50 years ago, children helped change nation when they sat down Children ‘were too young to be afraid'
City protest was sparked by the simplest of questionsOn Aug. 19, 1958, Clara Luper led 13 children into Katz Drug Store. Th
50 years ago, Oklahoma City children helped change nation when they sat down

By Devona Walker

Published: August 19, 2008

In their childhood, their world was divided. Separate but equal was custom or law at schools, parks, rest rooms, water fountains and restaurants. As children, they changed those customs. As children, they helped change America.

Fifty years ago today, the Katz Drug Store sit-in was one of the first civil rights protests in the nation. Executed by children — the youngest 6 and the oldest 17 — it was arguably the boldest. It sparked other protests in Oklahoma City that lasted more than four years. The Katz sit-in was borne from the question a child asked her mother.

"I asked Momma why? Why didn't I just go in and ask for a Coca-Cola and a hamburger?” said Marilyn Luper Hildreth, now 60.

At the time she was 10. It was a hot summer day. She did not realize she was challenging generations of oppression and segregation, an entire legacy held over from slavery. Her mother knew.

Clara Luper quickly began to train the children in the disciplines of nonviolent disobedience. She tutored them not to react when they were spat upon. She coached them how to lie down and protect themselves when they were hit. She instructed them to be polite, but forceful.

On Aug. 19, 1958, Clara Luper led 13 children into Katz Drug Store. They took seats at a nearly empty lunch counter. They ordered hamburgers and Cokes, but the waitress said they would not be served. They stayed for hours. They returned the next day, then the next, when finally they were served at Katz.

The protests expanded to nearly every restaurant in downtown Oklahoma City and continued for the next four years.

In the end, they had effectively integrated every eating establishment in the city.

"We only had one store in mind. One store. One hamburger and one Coca-Cola. Later, we understood the importance of what we did back then,” said Marilyn Luper Hildreth, now a local insurance agent, mother and grandmother. "It taught us to be tough. You had to have thick skin. My momma use to always say if you don't have thick skin, you better go buy you some thick skin.”

Marilyn Luper and the other children were physically and verbally assaulted. One day, someone turned a trained monkey on them. Douglas High School was threatened with a bombing and Marilyn Luper had to be escorted off campus by the FBI. Threats were made to the Luper home.

Like most older brothers, Calvin Luper knew his first responsibility was to stay out of trouble and harm's way. A close second was keeping a watchful eye over his sister. That summer, he recalls, was so hot that everyone was drenched in their own sweat. Women fanned themselves with their pocket books. Men fanned themselves with folded newspapers. The bus they rode to Katz was without air conditioning, and the dry, Oklahoma heat soaked his skin.

"Momma always put on this front as if nothing ever bothered her. As if nothing ever got her scared. But I think she did that for us, just to keep us from getting scared. I think she thought that strength would rub off on us,” Calvin Luper said.

The might not have happened if the NAACP Youth Council had not made a trip to New York. There the kids were exposed to cities that did not practice segregation. They ate in restaurants and stayed in hotels for the first time in their young lives. On their way home, the familiar signs returned, the black and white drinking faucets and separate restrooms. Coming home, they were once again eating their meals on the bus out of brown paper bags.

The children, once chattering excitedly, were quiet as they returned to Oklahoma. Their overnight bags, filled with keepsakes from their trip, now represented a life outside their grasp.

"It was a realization,” Calvin Luper said. "We had no idea it was going to go national. We just knew we had to do something.”

"We were too young to be afraid,” Williams said, admitting that at that age he was fearless to a fault. Months before the Katz Drug Store sit-in, Williams and a few classmates staged an impromptu protest, vocally opposing segregation at another eating establishment.

That protest, however, lacked organization.

"Ms. Luper was very influential. She had a lot of passion for change; that was the thing that was most noticeable,” said Williams, a speech pathologist in Oklahoma City. "She wasn't the kind of person to have a hobby. She was always involved in the cause.”

Of those original protesters, all went to college. Some earned advanced graduate degrees. The ultimate life achievements of these youth, at a time when obstacles facing black people interested in higher education were immense, makes one wonder if this joint experience had somehow prepared them for living exceptional lives.

"It's one of those things: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” Williams said. "I think maybe we had more of an effect on the movement than it had on us.”

By the end of the protest, he was well into the middle of his first year of college. He came home on weekends to participate. The retired school teacher says that period of his youth, second only to his family, were the proudest moments of his life.

"I participated in change and now you can go into any restaurant and see all the races having lunch, dinner or whatever,” Brown said.

Brown, like many blacks of that era, rarely ate in restaurants before the sit-ins. Once a week, his mother would leave bus money for him on the nightstand, then with a kiss on the forehead, she would tell him to come downtown and she would buy him lunch. It was a dear time for mother and son, something they both looked forward to all week. But it was always in the corner of a restaurant's kitchen. They were not allowed to eat in the dining room with white people.

"I did understand it. I knew unconsciously that it was a separate but equal law. I knew you couldn't eat out front with the white customers,” Brown said. "That was handed down to you from your parents because they knew the rules and what the limits were.”

When he first told his mother about the protest, she was less than enthusiastic. She was more concerned with his safety than making history. But Clara Luper was her own sister, and she had more faith in family than anything else.

"Clara would drill it into you, you are somebody,” Richard Brown said. "She would say, ‘Don't ever let anybody tell you that you are not somebody.' With time, it kind of wore off on me.”

Posey does not remember how she came to be the group's spokeswoman. Nonetheless, it was she who ordered the original 13 Cokes.

"The waitress said, ‘We're sorry. We can't serve you here.' And I said, ‘Well, thank you. We'll wait until you can,'” Posey said.

Posey went on to earn a doctorate's degree in economics from Georgia State University. For years she was a professor of economics at Clark Coolege. She is currently a professor at Alabama A&M.

"How much influence has all this had on my life?” Posey asked. "It has been my life.”

She was the oldest of the original 13. Even at that age, she was a striking presence. Standing nearly 6 feet 2 inches, she towered above the other children. She was a little self-conscious about her height and had a habit of walking with bowed shoulders. At the time, she wore her hair straight, pulled back into a ponytail. Later in life, when she started teaching school, she was known by her students for her commanding Afro. Later, after returning to school and getting a law degree, she was known by her clients as being a dedicated and tireless advocate.

"I'm proud that I could be a part of the beginning of change in Oklahoma City,” Washington said.

Recalling those original protesters, and the fact they all went to college, nearly half earning advanced degrees, Washington believes these things all go back to the influences of Clara Luper. "The experience of working with Clara Luper headed you for college, more so than being a part of the sit-ins,” Washington said. "She was a great motivator.”

Comments