In 1949, Gertrude Jeannette witnessed the Peekskill Riots in New York. “That’s the first time I saw the Ku Klux Klan,” she said. The KKK had come to protest a concert by Paul Robeson, a civil rights icon.
Ms. Jeannette attended the concert along with the motorcycle club she belonged to, the Harlem Dusters. She was, in fact, one of the first women in New York City to obtain a motorcycle license.
Ms. Jeannette was a playwright, and acted in plays and films from Our Town to Shaft. Her New York Times obituary recounts how her acting career sprang from taking a speech class, in which she had enrolled to attempt to correct her childhood stammer.
She paid for the speech classes with money she earned driving a taxicab. At the time, cabbies were referred to as “hacks.” Hack is a word with many meanings; in the context of taxis it short for hackney, which derives from a Middle English word for horse. Ms. Jeannette is believed to be the first woman in New York City to obtain a hack license.
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As a little girl, her most searing memory of the massacre was what the mob did to her doll. “My grandmother had made some beautiful clothes for my doll… She washed them and put them on the line. When the marauders came, the first thing they did was set fire to my doll’s clothes. I thought that was dreadful.”
Olivia Hooker hid under a table during one of the worst incidents of racial violence in US history. This experience, described in her Washington Post obituary, no doubt encouraged her interest in human behavior; years later she earned a doctorate in psychology. Her focus was on helping those in need.
Spar is a word with many meanings. In the context of the United States Coast Card, it is a shortened version of their motto Semper Paratus (always ready), and was the term for female reserve members during World War II. Ms. Hooker, one of the last known survivors of the Tulsa Race Massacre, was also the first African-American woman to serve in the United States Coast Guard.