Tolerance and Intolerance
Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world,
Red and yellow, black and white
All are precious in his sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
C. Herbert Woolston
.
Oklahoma City’s garbage collection was a municipal, not a private, operation. Almost all of the garbage collectors were African-American, and all of them were paid on the bottom of the wage scale.
In 1969 the garbage collectors pushed for a living wage, offering negotiation, mediation and arbitration, but the city wouldn’t budge. Whether it was or not (and it probably was), it soon became a racial issue, and Clara Luper stepped in. A true believer in the non-violent principles of Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Mrs. Luper had for decades been the spiritual lighthouse and the backbone of the Oklahoma City NAACP.
For two days I had watched from the steps of City Hall as the strikers and their supporters, sounding as if they were in an African Methodist Episcopal Church service, swayed, clapped and chanted to City Manger Robert Oldland:
You better git right, Oldland, git right
You better git right, Oldland, git right.
You better git right, Oldland, git right
Before I git maaad. Before I git mad.
But the first day or two of the strike looked bleak. Oldland was standing firm and Mrs. Luper, at strike headquarters, was crying.
As a reporter, I was supposed to be an impartial observer, gathering facts and color to organize later into a few hundred clear words for the next morning’s readers. I was not supposed to give in to emotion or insert myself into the scene. But I did.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Luper,” I said, very gingerly touching her shoulder. “It’s going to be all right.”
*
It had seldom been all right for blacks in Oklahoma, from statehood through Jim Crow and the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921, until well after the end of the Civil Rights Era years after the garbage strike. It had been better once, and would be again, but “all right” was only a phrase used by an embarrassed young man watching a strong woman cry.
**
Most mid-century Oklahomans were either still on the farm or no more than one generation away from it. Living close to the seasons, helpless in the face of the never-ending wind, yearly tornadoes, gully-washin’ rain, years-long droughts and an economy and governmental system that none of them understood or could ever hope to influence, the farmers could only explain their lives as the workings of God – and God and Saturday night were their only comfort.
Members of churches opposed to drinking and dancing didn’t even have the comfort of Saturday night to anticipate.
Oklahoma was overwhelmingly Protestant fundamentalist. Most folks felt that if you didn’t go to church twice on Sunday and to Wednesday prayer meeting, you were going straight to hell. The true believers didn’t worry too much about things beyond their control; they worried about sin and were always sniffing around for sinners.
They were little people and knew it, and so dealt with it in the way that people of the land have always done: they transformed their helplessness into a virtue. If God had ordained their lives, then anyone who lived differently or believed differently must be a sinner. Particularly those folks in New York City and San Francisco, the modern Sodom and Gomorrah.
And in a neat twist of logic, while proclaiming their pride at being small and insignificant (“poor old country boys,” as the song went), they found people more insignificant than themselves to look down upon, which gave them the further comfort of superiority.
We believed in the Bible, all right. We also believed that Indians were best kept on reservations and niggers in segregated neighborhoods. Queers were fair game – or would have been, had any of us actually met one. Or, rather, known that we had. The word “queer,” then, became a mere epithet; a word teenage boys wielded to insult each other. But our parents sure did get a kick out of Liberace’s television show.
**
Mr. Ladd was our Sunday School teacher for at least two years in junior high school. The lessons were, I believe, laid out in advance by the church authorities, complete with teaching manuals. Usually, they were centered around Biblical stories and what these stories were meant to teach us. Pre-planned lessons, however, didn’t preclude a bit of unscripted banter or a healthy dose of the teacher’s own beliefs.
When Mr. Ladd used the term “nigger knockin’” with a smile, it was the first time I had heard it, although it would hardly be the last. It referred to the custom of middle-class white boys cruising down Northeast Second Street in Oklahoma City – the very heart of “niggertown” and former home of a lively jazz scene where Ellington, Basie and Ella Fitzgerald once appeared – and throwing eggs, bottles or worse at the black people along the sidewalks or sitting on their front porches.
One Sunday morning, during the height of the space race, Mr. Ladd couldn’t wait to entertain his religious charges with the latest jokes he had heard.
“You know what NASA said when they sent the first nigger into space?” he beamed. “‘The jig is up.’
“And you know what they said when the first one landed on the moon? ‘There’s a coon on the moon.’”
Did I forget to mention that this was Sunday School?
Jesus may have loved “all the little children” no matter what their color, but we didn’t have to.
*
Oklahoma had a history of racism and segregation dating literally to the instant after statehood.
The Five Civilized Tribes were considered “civilized” partly because, like the South from where they came, they held black slaves. Ironically, however, from the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s until Oklahoma statehood, blacks were freer in Oklahoma than anywhere else in the south and thousands migrated to Oklahoma for the opportunities it seemed to offer.
