A Very OK Podcast
Episode 27: “A Little Freedom is a Dangerous Thing”
August 15, 2023
Episode Transcript
(upbeat music playing)
Trait Thompson: Hello, and welcome to A Very OK Podcast. My name is Trait Thompson. I’m the executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society, and with me, as always, is Dr. Bob Blackburn. Bob, it’s great to see you again. We took a little break in July, but it’s great to be back in the studio, and we’ve got some great stuff to talk about today.
Dr. Bob Blackburn: It is, Trait, and it’s always good to be with you. And I enjoy coming to the History Center to record these sessions with you, and of course, to work with our great guests, as we will again today. But I get to see the friends. I’ve learned that I have to come at least 20 minutes earlier than our appointment, because I see so many friends here I want to talk to and kind of go back over what everyone is doing, and I just enjoy coming to the History Center and being with you and talking about history.
Thompson: Well this is always one of the highlights of my week when we get to record. It’s a fun thing about this job is to talk about history and to talk about it with you. And boy, do we have a great topic to talk about today. I’m so excited about this. August 19 is the 65th anniversary of the Katz Drug Store sit-ins that was started by a group of students along with Clara Luper, and we have a great guest with us today. I am happy to welcome into our podcast, Ms. Marilyn Luper Hildreth. She has participated in those sit-ins and many other civil rights activist activities in Oklahoma. She was an insurance agent for her career during her life. And Marilyn, it’s just an honor and a thrill to have you here today.
Marilyn Luper Hildreth: Thank you very much for inviting me.
Thompson: Well, Bob, I want to get in to talking about this, and civil rights in Oklahoma, it’s a complex topic. It’s a nuanced topic. And of course, we’ve had our strained relations with civil rights and with Black history here. And, you know, one of the things I remember, you saying in our State Capitol documentary is that it’s important to know and understand our history, and not just the good history, but the history that we may not be so proud of because it helps us to to figure out how we can be better as a people. And so, I thought it’d be great if we could talk about some of the history of civil rights leading up to the Katz Drug Store sit-ins.
Blackburn: Right, and the denial of civil rights and injustice, and it’s part of our story. You can apply that to the way we’ve treated American Indians and still dealing with that issue today. You know, neighbor-to-neighbor based on religion, the Ku Klux Klan was a good example of really not tolerating Catholics and Jewish people. So, history is full of these episodes, and what we have got to do as educators and collectors and people and museums, is to make sure people know those stories because racism, ethnic divides, religious intolerance is still with us today. And so, how do we deal with it and how do we go forward? And fortunately for us, there have been people in our history who have said we are not going to accept this. We are going to resist. We are going to fight back. We’re going to try to do what we can as individuals to change the injustice in the community. And of course, Clara Luper was one of those. But really to understand Clara Luper and Marilyn’s role in this as a student, and then what she’s done since, and she’s kept the flame burning on resistance and education. I’ve worked with Marilyn now for over 20 years, and you almost have to really go back to Indian Territory and slavery. Slavery was a part of Oklahoma history.
Thompson: I think that’s something that a lot of people don’t realize is that the tribes brought slaves with them here when they were when they were removed from their lands in the southeastern part of the United States.
Blackburn: Exactly. And slavery was part of American Indian culture even before Columbus set sail. But it was Indians enslaving Indians, and generally absorbing them into the tribes is what happened with with American Indian slavery. But here comes African American slavery. And it’s different because by the 1770s and ’80s, Scottish and English merchants are moving among the Five Tribes, and they’re having big families. And so you get these mixed-blood leaders who are kind of the new leadership of the Five Tribes are trying to deal with the American nation with treaties and commerce and all these things that are alien to their Native culture, and they bring in the African American slaves and set up plantations that are on the model of southern plantations. So, the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in the 1790s is affecting Indian history just like it’s affecting history of the American South. Suddenly, you can grow enough cotton, become rich, but you have to have the labor in the humid south. Many small farmers aren’t going to do that. So what’s the solution? Well, African American slavery.
So slavery is brought west with the Five Tribes from the Old South and is reestablished here. Well, slavery comes to an end finally, and not in 1863, when many people assume— Emancipation Proclamation. It ended here in 1866, with the treaties with the Five Tribes, ended slavery, forced the Indians to allow the first railroads through and a variety of things in the march toward statehood. But, one important part of that is that the federal government forced the Indian tribes to give land to their former slaves and their descendants, which would affect the story of African Americans in Oklahoma. And as we get migration out of the Old South in the 1880s and ’90s, fleeing the Old South, you get two communities. One that is this blend of Indian culture, African culture, the legacy of slavery molding kind of the Native culture. And then when they get their allotments starting in the 1890s, they tend to take their allotments near family members and friends and cousins and aunts and uncles till you get enough good, prosperous farmers and good land, and you have a town. The town of Boley, town of Clearview, and the town of Summit. You go on to over 30 All-Black towns in Oklahoma while you get this in-migration from the Old South. Well, the nation, not just Oklahoma— what would become Oklahoma— but the nation is pushing back on this.
