Oklahoma City's Clara Luper helped give birth to a movement
National effort gained steam after first desegregation sit-in
Oklahoma City's Clara Luper helped give birth to a movement

By Devona Walker

Published: February 22, 2008

In August, it will be 50 years since Luper, her friend Portwood Williams Sr. and more than a dozen youths changed Oklahoma and the nation with the first lunch counter protest at Katz Drug. Luper was a young teacher who also worked as the adviser of the NAACP Youth Council.

"It was my daughter Marilyn's idea,” Luper said recently as she sat in her eastside home with her son Calvin.

Calvin Luper was 12 years old. His sister Marilyn was a year younger. Portwood Williams Jr. was 15. Donda West — mother of entertainer Kanye West — was barely 5. There were 11 other children — all members of the NAACP Youth Council — who arrived at Katz to protest segregation.

It was the first and longest sit-in protest of the civil rights movement. Momentum grew quickly. Two days later, the children numbered 34. Days later, there were 66 youths involved. Within weeks, that eating establishment was successfully desegregated.

For the next three years, the group expanded to numerous others throughout the state's capital city.

In Luper's den is a veritable Clara Luper Museum, all four walls loaded with awards from the NAACP and the U.S. government, statues and photos of Luper with dignitaries.

On Sunday, she'll be honored again, this time during the Miss Black Langston University Scholarship Pageant, which she founded 38 years ago.

The driver took the northern route, exposing them to cities that did not practice segregation. On the way back home, the driver took the group on the southern route. As they got nearer Oklahoma, Calvin Luper said, they started to see the old familiar colored-only signs re-emerge, and realized that something needed to be done.

"It was a realization, not something we verbalized at the time,” Calvin Luper said. "Then Marilyn suggested that she go into Katz Drug Store and order a Coca-Cola.

"We had no idea it was going to go national. All we were thinking about at the time was a hamburger and a Coca-Cola.”

Portwood Williams Jr. recalled the early days of belonging to the NAACP Youth Council. The youth would meet once a week at the Luper home.

"Ms. Luper was very influential,” Williams said. "She had a lot of passion for change; that was the thing that was most noticeable.”

He added: "She wasn't the kind of person to have a hobby. She was always involved in the cause.”

Of those original 15 youthful protesters, Williams noted that each went on to college. Some, in fact, earned advanced graduate degrees. But Williams stopped short of saying this experience was the motivating factor behind their successes.

"It's one of those things: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? We were all above-average kids, those of us involved in the NAACP Youth Council,” Williams said. "So I think maybe we had more of an effect on the movement then it had on us.”

In fact, during the time it was happening, many of the youths did not realize the importance of what they were doing.

Clara Luper recalled realizing the potential for harm. And even Calvin Luper recalled some of the ways their adult supervisors tried to train them for this type of nonviolent protests: What to do when someone spit on them, how not to react when they were assaulted and how not to evoke anger from the police department.

"We were too young to be afraid,” Williams said.

Luper and the youths were arrested multiple times.

"She was constantly reminding us of the importance of what we were doing. She constantly reminded us of how we should react to stay safe,” Calvin Luper said of his mother.

But it's not just the sit-in movement that made Luper a hero to so many. She also led the Oklahoma City Public School integration fight, participated in the historic March on Washington, and marched at Selma, Ala., and every major march in America.

She was arrested 26 times.

"I thought about my father who had died in 1957 in the veterans' hospital and who had never been able to sit down and eat a meal in a decent restaurant,” Luper said. "I remembered how he used to tell us that someday he would take us to dinner and to parks and zoos. And when I asked him when was someday, he would always say, ‘Someday will be real soon.'”

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