A sizable contingent of blacks joined the Land Run of 1889. The Territories provided equal-opportunity hardships and black farmers homesteaded and busted sod just like the whites and Indians. In Indian Territory, former slaves – freedmen – and their descendants were entitled to land allotments and to share in federal government payments to Indians. They could vote, they could form their own all-black towns, they could become merchants, bankers and businessmen. And they did.
Blacks not only voted, but held municipal offices. The Republican Party for a few years controlled Territorial politics and blacks formed about a sixth of Republican voters. With the arrival of statehood in 1907, Oklahoma’s population was about eight percent black.
Statehood’s arrival, however, marked an end to the black dream of a free and equal southern state. In the few years just preceding statehood, another breed of immigrants, southern white Democrats, swarmed into the Territories, equally determined to form a new state according to their own ideals. The Republicans, with their large contingent of relatively newly enfranchised blacks, were evidently no match for the firebrand Democrats and of the 112 delegates elected to the 1906 Constitutional Convention, 99 were Democrats, virtually all of whom had pledged to make Jim Crow the cornerstone of the new state government.
Leading the convention was the champion of the little people and my former hero, Alfalfa Bill Murray.
*
The assembly drafted a proposed new state constitution mandating, among other Jim Crow provisions, “Separate schools for white and colored children.” President Theodore Roosevelt slowed the Oklahoma Democratic plan down (for only a short while) by making it known that he would veto any statehood bill if the new state’s constitution contained any such language.
The Democrats obediently backed off and submitted a proposed constitution without any of the offending provisions. The constitution was adopted in September, 1907, and statehood followed in November. But before the year was over, the state legislature met for the first time to amend the constitution to make it virtually identical to the one Roosevelt threatened to veto, and then to pass laws in accordance with the amended constitution.
Until the 1960s, Article XIII, Section 3, of the Oklahoma Constitution (adopted at the very first legislative session) read as follows:
Separate schools for white and colored children. – Separate schools for white and colored children with like accommodation shall be provided by the Legislature and impartially maintained. The term “colored children,” as used in this section, shall be construed to mean children of African descent. The term “white children” shall include all other children.
Immediately after adoption of this section, the legislature passed a series of laws to enforce it. Among them were Title 70, Oklahoma Statutes, Sections 5-1 and 5-2:
§5-1. Separation of races – Impartial facilities. – The public schools of the State of Oklahoma shall be organized and maintained upon a complete plan of separation between the white and colored races with impartial facilities for both races.
§5-2. Definitions. – The term “colored,” as used in the preceding section, shall be construed to mean all persons of African descent who possess any quantum of negro blood, and the term “white” shall include all other persons…. (emphasis added.)
The statutes went on to define as misdemeanors such violations as “Maintaining or operating [an educational] institution [which admits] both races” (§5-5), “Teaching [at] an institution receiving both races” (§5-6), a “White person attending [an] institution receiving colored pupils” (§5-7), and “Teacher permitting child to attend school of other race” (§5-4, which not only called for a fine but suspension of the teacher’s certificate for a year.)
Thus, an administrator, a teacher or a student could become a criminal for having anything to do with integrated education, and a teacher could actually lose her license.
Other laws passed in the same legislative session required racially segregated facilities in nearly all public areas, including transportation (buses and trains) and waiting rooms.
So much for the bright promise of the country’s 46th and newest state.
For some reason, the new order wasn’t welcomed by the black citizens of the new state, who demonstrated their displeasure in the 1908 elections. Dozens of Democratic state legislators were turned out of office, along with three congressmen. Worse still, a black man from Guthrie won a seat in the state House of Representatives.
If black voters could actually sway an election, then something obviously had to be done about allowing blacks to vote. The Democrats retaliated with a 1910 ballot measure proposing a literacy test for voting. Since such a test might well have disenfranchised the majority of the population, the measure exempted, or “grandfathered,” descendants of persons eligible to vote on January 1, 1866 – a carefully chosen date, as it was just shortly before the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment:
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Since the measure required voter approval, the ballot was pre-printed with a “Yes” vote, and voters had to mark through the words “For the Amendment” in order to vote against it. More than a little ballot-box stuffing helped to seal the deal. The amendment passed. Illiterate whites could still vote; illiterate blacks could not.
In the 1908 election, approximately 30,000 of the voters were black. Two years later, black voters numbered fewer than 1,000. The grandfather clause worked.
Oklahoma thus became, for the South, the shining star on the flag. It had accomplished in four years what it had taken the other southern states 40 years to accomplish: legally mandated segregation of the races and decimation of black voting power.
