Teaching to Transform: Dr. Karlos Hill on Educator-Activist Clara Luper

In a recent interview, I spoke with Dr. Karlos Hill concerning the life and legacy of educator-activist Clara Luper. Dr. Hill is Associate Professor and Chair of the Clara Luper Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma where he teaches the history of racial violence in the US. He serves on the Facing History & Ourselves Board of Scholars and is the author of Beyond the Rope: The Impact of Lynching on Black Culture and Memory, The Murder of Emmett Till: A Graphic History, and The Tulsa Race Massacre: A Photographic History. In 2023, Dr. Hill plans to publish a new edition of Clara Luper’s memoir Behold the Walls that chronicles the Oklahoma City Sit-In Movement.

In this interview we discuss the history of the Oklahoma City Sit-Ins and Clara Luper’s approach to teaching as an educator-activist. Luper was a history teacher at Dunjee High School in 1957 when she became an adviser to the Oklahoma City NAACP’s Youth Council. In that role, she helped to spark a desegregation movement that would sweep the country. 

Kaitlin Smith: I understand that your department at the University of Oklahoma was recently named for Clara Luper. Can you speak to some of the forces that inspired that decision and how you engage her legacy as a department?

Dr. Karlos Hill: In coming to Oklahoma and joining the department in 2016, I learned that Clara Luper was a graduate of the University of Oklahoma and is considered to be the mother of the civil rights movement in Oklahoma. As Chair at the time, I was trying to figure out how to make it clear that our department centers community engagement, and in 2018 I caught wind of the fact that it would soon be the 60th anniversary of Clara Luper and the Oklahoma City Sit-Ins. My colleagues, as well as the Dean of Arts and Sciences at OU, were able to convince the university administration that renaming the department for her would be a great thing for our department and the university. 

Kaitlin Smith: Can you speak a little bit about the Oklahoma City Sit-Ins, one of the first lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement? 

Dr. Karlos Hill: The Wichita Sit-In, and especially the Oklahoma City Sit-In, were motivated by the success of the Birmingham Bus Boycott. That was really powerful encouragement for Black people to move beyond legalism as a method of gaining rights and moving toward direct action. There are things that we can do as a community and that can involve regular people, not just lawyers. Clara Luper, along with the NAACP Youth Council, were inspired by the Birmingham example and buoyed by the Brown v. Board of Education decision that desegregated education. Clara Luper and members of the NAACP Youth Council traveled to New York City to perform a play, entitled Brother President, that features the activism of Dr. Martin Luther King, as well as to attend the NAACP national meeting in 1958. En route to New York City, they took a northern route and, for the first time, were able to visit and patronize restaurants without being segregated. And this so excited them that they could actually be served at a restaurant and be treated with dignity.

On the way back from New York City, they took a southern route and experienced the same segregation that they experienced in Oklahoma and decided on that trip that they would not be complicit in their segregation anymore. They decided that they would sit in to eradicate segregation in Oklahoma and particularly in restaurants. Ultimately, Marilyn Luper, Clara Luper, and 12 others went to downtown Oklahoma City to desegregate the Katz Drug Store on August 19, 1958. They sat down and demanded to be served. They were denied service, but two days following the initial sit-in, Katz Drug Store decided to desegregate not just their store and their lunch counter in Oklahoma City, but all of their 50 stores located across Oklahoma, Kansas, and other parts of the Midwest. And so this is one of the early, significant victories of the sit-in movement.

Kaitlin Smith: Given the dual commitment to teaching and community engagement that you are centering in your department, are there particular approaches that Luper exhibited that inspire you?

Dr. Karlos Hill: Certainly what we're trying to do as a department is to figure out how to actualize her vision for education . . . for the scholar-activist and the citizen-activist. I think in listening to video footage of Clara Luper and just talking to her students, she was someone devoted to making positive change in society, and she was a teacher, but her real work was trying to create change in the lives of young people. I think Clara Luper was, first and foremost, about teaching students how to demand the very best of themselves and live up to those demands and expectations. There are stories that her students tell about her correcting their English, about her demanding that they not say "um" and "ah" when they spoke, but speak very clearly and decisively. 

She lived in an era when Black people were seen as inferior and were made to be inferior, so demanding that they exude excellence at all times in everything that they did—their appearance, their diction, how they walked, and how they comported themselves—is something that then allowed her to challenge students to do things that we don't normally ask students to do: to ask students to essentially put their lives on the line and ask their parents to allow their children put their lives on the line. All of this was possible because she had such high demands for them as individuals.

I think as educators we can sometimes think that we don't want to push students too hard and we don't want to turn students off by being very demanding. We want to create these comfortable settings where no one is seemingly put out or made to be uncomfortable. But I think the reason why they remember her is because she demanded excellence, and because she demanded excellence, they wanted to meet the high standards she set for them. They wanted to prove to her that they could rise to that level and everything flowed from there.
 

Dr. Karlos Hill recommends the following resources on Clara Luper:

Introductory:

• Clara Luper Legacy
• “Luper, Clara Shepard (1923-2011)” in Oklahoma Historical Society Encyclopedia

Videos:

• Children of the Civil Rights documentary
• Oklahoma City Sit-Ins (excerpt) from NBC’s The American Revolution of ‘63
• “13 Cokes and a Side of Freedom” a spoken word performance by Tinasha LaRayé

Academic Scholarship:

• “The Right to Be Served: Oklahoma City’s Lunch Counter Sit-Ins, 1958-1965” in We Shall Overcome: The Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, Vol. 1

• “The Great Plains Sit-In Movement, 1958-60” in Great Plains Quarterly