The Supreme Court finally in 1896, about the time the migration is reaching a crescendo in Oklahoma, Supreme Court says separate but equal is constitutional. It’s the law of the land. And they decided that no, no, no, these people, because the pigment of their skin were not like any other American, but they were so unique that they could be kept separate in a community. It was apartheid, as they would have in South Africa until recent times. But that was a legal formula to use. Now, of course, the “separate” was enforced, but the “equal” was never, you know, really delivered. And so, in communities across the country, especially in the South, but also in the North, you had segregation. So you had in New York City, Harlem, and in Tulsa as it grows as an oil community, Greenwood; in Oklahoma City, as prosperity draws people from Okfuskee County and these little towns that are suffering from agricultural decline, they’re coming here in Deep Deuce. And so you get cities within cities, you get segregated towns around the state in the All-Black communities and the white majority is pushing back, led by people like “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, who is the father of the, you know, the Constitutional Convention, who really is a strict segregationist. He believes it in his heart, as well as in his mind, that there is something so different. And we have enough of his writings, we know what a racist he was. He fit right in with the separate but not equal clause. And we became a segregated state legally in 1907.
Thompson: Well, and it’s interesting because during the Constitutional Convention, there was an effort to try to put segregationist policies into our constitution. And Theodore Roosevelt pushed back on that and said, if you do it, I’m not going to sign the statehood proclamation. I’m not going to let you come in. So they said, okay, we’re going to back off on that. But then the first bill that’s passed is Senate Bill One, which establishes segregation in train cars. And in fact, it caused a riot at the train station in Taft where they were, you know, burning cars and all of those kinds of things because of that provision. So, they bided their time. They got into the Union with—what’s interesting— one of the most progressive constitutions in American history. But they just couldn’t wait for it to be the first thing they do to enact that segregation.
Blackburn: So you have that in the law separate. But then you also have the tool of terrorism, of violence, lynching. Well over 20 people, Black people, were lynched in Oklahoma during these decades after statehood. Then you get events like the Tulsa Race Massacre, May 31, 1921, when the entire community of Greenwood is wiped off the map by looters and fire, murder, just bloodshed and hatred just spills out. The emotions of racism becomes an act of terrorism. Like, you know, be careful. Don’t walk on the same sidewalk as a white person. Don’t look at a white woman in the eye. All these unwritten traditions and part of our culture are enforced through this terrorism, and so, you have this pushback, but this desire for equality and equal opportunity.
And people like John Hope Franklin, one of my heroes, the great historian, who was here in the History Center five or six times before he passed away. But he wrote a book, Slavery to Freedom. He grew up in Tulsa, after the Tulsa Race Riot. And he once told me personally, because I asked him to come, I was chairman of the Race Riot Commission at the time, said, Dr. Franklin, I need you at my right side. He came, and he said, I’ll never forget his words. He said there was a pride in the Black community that our fellow young men stood up to this injustice. They were going to save Nate. They weren’t going to let someone lynch him. And they put their lives on the line to say, no longer are we going.... So, you have this attitude of not only resistance but pride within the limits of what could be done in terms of the law, the tools of terrorism. But things change, obviously, as all times. Thirties, it begins to change the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, the impact of World War II. You come out of the war, desegregate the armed services. Harry Truman just makes that an executive order. And here in Oklahoma, some of our civil rights leaders, led by a man, one of my heroes in all of Oklahoma history, Roscoe Dunjee, would come here in 1893. His dad was a Baptist minister. Dad dies early. Roscoe, the oldest, has to run the truck farm, tries to make a living, never finished his high school, doesn’t have a chance to go to college. But well-educated, very capable. Probably could have made a lot of money in a segregated city within a city. He could have been a tool of the white majority, you know, keep people under control and do what we expect them to do. But he said, I can’t do that. He pushed back, and he started a newspaper in 1914, The Black Dispatch, and in 1915, he published an issue of probably my favorite headline of all time. When I did my first book in Oklahoma City in 1982, I had to use full page of his newspaper as an illustration— “The Bloody Fangs of Jim Crow.”
Thompson: Wow.
Blackburn: He understood that segregation was a cancer on our society, not just for Black people, but for everybody, because it created hate and fear and misunderstanding, and we weren’t working together for the common good. And he realized all this. He was a man, he was a good Christian. He had been raised in the church. And he realized this is not the Christian way.
Thompson: And he brings the NAACP to Oklahoma, and then he starts with the court cases. And so probably one of the most famous was 1948 with Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, who sued because she couldn’t enter the University of Oklahoma Law School. And so I think that’s one of the first big cracks in segregation in Oklahoma is that case.
