COUNTER PROTEST
60 years ago, 13 students changed U.S. history
Sixty years ago, a group of 13 children sat down in Oklahoma City and changed the course of American history.
It was Aug. 19, 1958, and members of the Oklahoma City NAACP Youth Council walked into an all-white drugstore chain downtown. Sitting at the lunch counter, they politely asked for hamburgers and Cokes.
They were not surprised when their requests were refused, nor when they were asked to leave.
They sat in peaceful protest, letting the insults and glares from white customers roll off their backs, patiently waiting to be served.
Two days later, Katz Drug Stores ended its segregation policy.
No remnant is left of the store that once stood at west side of Robinson Avenue and Main Street, but those involved in the sit-in refuse to let the event fade from people’s minds.
The Oklahoma City Sit-In Movement Planning Committee organized five events for Aug. 16-19 to recognize sit-in participants and reflect on the state’s history of race relations.
Ayanna Najuma, who was 7 years old when she participated in the sit-in, will speak at the first event. Najuma said she remembers the Katz Drug Store sit-in vividly, as well as the other sit-ins she participated in for the next seven years.
Najuma said Clara Luper, the NAACP Youth Council’s sponsor and the woman many call the mother of the civil rights movement in Oklahoma, led participating children through a type of boot camp before the sit-ins. Luper taught them how to react in situations without causing escalation or violence, Najuma said. Luper taught them their oppressors were not inherently evil, they were only resistant to change.
“Change is very difficult for people,” Najuma said. “Clara always taught us, you know, really, that’s a good person on the inside, there. They don’t really want to say and do all these horrible things, they’re just having a little problem adjusting to change.”
Most of the children grew up in a segregated Oklahoma City and had never known anything else until earlier that year, when the group took a trip to New York. The NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights organization, requested Luper perform her play, “Brother President,” in New York City. The youth council doubled as cast members in the play, so Luper loaded up the children and they trucked to the city. There, the children’s eyes were opened to a desegregated world.
“We saw a whole new type of lifestyle and attitude,” Najuma said. “There was no (visible) discrimination in New York City. There were no signs that said ‘colored’ or ‘white.’ We were able to eat in restaurants and stay in the hotels with white people. It was a fabulous time for us there.”
Upon returning to Oklahoma, they saw public areas where signs reading “colored” and “white” divided the races in a different light. Luper and the council worked with church leaders to develop the idea of sit-ins, peaceful protests, and the movement began.
Overlooked
The event was one of the earliest of its kind and had a significant impact on civil rights in Oklahoma, but it’s not recognized nationally. There’s no mention of it at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016.
Most historical collections that detail the progress of the civil rights movement highlight the 1960 sit-in at a Woolworth department store in Greensboro, North Carolina, as the first, neglecting Oklahoma City’s successful movement two years earlier.
Bruce Fisher, the Oklahoma History Center’s special projects coordinator and son of Oklahoma civil rights activist Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, said the upcoming commemorative events were organized in part to bring attention to Oklahoma City’s role. There might be many sit-in movements that preceded Greensboro’s and Oklahoma City’s, but Fisher said he’s planning to set the record straight and get Oklahoma City’s sit-in in museums everywhere.
“It’s too important to overlook,” Fisher said. “We’re not trying to change history, just complete it.”
Fisher said he hadn’t contacted the museum because he wanted to pull together a package of historical evidence and gain the support of the Oklahoma congressional delegation before presenting his case to the Smithsonian.
Understanding the past for the future
Bob Blackburn, executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society, said people must look at the past to have a wellinformed dialogue about race relations in Oklahoma today.
Blackburn said slavery entered present-day Oklahoma when the Five Civilized Tribes moved west in the 1820s. From the end of the Civil War through the beginning of the 20th century, “separate but equal” was the mindset of the times and segregation was commonplace, leading to allblack towns, Blackburn said.
Following court cases such as Sipuel v. Board of Regents of University of Oklahoma and Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law in 1964. But segregation continued in Oklahoma well into the 1960s, Blackburn said.
“I graduated from high school in 1969,” Blackburn said. “I never went to school with a black person until I got to college.”
Although the law had changed, Blackburn said, segregation was embedded in Oklahoma’s culture. Proponents of desegregation faced the challenge of changing the perception of race relations in people’s hearts.
Blackburn said the change flourished through a new medium for sharing information: television.
“The power of television, of bringing those kids into their living room — that started to humanize the story,” Blackburn said. “Suddenly, they see these are real people. These are kids, who are afraid like their own children would be.”
The hearts of people who had never been around black people, never shopped with them, gone to church with them or shared a streetcar with them, began to change, Blackburn said. This countered racists’ attempts to dehumanize black people.
“Dehumanizing is a tool for white supremacy,” Blackburn said. “If they’re not real humans, (people) aren’t going to be as sympathetic. Hitler was a master at that.”
Although segregation is largely viewed as an issue of the past, Blackburn said it is still an American problem. In Oklahoma City, he pointed to de facto segregation in neighborhoods and the more than 70 predominantly black churches in the metro. There has been progress, but people still put limitations on others based on the color of their skin, Blackburn said.
“We’re dealing with the legacy of several hundred years,” Blackburn added. “It’s going to take generations to wash that out of our system.”
People must keep talking about race relations if they want them
to improve, and that is exactly what these anniversary events were planned for, Blackburn said. It’s not only about understanding the protections afforded to every American citizen by law, but also changing every individual’s heart and mind and daily actions.
“The vast majority of Americans would say they don’t believe in white supremacy, yet they might still have racist thoughts; they might jump to a conclusion about a person based on their race,” Blackburn said. “People like Clara Luper understood that if we don’t do something about it, we are abetting.”