*
Five years later, the United States Supreme Court, in Guinn v. United States, struck down the “grandfather clause,” although it held that the literacy test itself was not unconstitutional, being merely an “exercise by the state of a lawful power vested in it, not subject to our supervision.”
But when one scheme failed or was ruled unconstitutional, another was already waiting to take its place.
Not to be outdone, the Oklahoma Legislature struck back. Because the literacy test was not per se unconstitutional, a specially called session of the legislature passed yet another law in 1916, graciously stating that all citizens eligible to vote in 1914 (just before the “grandfather clause” was ruled unconstitutional) would remain eligible to vote. The rest of the state’s citizens (nearly all illiterate blacks) were also cordially invited to register to vote – and given two weeks to do so.
Failure to register to vote between April 30 and May 11, 1916, would render them perpetually ineligible to vote.
This legislative scheme lasted much longer than the “grandfather clause” scheme, and it was not until a quarter-century later that the Supreme Court found it, too, to be in contravention of the Fifteenth Amendment. Justice Felix Frankfurter summarized the history of Oklahoma’s attempts to prevent blacks from voting (Lane v. Wilson, 1939) and concluded that “The [Fifteenth] Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination.”
But the literacy test itself was still constitutional. That test, fancy gerrymandering, coercion and a host of other tactics continued to limit, although not actually ban, African-American participation in Oklahoma politics until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. While Black voters increased after 1939, Blacks didn’t vote in great numbers for decades. There were no black candidates and blacks had little interest in voting for whites. They did make a difference in some county elections, however, since well-heeled candidates could round up black voters, haul them to the polls and pay then a dollar each to vote.
To Oklahoma’s credit, it never instituted a poll tax like many other Southern states, including Texas.
*
Voting was the smaller part of the Jim Crow plan. The larger part was institutionalized segregation. The first state legislature took on segregation of schools and public accommodations, but white citizens themselves accepted the job of segregating residential neighborhoods and restaurants.
One of the most useful segregation tools was known as “restrictive covenants.” Either a housing developer would insert these covenants into deeds as he sold his new houses, or entire neighborhoods would agree to enter into a compact, such as the following, present in one form or another in every Midwest City deed and plat map:
No persons of any race other than the Caucasian shall use any building or any lot, except that this covenant shall not prevent occupancy by domestic servants of a different race domiciled with an owner or tenant.
Sometimes the “Negro race” was specifically excluded. In other deeds, both the “Caucasian” and “Indian” races were specifically allowed.
The covenants were enforceable by each property owner against all of the other local property owners. If a person tried to sell his house to a buyer of “any race other than the Caucasian,” any other party to the agreement could obtain a court injunction prohibiting the sale.
Thus, in addition to constitutional and legislative restrictions against integrated education, legally segregated neighborhoods (and, by extension, neighborhood schools) ensured that blacks would not be schooled with whites.
In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Shelley v. Kraemer that these covenants could not be enforced by state courts. Being “private agreements,” however, they were not unconstitutional in themselves (just as literacy tests were not unconstitutional), and so they remained, their very presence having a chilling effect on the attempts of blacks to move into white neighborhoods. Oklahoma’s reaction, anyway, was simply to ignore the ruling; laws allowing enforcement of the covenants remained on the books for years.
Shelley v. Kraemer was decided in the same year that President Truman ordered the armed forces integrated. The country was changing, but the Midwest, including Oklahoma, wasn’t yet changing with it.
*
Not too many years later, the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1955) did away with the doctrine of “separate but equal” education for whites and blacks.
Except that it didn’t. That’s merely what the textbooks say. All Brown really did was declare the doctrine to be unconstitutional. For two decades and more the decision actually had little effect on public school districts in the metropolitan areas. The continued presence of racial covenants and other restrictive practices ensured that neighborhoods – and therefore neighborhood schools – continued to be segregated. Schools might no longer be intentionally segregated by law, but they were segregated, nonetheless. (Ironically, small towns and rural areas didn’t experience the same degree of segregation as did Tulsa and Oklahoma Counties, probably for lack of funds to support separate schools for Blacks and Whites.)
The state’s constitutional provisions and statutes criminalizing integrated education remained on the books well after 1955. Even though they had been found to be unconstitutional, the state couldn’t gather a legislative majority to repeal them or to put repeal to the voters.
It was, of course, nobody’s fault. Homeowners bought their properties already encumbered by racial restrictions. Few Oklahoma City real estate agents were followers of Supreme Court decisions and those who were even aware of Shelley v. Kraemer didn’t care; no decent white person would be the first in his neighborhood to sell his house to a Negro. The politicians were likewise innocent – they no longer relied on statutes mandating segregated education. Neighborhood schools were just fine and segregation was just…one of the facts of life.
