Aug. 19, 1958
Inspired by the success in Wichita, Kansas, the NAACP Youth Council in Oklahoma City, led by Clara Luper, a high school history teacher, began sit-ins to challenge the all-white lunch counters.
Luper had spent a lifetime fighting segregation. When she attended the University of Oklahoma, she encountered separate restrooms, separation in the classrooms, separate sections in the cafeteria.
“In one class a professor told me he had never taught a n—– and had never wanted to,” she recalled . “I moved that wall by staying in his class and working so hard that at the end of the school term, he confessed his sins.”
On that day in 1958, she led the students into the Katz drugstore, where they sat down and ordered Cokes. They were refused service, and white customers jeered at them and called them names. Some coughed in their faces, and one child was knocked to the ground.