“They didn’t break the [family’s] old rugged cross,” said Hooker, who has lived in White Plains [Greenburgh] for the last 59 years. “In a sense, they gave us a message about what they thought was appropriate for us.”
The mostly black Oklahoma neighborhood was burned to the ground that day in 1921 during the Tulsa Race Riots—according the New York Times, 300 people died that day while 8,000 were rendered homeless. Some reported that airplanes were flying over Tulsa that day dropping incendiary bombs, but Hooker says that’s not what children read about in history books.
