Norman street name reveals two distinctly different pasts
NORMAN — Although they arrived generations apart, two scholars from Michigan played significant roles in academics and race relations at the University of Oklahoma. Which side of the racial issues they fell on, however, was tied to the color of their skin.
Edwin DeBarr founded or led some of the school’s most important departments, including chemistry, engineering and pharmacy, and he taught for decades.
George Henderson founded the human relations department at OU, and he has taught and mentored students there for half a century.
But it was largely what each represented outside of the university that would distinguish them from one other. Henderson cut his teeth on civil rights activism in Detroit, and DeBarr rose to prominence as a leader in the Ku Klux Klan.
Now, almost a century after his dismissal from the university for his ties to the Klan, there is a renewed effort to remove DeBarr’s name from a street just north of campus and replace it with Henderson’s.
City Councilwoman Breea Clark started an online petition last month to galvanize support behind the proposed change.
Edwin DeBarr
DeBarr arrived in Norman in 1892, when the university was in its infancy. The Klan’s influence had waned in the two decades before DeBarr moved to Oklahoma, but it would experience a resurgence shortly after the turn of the century. In 1921, the Tulsa Tribune estimated 70,000 Oklahomans had joined the Klan’s ranks, and many believed that in the years that followed those numbers increased by tens of thousands.
“Before its force was spent, the Klan’s influence had reached every courthouse, every state office, and the campaign headquarters of both major parties,” historians James R. Scales and Danney Globes wrote in their book “Oklahoma Politics: A History.”
DeBarr became an influential figure at OU, academically and in student life. On campus he was known as “Daddy” DeBarr, and until 1988, when students and faculty lobbied the board of regents to have it removed, his named adorned the chemistry building.
In the university’s 1920 yearbook, a full page was devoted to a Ku Klux Klan club on campus. Two years later, author Upton Sinclair lambasted the regents for passing a decree that he saw as a way to forbid faculty from voicing opposition to Klan activity in local and state politics.
“I am told in good authority that the president of this board is a member of the Klan, as also is the vice president of the university, and about two-thirds of the faculty,” Sinclair wrote.
But it was that very policy that eventually removed DeBarr from his tenured position. By the time of Sinclair’s letter and the board’s decree, DeBarr was the university’s longest-sitting professor and was the Klan’s Grand Dragon of Oklahoma. In the following years he would continue to rise through the Klan ranks, eventually becoming its national chaplain.
But in 1923, after DeBarr gave public speeches on the perils of desegregation and diversity and was involved in state politics geared toward supporting fellow Klan members, the board of regents expelled him.
DeBarr continued to live in Norman for many years, and in 1935 he sat down with Lida White, a local teacher, to do an interview in which he unabashedly laid out his hatred of black people.
“The first negro I ever saw scared me into convulsions,” DeBarr said in the interview, which is part of OU’s Western History Collection.
“I was sitting on a rotten rail fence. Uncle Dorsey caught me as I fell. He took a year to pacify me. I still think of it when I see a negro. A negro in Michigan gave me more trouble than all the other pupils.”
When White asked DeBarr how he handled the student, he said, “I would tell the negro that the prejudice was so great he could not stay.”
George Henderson
When George Henderson came to Norman in 1967, there was no black community like the one he came from in Detroit. And Henderson, an assistant to the superintendent of the Detroit public school system, knew little of Oklahoma.
“I only had a warning from my mentor, ‘Don’t go there. They would not appreciate your values and your commitment to race relations and solving race relations problems,’” Henderson said Wednesday from his office in the Physical Science Center.
Henderson held a doctorate in sociology and had been a civil rights activist, social worker and teacher. Just three weeks after he signed a contract with OU, which paid $5,000 less per year than he was making at the time, race riots broke out two blocks from his home.
“Truth of the matter is, if I had not signed that contract I probably would be in Detroit or someplace else,” he said.
Henderson thought he might give Oklahoma a few years before moving on, but over dinner shortly after his arrival, leaders in Oklahoma City’s black community told him how much he was needed on campus.
“It was a challenge,” he said. “And I realized the gravity of that when I processed what had happened at that dinner meeting. Here, I am championed as the black savior academically. I didn’t want to fail, and I knew that was a possibility.”
Henderson and his wife, Barbara, committed to staying. They became Norman’s first black homeowners and raised their children there. They remain to this day in that home on Osborne Drive. But they felt anything but welcome those first years.
“The overt racism, the name calling, garbage on the lawn, a poorly made cross thrown on the lawn partially burned, my car egged, obscene phone calls at all hours. You name it, we experienced it,” he said.
“It was like either you can accept this as just something that’s not going to change and leave, or you can decide, as Barbara my wife decided for us, we brought our children here, they’re going to go to school here, we’re not going to pull them out and go to another school. This is our home. She said we will leave when we want to leave, not when someone else thinks we should leave. And I said ‘yes, ma’am.’”
Henderson said he would like to see the name of DeBarr Avenue changed, regardless of whether his name ever graces the street sign.
“Even if it doesn’t (change) it will remind the community again that historically, no matter how prominent some of our faculty members have been and are, that there’s another side of how they influence and affect the lives of our community,” he said.
“If the other side of that story is that those individuals were involved in activities that did not promote racial harmony, that ought to at least be noted. If nothing else, once again the community is reminded we’ve come a long way from DeBarr to the Hendersons.”