says it wants of its citizens — being creative, enterprising and industrious, being self-respecting and self-sufficient — only to have white people destroy what they’ve built, impede their progress and erase their wealth. And those are not far-off stories: Those are also the stories of the living."

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She described an idyllic life of school, visits to the grocery store whenever she had two pennies, and her fear of the trolley that ran through town.

But that was all ripped apart one day in her sixth summer, when Greenwood erupted.

White men broke into their house as Hooker and some of her siblings hid beneath an oak dining table, draped with a tablecloth.

“They took a hatchet to my sisters’ piano. They poured oil all over my grandmother’s bed.” They “stuffed the dresser” with ammunition, Hooker told me. Maybe they had intended to burn or destroy the house, but they didn’t.

She continued, “They took all the beautiful biscuits out of the oven and threw them out in the mud.” We both managed a laugh.

They broke the phonograph and the Enrico Caruso records her mother had received as a gift from a friend who had gone to study in Heidelberg, Germany.

“They didn’t appreciate you having anything classical,” Hooker said. “They took all the silverware that Momma had just got for Christmas, coffee pot, teapot — you know, that kind of beautiful stuff. If anything looked precious, they took it.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/13/opinion/olivia-hooker-tulsa-race-riot.html

[Runningdawg]

1. The Tulsa World recently reported on this

and asked the question - Is it time to stop calling it a riot and start calling it a massacre?

Lord have mercy - Tulsans tried to break the internet. After about 500 comments on the story, many of them worthy of their own FBI investigations, they finally pulled the story. It seems too many current residents think their ancestors should have finished the job and they are chopping at the bit for their shot. I've lived in Tulsa since 1981, I currently live just off Greenwood. I have never seen Tulsa more divided racially than it is now. As it is with most social issues, OK seems to take 1 step forward and 3 steps back.

[JHan]

2. damn. That is crazy.

Trumpism has exposed the ugliness that was always there.