Blackburn: Well, and too, I always like to use the metaphor of a brick wall of segregation. And later, when Clara Luper would write her autobiography, Behold the Walls. And so, if you think of segregation as a physical wall, and if you want to weaken a wall, you don’t butt your head against the middle of the wall. You go to the base, and you try to work on the foundation. You undermine it. You pull a brick out. As you said, a crack. Make that crack as big as you can, then pull that brick out, and then you pull another brick and another brick, and suddenly it begins to weaken. Well, that’s what Roscoe Dunjee and Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher and McLaurin and others are doing at the time. Well, once University of Oklahoma had to allow a couple of Black students, the NAACP and others—Thurgood Marshall was the young attorney sent in to help with this case. They said, we’ve got to make sure that the university and the white majority doesn’t backtrack and keep others from applying. So, the word went out. We need some young Black people to try to enroll in graduate schools at OU you where you don’t have it at the segregated college, Langston. And one of those young people who said, I will try to enroll at OU in a graduate program and put up with the abuse and and perhaps physical violence, which was the way of life in Oklahoma, in the South at the time. And that young lady who had been born in Okfuskee County, this blend of African Indian migrant culture, who is smart, had gone to Langston, had her history degree, said I will enroll in the graduate program for history at OU. And that young lady is Clara Luper.
Thompson: Well, that is a great place, Marilyn, that we can pick up, your mother’s story. And also, first of all, I want to point out, Bob just did that entire thing, with no notes, right off the top of his head and just went on. Marilyn, do you see all the notes that I have here that I had to do research to get ready for this? And this man just shows up and just rattles this off the top of his head, Bob.
Hildreth: He’s brilliant. He’s brilliant.
(laughter)
Thompson: Well, I mean, come on, come on.
Blackburn: Well, have one reason I do that. And Marilyn can say the same, because Marilyn has been an intellectual in the community as her mother was, but also it has to be in your heart to really to resist and to fight. And I was raised in a southern family where I never went to school with a Black person until I got to college. So, I was I was a victim in a way, but part of a segregated community. And I had to go through a personal transformation as well as a professional to understand. And I started that in college when I had my first Black history course and read Dr. Franklin’s book. So to me, it’s been personal as it is to Marilyn. Yeah, this is something we can do to educate the public, but this is personal. It’s in our hearts, and we believe in it, and whatever we can do. You know, we’ll butt our heads against a wall. We’ll try to undermine those walls and whatever we can. And Marilyn has been a champion of doing that her entire life. But in the last—since her mother grew ill and then passed away, she really picked up that baton and marched forward. And I’m so proud of her, and I’m proud that she’s a friend.
Thompson: I would love to know, Marilyn, if we could just start off with who your mother was as a person. What kind of mom was she to you, and I know, Calvin, your brother? And do you have any other siblings? I’m forgetting off the top of my head.
Hildreth: Yes. I have a sister.
Thompson: I’d love to know just what kind of person was she? What kind of mother was she, before we get into the type of work she did?
Hildreth: Well, I can really talk about that because she was a mother, 24/7. And not only was she a mother, she was a teacher while being a mother. Everything was a lesson to us. And as I was listening to you talk about Roscoe Dunjee, a thought came back in my head, and I haven’t thought about this for decades. As a child, mama would take us down to the History Center, and we would have to go through The Black Dispatch and read articles to find, I guess, to find out what’s going on really in history. I just thought about that when you said it. It was not one time, it was even before, long before the sit-ins started, so we were really kids.
Thompson: Where did her love of history come from, do you think?
Hildreth: When she was a child, I often, I didn’t know, I didn’t know until she was grown all the things that her family had gone through. And you know, she is from Okfuskee County, Hoffman, Oklahoma, graduated top five of her class but there were only five people in the class.
(laughter)
Hildreth: She used to have the history books that they had in their class were used history books where the back pages were all torn. And what happened was they had to create their own endings to the stories in the history books. So, I think that while they were trying to hurt our community, they really built something— creativity. You write the end of your story, what you think the end should be. And I really think that it had something to do with her interest in history. And when she was a child, her brother died because of the fact that he was Black and could not be treated in a hospital.
Thompson: Wow.
Blackburn: What were your grandparents farmers or what? What did they do?
Hildreth: My mother used to say that my grandfather was a pilot, and they would tease her all the time. Clara Shepard, you know your grandfather’s not a pilot. They don’t have Black pilots. She would say, “they pile bricks over here. They pile bricks over there.”
(laughter)
Blackburn: Pile it here, pile it there. That’s great. I love that. I’ve never heard that.
Hildreth: And she was a dreamer, and my grandfather was a dreamer. I can remember things that, as a child he told me that you don’t have to laugh and grin at white people, because I paid that price so that you would not have to. I didn’t understand it then, but as I grew older, I realized what he was talking about. Because he was a man that had been in the military and but never had the opportunity to spend a night in a hotel or a motel because of the fact he was Black, but willing to give his life for his country.
Thompson: So your mother taught at Dunjee High School in Spencer, Oklahoma, and then later at John Marshall and Classen High Schools in Oklahoma City. Where was she teaching when she wrote Brother President?
Hildreth: Dunjee.
