A 103-year-old survivor of the Tulsa Race Riot will be featured on the debut episode of a new NPR podcast series that launches Thursday.
Dr. Olivia Hooker, who was 6 years old at the time of the 1921 riot, tells her story as part of “Last Witness,” a new series from NPR and Radio Diaries.
The series is billed as “featuring interviews with the only surviving witnesses to major historical events.”
In her segment, Hooker, a retired college professor and psychologist who now lives in New York, describes what it was like to be so young and confronted with something so horrifying.
During the riot on May 31, 1921, the family home was ransacked by a white mob while she and her siblings hid.
Her father’s successful clothing store, Samuel D. Hooker and Son, was also destroyed, along with the rest of Tulsa’s thriving black Greenwood District.
People are also reading…
The riot would leave at least 37 dead — although some unofficial estimates put the figure in the hundreds — and about 10,000 people homeless.
Afterward, Hooker’s family left and settled in Topeka, Kansas.
From there, she would go on to a life of distinction, becoming the first black woman to join the U.S. Coast Guard and earning her doctorate.
She later helped form the Tulsa Race Riot Commission to make a case for reparations for survivors.
Hooker returned to Tulsa in 2008 to attend the premiere of a film documentary about the riot, “Before They Die.”
Along with Hooker’s, other interviews on the first episode of “Last Witness” include Russell Gackenbach, a crew member from the mission to bomb Hiroshima; Nick Clifford, a Mount Rushmore construction worker; and Ted Petry, the lab assistant who witnessed atomic history.
The series can be found at radiodiaries.org, or through other podcast providers.
