Dr. Olivia J. Hooker was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma in 1915, and moved with her family to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father was a successful businessman who operated a clothing store and her mother was a former teacher in the Greenwood District, which was referred to as “the prairie’s own small turn-of-the-century Harlem”.
Dr. Olivia Hooker was six years old when her community in Tulsa was destroyed on May 31, 1921, in the worst race riot in the history of the United States. The Tulsa Riot resulted in the deaths of more than three hundred people, and the burning of more than one thousand homes and businesses. Dr. Olivia J. Hooker vividly remembers being awakened by the thudding sounds of machine gun ammunition raining down on her family’s home.