Thompson: Can you talk about Brother President and what what kind of play that was?
Hildreth: Brother President was the story of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement in Montgomery, Alabama, and the bus boycott.
Thompson: Right. Yes.
Hildreth: After she wrote Brother President, the students, and mama always brought education to the students so that they could relive history and better understand it. They put this play together, and she had to, Herb Wright was in the audience, who was the national youth director of the NAACP. And he was so impressed with the play, that he wanted her to bring it to the NAACP national convention, but he wanted her to bring one student and she said, no, that she would have to bring our students, or none of them would go. That’s the type of person she was. And he said, Clara Shepard, you know we don’t have the money to bring all these kids to New York City. And she said, we’ll raise some money. Mama was a dreamer, didn’t have a penny at the time. But the people of the Dunjee community, the Spencer community sold dinners, sold pickles, sold candy, popcorn, to get the young people to New York City.
Thompson: Were you on that trip?
Hildreth: Yes.
Thompson: Were you in the play?
Hildreth: I had a little small role.
Thompson: A little part in the play.
Blackburn: You were a little girl at that time.
Thompson: But that trip, it really spurred something in your mind, because when you went to New York City, what you experienced there, in terms of being able to eat at a restaurant or going to a hotel, was vastly different than what you had experienced in Oklahoma.
Hildreth: Well, I thought the whole world was like Oklahoma, that you had to go behind a building to eat your lunch out of a brown paper sack. That you could go into a department store, buy anything you want, as long as you didn’t have to try it on.
Thompson: I remember you saying that you used to have to measure your feet.
Hildreth: No, my grandmother did.
Thompson: Before you went to the shoe store because you weren’t allowed to try on shoes.
Hildreth: Right.
Thompson: It’s so hard to imagine today. It just, it breaks my heart to hear those stories.
Hildreth: Well, if it breaks your heart to hear it, how do you think that we felt as people?
Thompson: Yeah.
Hildreth: And that’s why I think it’s so important that we know our history.
Thompson: 100%. Yes.
Hildreth: And after we got to New York City, for the first time in our lives, we had an opportunity to go into a restaurant, into a hotel, and sit down and drink a Coke, eat a hamburger, just like anybody else. Just like anybody else in America. You say that’s not a big deal. But yes, it is, when you’ve never been accustomed to it, because we thought that the whole world was like Oklahoma. Everything was colored this and white that. Water fountains, telephone booths, everything. And I can remember hearing people say, know your place. You go to the colored side because you’re colored. Well, I get so tickled, because I feel like Harriet Tubman, “A little bit of freedom is a dangerous thing.”
Thompson: Yeah.
Hildreth: If you didn’t never show us that people lived another way in America, then we never would have known the difference.
Thompson: Was it hard to come back after experiencing that freedom? Was it hard to come back to Oklahoma?
Hildreth: No, it was not hard to come back. But we decided that in coming back, that we wanted to change our little state. We didn’t want our state to be full of bigotry and hatred and segregation and discrimination.
Thompson: And so you had an idea?
Hildreth: Yes.
Blackburn: Set the scene, Marilyn, of being in your house, and the students, and the table, and you know, the role your, and backtrack a little bit. And how your mom became the leader of the Youth Council.
Hildreth: She was asked to take over the NAACP Youth Council here locally. Now that was not a popular position. Nobody wanted that but mama. I don’t know if she really wanted it at first, but someone had to step up to the plate. And we were meeting after the national convention to see what we could do to make a change come about in Oklahoma City. And prior to that, we had decided to target the restaurants because—especially places like Katz Drug Store—that was like the hub of Oklahoma City. We came downtown to go to Nichols Hills to work as a maid or butler would, you had to go through downtown Oklahoma City, get off at Katz to go to Nichols Hills. It was like a hub. Everybody stopped there. We developed a committee that went in and met with the restaurant association to see about desegregating the system, and that lasted for a couple of years. And they said, no, we’re not going to desegregate because white people do not want to sit next to a Black person. You take your money in the stores, everything else. But we don’t want you to sit down at the counters. They made their decision, and we made ours. I made a motion at the Youth Council meeting that we would go down to Katz Drug Store, and we would have a seat. And I have a brother by the name of Calvin that I love dearly, that said, you must be crazy.
(laughter)
Hildreth: Either these white folks gonna kill us, they’re going to do something to us. Because you have to imagine how segregation was in Oklahoma during that time. And I didn’t realize, Dr. Blackburn, that it was three years after Emmett Till’s death that we started the sit-ins here. So, people were kind of fearful anyway. And here we would teach in passive, non-violent resistance. Turn the other cheek. Do good to those that do evil to you. Something as old as the Bible itself. But that’s what we were taught, and we had to prepare mentally for going down there.
Thompson: Well, there was training.
Hildreth: Yes.
Thompson: What kinds of things were you trained on? Because, you know, the adults knew, your mother knew, you would be cussed at. You would probably be spit on. You would probably, you know, there could be physical violence. So, what was that training like?
