Clara Luper, 1923–2011

Oklahoma City schoolteacher Clara Luper taught a memorable lesson in race relations in 1957. When she took her black high school students on a Greyhound bus to New York City for the NAACP’s national convention, she chose a northern route so they could eat at lunch counters alongside white people for the first time. On the way back home, they traveled through the South, where they had to eat out of paper sacks. “It gave my young people a taste of freedom,” Luper said.

The following year, Luper led 13 well-dressed children, including two of her own, into a Katz drugstore in downtown Oklahoma City and ordered Cokes. “The youths endured curses and threats from other customers; were covered with ketchup, hot grease, and spit; and were kicked and punched,” said the Oklahoma City Oklahoman. “They did not fight back.” Luper and her charges stayed put until closing time and kept coming back until the drugstore relented and served them. Their sit-in—18 months before the more celebrated one in Greensboro, N.C.—led to the desegregation of all the Katz stores in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, and Iowa. “I knew I was right,” Luper later said. “Somewhere I read in the 14th Amendment, that I was a citizen and I had rights.”

Luper was born near Hoffman, Okla., to a bricklayer father and a mother who worked as a maid, said The New York Times. She graduated from Langston University in 1944 and was the first black student to enroll in the University of Oklahoma’s history department, where she earned a master’s degree in 1951. Until she retired, in 1991, she taught in Oklahoma City, which now has a street named after her.

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Luper was arrested 26 times during her campaigns to desegregate Oklahoma City’s restaurants, stores, and swimming pools, said The Washington Post. She recalled years later that her father had inspired her activism. “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 when was someday, he would always say, ‘Someday will be real soon,’ as tears ran down his cheeks.”