need to talk about how they lived and what they built. we have to talk about what s left behind. that story lasts for a hundred years. the massacre was two days. o lord there can never be a light to take the darkness away people say why don t you leave here? because the memory of something that i will never see anywhere else is still here. these pages contain all the photographs of my ancestors who lived in greenwood. the memory. we re connected to our memories. olivia hooker who was a survivor
was a really beautiful soul. that night of the massacre, olivia hooker, a 6-year-old girl, saw her own home ripped apart. white folks came into her house, destroyed her piano with a hatchet, and when they left, she went over there and she struck the key board. and there was still sound coming out of that piano. that s who greenwood is. you might destroy the outside of me. you might shoot me. you might burn me. you won t destroy my soul. we still sing. we have these cycles of greenwood being built, destroyed, rebuilt. if you look at it all together
one of them is just, we were talking about veterans and the connective tissues that that can build. and that s absolutely correct. of course, then, you look at what happened in tulsa, and you have images today of hundreds of world war i black veterans from world war i being rounded up and put into the equivalent of local concentration camps and many of them lynched. it s a very harsh, difficult history that is still prescient today when you think, we still have survivors from this. the other reason this is an important story is because i think americans, especially white americans, but americans in general tend to be very good at forgetting history, but also tend to think that slavery was a very long time ago and that discrimination was a very long time ago. the reality is not that s just not the case. so we have individuals. i spoke, actually, to dr. olivia
Olivia Hooker in 2021 and 2018
On May 31, 1921, Olivia Hooker was six-years-old when white mobs launched an attack on the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. In less than 24 hours, the mobs destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses. It’s estimated as many as 300 people were killed. The Tulsa Race Massacre is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history.
For decades, the events of 1921 were rarely discussed or taught in school. But in 1971, Impact Magazine editor Don Ross published one of the first accounts of the race riots in nearly 50 years. He went on to become a state representative and, along with State Senator Maxine Horner, is credited with bringing national attention to the buried history.