Clara Luper, 1923–2011

The schoolteacher who pioneered the sit-in

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.”

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