August Nineteenth, Nineteen Fifty-Eight, Clara Luper and the Thirteen
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
On the afternoon of August nineteenth, nineteen fifty-eight, a high school history teacher named Clara Luper walked into the Katz Drug Store at the corner of Main and Robinson in downtown Oklahoma City with thirteen Black children in tow. They sat down at the lunch counter and ordered Cokes. The counter was for white customers only.
The manager refused service. Luper and the children stayed. They were cursed at, had things thrown and poured on them, were shoved and kicked.
They did not leave. This was not a spontaneous act of protest. Luper had spent two years preparing for it, working with the Oklahoma City chapter of the NAACP Youth Council, rehearsing nonviolent response to exactly the kind of treatment she knew was coming.
The thirteen children, the youngest was only about seven years old, had practiced sitting still, keeping their hands visible, and saying nothing when provoked. Luper had studied the Gandhian model carefully. The sit-in had a strategy, a contingency plan, and a clear objective.
After a few days of demonstrations, Katz Drug Store integrated its lunch counters. Not just in Oklahoma City, the chain operated in several states, and its lunch counters in three states integrated. The capitulation was, by the standards of nineteen fifty-eight, remarkable.
It came a full year and a half before the Greensboro sit-ins of February nineteen sixty, which are more widely remembered as the spark that ignited the lunch-counter campaign across the South. Clara Luper continued organizing in Oklahoma City for the next thirteen years. She led sit-ins at restaurants, theaters, and amusement parks throughout the early nineteen sixties, was arrested at least twenty-six times, and held her position teaching history at Dunjee High School while doing so.
She published a memoir in nineteen seventy-nine called Behold the Walls. She died in Oklahoma City in two thousand eleven at the age of eighty-eight. The lunch-counter stool she sat on that August afternoon is now in the collection of the Oklahoma History Center.
The Katz Drug Store building itself is gone. The corner where it stood is still there, at Main and Robinson, unmarked by anything except the knowledge of what happened.