Hildreth: We were actually, we didn’t, they didn’t spit on us in the training, but the reenactment was like they were spitting on us and kicking us. But we learned from the training to turn the other cheek. When you kicked us, we would learn how to move our foot. And if you notice that during the sit-in pictures, you see the young people just looking straight ahead because we were not doing a lot of talking, not talking back.
Thompson: And this comes this idea of passive non-violent resistance. It comes from Christ. Dr. King embodied this. John Lewis did.
Hildreth: No, this was long before John Lewis, because John Lewis was in the movement, too. But it was Martin Luther King. It was more of Gandhi. Do good to those that do evil to you. That’s what we were always trained.
Thompson: It’s easy to read on a page. I can imagine it’s incredibly difficult to do when it’s happening to you.
Hildreth: Now you think about it, I guess it was, but it didn’t at the time, because that’s what we were expected to do. We were expected to turn the other cheek.
Blackburn: Marilyn, if you can. I’ve heard Mrs. Luper tell the story— your mom. But gathering and being in the cars and who’s going to drive you downtown. Talk about driving from where you gathered to getting there and actually getting out of the cars and going in, that experience.
Hildreth: Portwood Williams, who was a member of our church; Ruth Tolliver, it was three or four cars, and they dropped us off at Katz Drug Store, and we waited until everybody gathered and went in. And I know what they were saying where these people going? What in the world? And we went in and had a seat at the lunch counter, the seats that were vacant. And then, when they saw that we were Black, some people immediately to get up because they didn’t want to sit next to us. But the hardest thing for me to understand as a child is how you can hate me and not know me. How can you be that mean and spit on me and kick me and talk about my national heritage and you don’t know nothing about me? And I would ask my mother that question: how can they hate me this bad, and they don’t know me?
Thompson: There were 13 of you.
Hildreth: Yes.
Thompson: Who went in on that first day and took seats at the counter. How did the staff react?
Hildreth: They didn’t know what to expect because that had never happened before.
Thompson: Did any of them try to take your order and management said no, or how did that go down?
Hildreth: What do you want? We just want a Coke, a hamburger and a Coke. That’s all. And they looked at us like we had lost our minds. See, before, you could go and order your food, you had to get it in the brown paper sack, and then go behind Katz Drug Store and eat out of the brown paper sack. And it’s like we were dogs or something.
Blackburn: What was the range in the age of the children.
Hildreth: Seven to 17.
Thompson: This is something, Bob. You know, my daughter’s 11. My son is 15, you know, and it’s hard for me as a parent to think about subjecting your kids to what they would probably be subjected to. I think maybe what helped is that, you know, in your case, all of you kids were for it, and then the parents probably trusted your mother.
Hildreth: The parents did trust her.
Thompson: Why did they have that trust in your mom?
Hildreth: I guess the same reason I did. They knew that she was going to protect them. And, one example. When we were picketing in front of Bishop’s Cafeteria, this guy threw a chimpanzee on me. And my mother said that I’m so happy that he threw the chimpanzee on you instead of any of the other children, because you can take it. And there’s your mom, I can better explain to myself why you could take it.
Thompson: How many days do you go back to Katz?
Hildreth: A few days, I want to say about four. And then when we came in again, they served us. Not only did they serve us here in Oklahoma City, but in all the Katz Drug Stores in the United States.
Thompson: You all integrated because of your work? It was three days. You all integrated 38 Katz Drug Stores across the country because a group of seven to 17-year-olds went and sat down at a lunch counter. I find that to be so inspiring. I find that to be just incredible.
Blackburn: Trait, if I might add a little bit there. You pose that question to Marilyn about why did people trust Mrs. Luper? Clara? Well, same reason I trusted her. The same reason that Jackie Cooper, the auto dealer, trusted her. P. D. Taylor, other policemen; the police force was supportive in many ways. They let Mrs. Luper establish a relationship there. And I can speak from my experience getting to know her very early in my career. This would have been early 1980s when I got to know her. I was on a radio show. I was on programs with her. I sat in the Freedom Center and talked about strategy, and she was charismatic in a way. And it wasn’t because she was flamboyant or that, but she had this sense of purpose, like she is not going to waver. And so why should we waver, you know, and that’s leadership. And she had the qualities of a leader. And, by that time, had the confidence to do that. But at a time when women of all races had a very low glass ceiling, here is a woman in a minority community with a low glass ceiling exhibiting that confidence. I’ve always admired that so much.
That had to come from her family, from growing up in Okfuskee County, or friends, the experience of Langston I think it was critical in helping to establish her confidence, because there she was an outstanding student and it was a segregated, but they had some of the best professors because those Black professors could not teach anywhere else. So, if you were a star professor or teacher or even student, you went to Langston. So the quality of education was very high, even though the facilities were very inferior, the quality and the people you would meet. I think Langston probably helped give her that confidence. And then her church. She believed. She was a true believer at her church. And I think those things combined with her own personal determination and that stubborn, stubborn? I think is a word we can use for your mama. She was stubborn. She wasn’t going to give up. She was going to keep trying, as she did. As a teacher, you know, some student wasn’t quite towing the line. She would probably keep after that student until he or she was learning. I think that that personal charisma was there.
