Let’s look back at a tragedy which dramatically overshadows today’s current event. It is one of the most bleak and secretive tragedies in our past. It is so secretive that my thoughtful guide in Oklahoma knew nothing about it, and I had to direct him to its site. It is the worst race riot in U.S. history.

Ms Hooker, who died on Wednesday at home in White Plains, New York, thousands of miles and almost 100 years away from the riots in Tulsa, was born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in February 1915. By the time she was six, the family had moved to Tulsa, where her father had “a very nice store” which “didn’t carry shoddy things.”

As I stood in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma I was amazed by the lushness of its greenery and sense of cosmopolitism. This was my first trip to Oklahoma, and in my naiveté, I had thought the whole state was one big Dust Bowl. Perhaps I had seen John Ford’s film adaption of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath too many times, but that image had been branded in my mind.