Educator Olivia Hooker (M.A. ’47), the last survivor of the infamous Tulsa race massacre of 1921 and the first-active duty African-American woman to serve in the U.S. Coast Guard, has died at the age of 103.

Hooker, a prominent advocate for the learning disabled, served as Professor of Psychology at Fordham University for many years, retiring in 1985. While at Fordham she founded a division of the American Psychological Association focused on individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities, her areas of specialization.

Hooker, who lived in White Plains, New York, received Teachers College’s Distinguished Alumni award in 2016.

As many as 300 black Tulsans perished over the course of two days in 1921 when a false report of a black teen assaulting a white woman prompted a white mob to attack Tulsa’s prosperous black Greenwood district.

In an NPR interview recorded shortly before her death, Hooker recalled her mother hiding her and three siblings under a table with orders “not to say a word” as white marauders descended on the family home.

“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,” Hooker told NPR. “And they were teaching you a lesson. Those were all new ideas to me.”

It would be a lovely world if everybody was peaceful in their efforts and aims."

—Olivia Hooker

Hooker’s family subsequently relocated to Kansas and then Ohio. Hooker earned an undergraduate degree from The Ohio State University and was teaching at an elementary school at the outset of World War II. Rejected in a bid to enlist in the Navy, she instead joined the Coast Guard in 1945.

In an oral history interview compiled by the White Plains Library, Hooker noted that she was not, in fact, the first black woman to serve in that military branch, which began accepting female reservists in 1942.

“I was the first one in active duty,” she said. “There may have been others that were planning to go in, but I was the first one that actually arrived.”

The Coast Guard recognized Hooker in 2015 by christening a Sector New York Galley on Staten Island with her name.

African Americans were also under-represented on college campuses when Hooker arrived at Teachers College following the war.

She has been a professor and mentor to her students [and] a tireless voice for justice and equality.”

—President Barack Obama

In 2016, when illness prevented her from appearing at TC’s Academic Festival to receive the Distinguished Alumni Award, Hooker sent a videotape of herself in which she saluted the College for helping minority students “cross the great divide” and for its “vision in making sure we had access.”

In that same tape, Hooker said that along with her parents, her TC mentor, the late TC Psychologist Nicholas Hobbs, deserved credit for her success at Teachers College and beyond.    

“He found ingenious ways to help those who were not [treated as] equal to everyone else,” she said of Hobbs, adding, “It would be a lovely world if everybody was peaceful in their efforts and aims. Once in a while you find somebody that’s spent their lives trying to make things better for all of us, and that is a pleasure.”

At the Coast Guard Academy’s 2015 commencement exercises, President Barack Obama singled out Hooker herself as someone who met that standard.   

“She has been a professor and mentor to her students,” Obama said, and “a tireless voice for justice and equality.” – Steve Giegerich