Hildreth: Well, I, Dr. Blackburn, as you were talking, I was thinking, because I think that another thing that motivated mom was that she would always tell us, you need some tough skin to make it. You’re not going to make it being a weakling. And if you don’t have any tough skin, you need to go to the hardware store and buy you some.
(laughter)
Hildreth: Because you never will survive in this society unless you have tough skin, and you cannot make people like you. Nobody has to like you. But what you have to do is you have to love your enemies anyway.
Thompson: I found a quote from your mom. It’s probably in the book. “Being a Christian means expressing Christian ideals all wrapped up in one package that’s called love. That’s all I have to do is love, love your enemies. And if you can love, you can live.” And she embodied that, not only in what she said but— this is where a lot of people fall short— but what she did, and I take a lot of inspiration from that.
Hildreth: And she was honest about it, and she would not let us take the easy way out.
Blackburn: Marilyn, talk about, talking about tough skin. Being thrown in jail is a traumatic experience for anybody. But your mama went to jail.
Thompson: Twenty-six times.
Blackburn: Twenty-six times. What was her reaction? I know that she’d make sure the police knew of, you know, she had her partners there and some communication. But she still went to jail with that key turning in that lock. And I can imagine the emotional trauma of that. But she kept going back each time that just,
Hildreth: Because she believed what she was doing was right. And anybody from Hoffman, Oklahoma, you had to have tough skin. And another thing is she taught me so much because as a teenager, her mother had to move to the servant quarters of Nichols Hills to educate her. That motivated her to fight, because my grandmother only went to the fifth grade.
Blackburn: She saw your grandma, she saw her mother, suffering from this racist system of segregation, and exploitation is what it would have been.
Thompson: You all integrate Katz Drug Store.
Hildreth: Yes.
Thompson: And you move right on.
Hildreth: We were in a war.
Thompson: August 22, 1958, you go to John A. Brown’s. Can you talk about John Brown’s department store, what it meant to the fabric of Oklahoma City, and how difficult that journey was?
Hildreth: Oh, John A. Brown’s was tough. You could go downtown to John A. Brown’s and buy anything you wanted to buy, because they had everything, like a one-stop shop. They had a lunch counter in their cafeteria, but they were convinced they were never going to serve Blacks. And we were convinced that if you’re going to take our money in your store, you had a responsibility. If that money is good enough to buy clothes and shoes and pots and pans, our money should be good enough to drink a Coke. So, we went down to John A. Brown’s. There was, it was like we were on a mission— a mission to fight injustice.
Thompson: It takes three days to integrate Katz. It takes three years.
Hildreth: Yes.
Thompson: To integrate John A. Brown?
Hildreth: Yes.
Blackburn: And Trait, to take on John A. Brown’s would be today like taking on Walmart plus Target. It was, for young people, they don’t understand the importance of John A. Brown’s in economic development. But by the 1950s, John A. Brown’s was, it was like a mall inside of this one store. As Marilyn said, you could get anything you want. And it was a juggernaut. And it would remain very active until the 1980s, with four stores at all of the mall, that anchored all of the malls, eventually, but that store was downtown, and it had expanded into several buildings as it spread laterally and down. There were cafeterias in the basement as well, and you’d go different departments on the floors. But taking on John A. Brown’s was taken on the big boy. And that’s what Mrs. Luper and the children decided to do.
Thompson: Why do you think it took so long for John A. Brown’s to integrate?
Hildreth: Because of the history of— history of Oklahoma and how we believed in segregation and and how they fought to keep it. They did not want to integrate Oklahoma. They wanted to keep it segregated. And as much as they wanted to keep it segregated, we wanted it integrated.
Blackburn: Marilyn, I don’t know if you were that aware of it at the time. Probably were, because you would have seen them. But I think an important part of this story is convincing the white majority of people, not just the owners of the Katz Drug Store or Bishop’s or Brown’s, but it was really changing the attitude of the people who also shopped there, who would be, who should have been willing to sit down with people of any color. Well, I think a big part in changing people’s attitudes at the time was television. Television went on the air in Oklahoma in June of 1949. WKY television, it’s coming up on its 75th anniversary. Then you get channel 9, a couple of years later in ’54. Then you get KOCO in ’58. So just as the sit-ins are starting, you have three television stations with mobile units looking for the news, and all of a sudden for a segregated community where many white people, in fact, I say most white people never had an interaction with a Black person other than seeing them on the street. Or maybe, you know, digging ditches or building brick walls, little interaction. Suddenly, they’re in their living room on this television screen, and all of a sudden people see the injustice of segregation. Whereas, as a kid growing up in Oklahoma City, as I did, I did not know all of the impact of segregation. It just never dawned on me because I was not exposed to it. No one taught me better. Suddenly, it was on your television set, in your living room, with your family around. You say, Mom, Dad, why are they doing this to these people? And it began to change people’s attitudes at the same time. So television, I think, was a big part of this. The same thing with Selma and in Birmingham, all of those events were more impactful because the local press was not going to cover it. They would have been cheering on the the policemen with the dogs. They weren’t going to cover it. But television and those images that came across the screen and the national news that was being beamed into our homes, that began to make people realize this is an unjust system, and we have got to change. So, I think that was a part of it, and the fact that those sit-ins could generate the press, Mrs. Luper had to be very aware of that. Well, she went into radio. She understood the importance of the media with her radio station and her radio program. Do you remember the television crews covering some of these events?
