David Donell Hooper was born and raised in Lubbock, Texas. He went to segregated schools and was in junior high when Lubbock’s schools were integrated. Hooper witnessed when Willie Ray Collier (an African American student) was shot and killed September 9, 1970 at the historically African American Dunbar High School by Jeff Carve (a white student). Hooper also remembered the riots that followed, the police oppression enacted upon Lubbock’s African American community, and the visitation of the Black Panthers to Lubbock.