The United States Coast Guard has announced the death of Dr. Olivia Hooker at the age of 103.
Dr. Hooker was the first African American woman to enlist in the Coast Guard in 1945.
Born in 1915 in Muskogee, Okla., Hooker was a survivor of the infamous Tulsa Race Riots in 1921, when the Ku Klux Klan burned her father's clothing store. Her family survived the riots, but they departed Oklahoma when her father desired to live in a community where his children could live without fear of violence while getting an education.
They moved to Topeka, Kan., and later Columbus, Ohio. Hooker graduated from high school in Columbus in 1937. She earned a bachelor's degree in education at Ohio State University. She went on to teach third grade in Columbus for the next eight years.
By the mid-40s, after President Franklin Roosevelt opened female military corps to all minority groups and not just whites. African American women began to enlist in the military. Encouraged by a friend, author and Coast Guardsman Alex Haley, Hooker joined the military.
According to a Coast Guard biography of Hooker, she was accepted into the Coast Guard SPARs in 1945.
“It was not easy for Miss Hooker to take the step of enlistment. She is the first Negro woman to be accepted by the SPARs, and is in full realization of this fact. She feels a sincere desire to serve and further feels that she is opening a field for the young women of her own race," said Lt. Margaret Tighe, a recruiter at the Columbus station.
After completing boot camp and training, she worked at the Coast Guard Personnel Separation Center in Boston helping Coast Guardsmen returning from the war to rejoin civilian life. By the middle of 1946, the SPARs were disbanded, and Hooker was able to use her GI Bill benefits to earn a masters degree and doctorate in psychology to further her career.
By the time she retired in 2002 at the age of 87, she had served her community and nation as a pioneer in education and mental health care as well as for minorities in the Coast Guard.