Hildreth: Oh, yes, I do. They were always covering and always asking questions. Why? I remember one really asked a stupid question, Why do you want to go in there and eat a hamburger? That was a stupid question. Or drink a Coke? I want to do the same thing you’re doing.
Blackburn: And you were humanizing an issue that may have been abstract to people before. That’s just the law. Suddenly, it was humanized because you were saying it directly into that TV camera, and I think that had an emotional impact on the community.
Thompson: One of the things that’s really impressive to me is that you and your mother, you know, your mother and Mrs. John Brown, his widow, they eventually became friends.
Hildreth: Very good friends.
Thompson: Can you talk about that a little bit?
Hildreth: I can tell you what I remember. My mother was honored by her sorority. And when this article came out in the paper, Mrs. Brown sent her most beautiful orchid that I’ve ever seen. But prior to that, my mother had, Mrs. Brown had, invited her down to her office and Mrs. Brown asked mama, what could she do for her not to hate her? And mom said, I don’t hate you. I never have hated you. What I hate is injustice. I love you as a person, and after that, they just became friends. And they became very good friends. She was always supportive after that.
Thompson: I have a quote from your mom that says, “I saw her as another woman who was deeply in love with her husband. And when she arrived,” talking about that first meeting, “we ended up in each other’s arms crying. And Mrs. Brown and I became very good friends.” What a story. And in the end, this is all just about people being people, reconciling together and how great it is when color goes out the door and we just can see each other as people.
Hildreth: And that’s why it’s important that we know our history. That’s why it’s important. Because love is important.
Blackburn: And Trait, really, you know that education and collection is the ability to tell stories. Takes me back to working with Mrs. Luper. When we started working on the Oklahoma History Center project in 1998, she and I had been friends. I reached out and I said, we want to build a collection. We did not have good collections on the African American story in Oklahoma, because of the segregation in the historical society, basically, over the years. But we were trying to correct it. My first hire as executive director that year would have been Bruce Fisher.
Blackburn: Who was the son of Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher who was a contemporary of Marilyn’s and good friend. And so we started reaching out, and Mrs. Luper embraced it. She understood what we were trying to do. The second-largest gallery in the History Center was on the Black experience in Oklahoma. And the centerpiece of it, I knew at the time it had to be the sit-ins, because that is, you know, most people tell the story of a country or an empire by battles. You go to one place one day, you know, two armies, fight, bang, changes its history. In this case, one day at Katz Drug Store in 1958 changed the course of history, started getting better at that moment. We knew we had that. That’s the story the public in ten minutes could understand. So we said we are going to do a reproduction. At one point, I thought we found the real counter. I had a, after we got some publicity on this, he called me. He says, Dr. Blackburn, we’ve got the real counter. It’s over in our church. And so we go, look, we take pictures and we’re all excited. Wow. We’ve got the real artifact— the counter. By looking at photographs, and it was very well-documented, it wasn’t the counter. It may have been a counter somewhere, but it wasn’t THE counter, so we had to reproduce it. And Mrs. Luper loaned us at that time her collections to go with it. That personalized it. And we had the photographs and we had the audio version.
And I’ll never forget, even before we opened the History Center to the general public, we had an opening for the Black community in Oklahoma. Marilyn was there. Mrs. Luper, of course, was the star of this, and it was about 600 people crowded into the Devon Center. And we had a program, and then we cut the ribbon to the to the gallery where the African American story was. And I’ll never forget that day. And I kept going back and looking because I thought she might be too tired. But Mrs. Luper was sitting on one of those stools, greeting people as they came by, and people very patiently and almost reverentially, waited in line to shake the great woman’s hand. And of course, tears were in her eyes, and I kept going back, thinking, she’s got to be tired. Can I rescue her? And I’d say, Mrs. Luper, would you like? “No, no.” And she stood up there for hours and greeting people and hugging friends. And in a lot of those sit-in kids were there. And then later on we had all, but I think Marilyn wasn’t at all but one or two of those first 13 kids came for that program?
Hildreth: I think there was just one missing.
Blackburn: Yeah. We just we decided, and it was on the 50th anniversary, the date of, and Mrs. Luper wanted to help, so we did the invitation had a huge turnout. Oh, that was a great night.
Hildreth: I remember that. Yes, yes.
