Desegregation
The 1954 Brown v The Board of Education decision started the push for desegregation in Oklahoma, where segregation was both de jure (by law) and de facto(in fact). In the 1957 - 1958 school year, the same year that the “Little Rock Nine” fought for a place at their Central High School, five black students walked the halls of Tulsa’s Old Central. Unlike the Little Rock story, no lines of protesting whites shouted, no guard troops blocked the doors and no national media followed them around. Juan Dola Washington and Deloris Hardeman began as juniors; Charlie Jones, Louie Moore and Peaches Littlejohn started as sophomores. 8 I have placed the yearbook pictures from that year in Appendix A, Figure 1.
In a 1997 interview with the Tulsa World9, Louie Moore reflected on how he felt accepted and welcomed at Old Central. “I did not have a problem’ Moore said,” I felt like I was treated equal. I was quite comfortable at Central.” Peaches Littlejohn said in the same news report that students seemed to be proud of the “novelty of black students and most were eager to make black friends.” Charlie Jones was a little different in that he was mixed race, half-white and half-black. He said he really didn’t feel fully accepted anywhere, although Central was much better for him than the still all-black Booker T. In 1959, Juan Dola became the first black graduate followed a year later by the others. There is no public record of why Deloris Hardeman did not attend Central her senior year. More black students enrolled each year so that in 1966 the black student population was about 10% of the more than 2500 students enrolled: a percentage that was mirrored in the city of Tulsa itself. Those first 10 years of integration came and went with little social turmoil or unrest.
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