History in Our Everyday Lives

The Civil Rights Movement

In 1958, several years before the lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro, NC, Clara Luper, a black primary schoolteacher, and 13 of her young black students sat at the segregated front of the lunch counter at Katz Department store in Oklahoma City.¹⁰ They sat for two days before one of the workers finally decided to serve a child a hamburger. Almost immediately the tension eased. Four years later, when Civil Rights leaders and black students from all the Tulsa high schools organized to sit-in at restaurants and movie houses, Clara Luper was invited to help. While there is no official record of where the student participants were from, we can assume that at least a few were from Central. These sit-ins were met with arrests by local police, but not by violence from the police or counter protesters. On one occasion, Tulsa NAACP leader, Benjamin Roberts said that more than 600 protesters were arrested.¹¹ The students kept up the protests until one by one the establishments gave in and served their black customers along with the whites. As time wore on, more and more businesses gave in on the first challenge to segregation policies because of pressure from the public.

A great deal of this pressure came from the support of local news organizations that presented a fair picture of both sides of the story. The Tulsa Star and The Oklahoma Eagle, black run newspapers, pointed out injustices and the traditional newspapers such as the Tulsa World and Tulsa Tribune would occasionally republish some of their articles, placing even more pressure on the public. The senior editor of the Eagle was also the leader of the movement in Tulsa and the head pastor at the Vernon AME Church in downtown Tulsa. The Reverend Ben Hill and his wife Fannie Hill lead many student protests. Fannie Hill herself led students to Mohawk Park which at the time was a country club type of park, golf course and zoo and one of two elaborate parks with all the amenities. It was whites only, until, Mrs. Hill and her students protested daily to gain admittance.

Meanwhile, back at Old Central, black and white students participated together not only in the classrooms, but in a limited way, in clubs, sports and activities. Outside of the sports arena, it was a slow process because of resistance from both black and white cultures. Lawrence “Night Train” Lane (graduate 1966) talks about some of these issues in his 1969 interview in the Tulsa Tribune. Night Train was in basketball, A Capella choir, Key Club and Student Council. He found that his challenge was from blacks. “When a Negro is accepted by the white community, he is put on the spot by other Negroes who aren’t accepted”.¹² On the other hand, some of the premier clubs like the Camarata, a girl’s service group, said they were open to all students, but yearbook photos of the years 1958 – 1975 show very few, if any, faces that aren’t white. Was it reluctance to join on the part of black students or was it a symptom of discrimination within the school? The answer cannot be known for sure, but the lack of diversity did not change until after Old Central closed in 1975.