Blackburn: When we did that program and we did it there in the Devon Center. And then when Mrs. Luper passed away, Marilyn and Calvin were so generous. They and the family, the extended family, all got involved in the conversation is that her collection, the bulk of it, should be here at the History Center to tell this story. And so forever we will be telling the story, I’m sure, of Clara Luper, those kids, the sit-in movement, and changing the course of history.
Thompson: Right. Well, in 1959, at the NAACP conference, there was a report about the success of the Oklahoma City Youth Council and the sit-ins that had been done here. And there were three kids in that audience from North Carolina who go back to Greensboro, North Carolina, and that starts the sit-ins in Greensboro in 1961, that would then get national coverage, and that wouldn’t have happened without what you all did and what your mother did. I think that for a long time, this was sort of a hidden story. It’s starting to get out there more and more now with, you know, modern media and social media and stories being told. But I think for a long time, people didn’t know that all of that started right here in Oklahoma City.
Hildreth: Because we were not teaching our own history. Mom used to say, one day somebody is going to write about me. Somebody is going to talk about me. I guess it’s going to be me, myself.
Blackburn: And of course, happily for us, she did publish. She found a local printer who believed in her story. I think he was a white printer, in fact.
Hildreth: Yes. Jim.
Blackburn: That’s right, and he said, I’m going to help you get this book out, and Behold the Walls was published. Limited audience at the time, a lot of people still did not want to hear that story. You know that, oh, no, race is not part of our culture when we, you know, we’re beyond that. So, why bring it up again? That attitude has always been there and probably always will be. But that book was there. And so, Marilyn and I were talking about that book one day at one of the meetings, and so we’ve got to do something to get it back in print. So we did a facsimile reproduction, some copies. Marilyn had the the joy of sharing those books with a lot of her friends and family. Then we decided really something more needs to be done to the greater audience. And that’s when we all, Karlos Hill, Dr. Karlos Hill, who is the new champion for what we’re talking about today in terms of education. He’s a professor at OU. Karlos was getting involved with us. We all went to Washington, DC, in 2020 and had a great time trying to convince the Smithsonian they needed to do more on this story. And out of all of that came an agreement with the University of Oklahoma Press to reprint. And I wrote—with Karlos’s help— the introduction to the book. And pretty much the book is exactly what Mrs. Luper wrote. You know, some typos and all that were corrected, but minor changes. But that book is now available here at the Oklahoma History Center, other bookstores, online. OU Press should be applauded for bringing this out again. They went to the expense of doing this. We did not. We had a Humanities grant that helped a little bit, but not all of the expenses. But people believed in Mrs. Luper, wanted this book to come out, and now it’s in print and out there. And, I’m really pleased that the book came out.
Hildreth: I am too.
Thompson: Well, Dr. Blackburn, I know you and Dr. Hill worked very, very hard to do all of this work, and you’ve been working on it for at least the past two or three years, and so we’re very thankful for that. And I encourage everyone to go out and get a copy. As we mentioned, the 65th anniversary of the sit-ins is this month, this August. And so I want to encourage people to check out all of the events that will be happening to commemorate that. You are part of the Clara Luper Legacy Committee, and it’s a group of people who have participated in the sit-ins, but also people who have just come on, who, like Dr. Hill, like Jabee, people who are very, very interested in preserving this history. And so, we’re just, we’re thrilled about all of the great things that are going to happen to commemorate the 65th anniversary.
Hildreth: Oh, I’m so excited because of the fact, you know, for mom’s birthday, we had a celebration at the State Capitol, “Unity in the Community,” and we were carrying on this thing through the Freedom Fiesta celebration. And one thing that’s different about this year, is it’s a generational thing now. We have four or five different generations of family members who have participated in the sit-ins, and we’re asking those families to come and walk with us on Saturday morning. Dr. Blackburn, it was a Freedom Fighter, blah, blah, blah, and make your own signs and honor your own family members that were participants. Because so goes one of us, so goes all of us. And no one could do this alone it’s because of the good people of Oklahoma that we were able to do it.
Thompson: Well, Marilyn, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. Thank you for coming and joining us and talking to us about your story and your mom’s story.
Hildreth: Oh, thank you for inviting me.
Thompson: Well, Bob, I think that about wraps it up for us on this episode. And as always, it’s been a great time.
Blackburn: It has. And thank you, Trait, for doing this and choosing the topic. And Marilyn, thank you for all you’ve done, and we will keep the memory of your mother alive for all time, but you deserve to be right there with that story. So thank you.
Hildreth: Oh. Thank you.
Thompson: You’ve been listening to A Very OK Podcast, hosted by Trait Thompson and Dr. Bob Blackburn. The podcast is produced by the Oklahoma Historical Society. Visit us at okhistory.org, and find us on social media by searching for that @okhistory. I encourage you to purchase a membership to OHS to help us continue our mission to collect, preserve, and share Oklahoma’s unique and fascinating history.
(upbeat music playing)