*
Oklahoma City in the 1960s was a textbook example of de facto school segregation. No longer mandated by law, but simply existing. With no official board policy of segregating schools by race, everyone went to neighborhood schools. Nothing could be fairer, according to the School Board. But the only integrated neighborhoods were those from which the whites hadn’t completely fled as the upwardly mobile blacks moved in.
In the 1961-62 school year, the Oklahoma City School District consisted of 101 schools. Only fourteen of those were considered to be integrated. But the School Board evidently defined “integration” in the same way as the state statute (then still on the books) defined “Negro” (“all persons of African descent who possess any quantum of negro blood”), for one white student in a black school or one black student in a white school was enough for the board to boast of integration.
The eleven “integrated” elementary schools, according to the School Board, included the following examples:
School Negro White
Creston Hills 685 7
Culbertson 1018 8
Edison 182 4
Longfellow 1 359
Walnut Grove 138 3
As late as the 1971-72 school year, a full sixteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, 16 of Oklahoma City’s 86 elementary schools were nearly all-black and 60 were all-white. Only ten were truly integrated. Not, of course, including the five examples cited above.
*
Change comes slowly to Oklahoma unless there’s a challenge to the natural order of things. Then, just watch us old boys scramble.
My first elementary school was Creston Hills, which I attended from kindergarten in 1952-53 through second grade in 1954-55. It was all white.
In the summer of 1955, some carpetbagging niggerlover down the street sold his house to a black family. At least that was the adult view; I didn’t know what was going on, I just watched the neighborhood change almost overnight.
During that summer alone, our street changed color from all white to almost one-third black. There were no white buyers, but middle-class black families were lining up to move into a better neighborhood – and at bargain prices to boot. My parents applied for a transfer to the next-closest elementary school – in a neighborhood that had not yet been integrated.
Because I was white and wanted to transfer to an all-white school, the request was granted.
The interesting point to me, however, is that within seven years, virtually the entire neighborhood had moved out. Creston Hills Elementary School went from all-white in 1954-55 to only seven white students in 1961-62 – barely one percent.
Who says Midwesterners are slow?
*
The School Board’s policy was to rubber stamp “minority to majority” transfer requests. Transfer requests of a black student from his local integrated school to a more distant all-black school or of a white student from a local integrated school to a more distant all-white school were routinely granted. The reasoning, as one high school principal explained at the time, was that “if a child is unhappy in a situation, his unhappiness is not going to make a contribution to his learning experience, and if he is unhappy then he should be permitted to seek a place where he can be happy.”
Black students, no matter how “unhappy” with an inferior education, were almost never permitted to transfer to the better white schools.
In 1961, a black dentist filed an action on behalf of his son in the U.S. District Court, challenging the pattern of racial segregation in the Oklahoma City Schools and the “minority to majority” transfer policy in particular. The case was assigned to Judge Luther Bohanon, who continued to manage it for nearly twenty years, mostly because of the school board’s delaying tactics. Judge Bohanon presided over many other significant cases during more than forty years on the federal bench, but his name will always be Mudd in Oklahoma City because of his supervision of school desegregation.
But middle Americans, for all their lazy drawls and mulish slowness, are practically hyperactive compared to the glacial pace of the federal courts. In 1963, Bohanon found that Oklahoma City had deliberately segregated its students, relying on restrictive covenants (a full fifteen years after Shelley v. Kraemer), on state and local laws requiring residential racial segregation and on School Board policies regarding student transfers.
The school board argued that it could solve the problem by a complex formula of re-zoning neighborhoods, but two years later, Bohanon found that this plan had not succeeded. It was not until 1972, however (11 years after the suit was filed), that Bohanon finally ordered a plan instituted to really integrate Oklahoma City schools. It involved busing black students to white schools and vice versa.
The mechanism was known as the “Finger Plan,” after its author, Dr. John A. Finger. Folks had a catch-phrase ball with this title, and “Bohanon has given Oklahoma City the Finger” was a quip which only became more witty with each repetition.
The case of Robert L. Dowell, et. al v. School District No. 89, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma was filed when I was in the ninth grade, in 1961. Busing of students to achieve racial integration didn’t begin until after 1972, when I was out of college, out of the army, and back in Midwest City working as a reporter for The Oklahoma Journal. But Midwest City was aware of it – and afraid of it – from the day it was filed.
By 1963, we knew what was coming. Judge Bohanon was clearly ready to rule that Oklahoma City’s de facto segregation was not in compliance with Brown v. Board of Education.
President Kennedy was dead and President Johnson was pushing the Civil Rights Bill, which would allow for actual enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
Midwest City was technically exempt from the school integration battle, there being no black students within our school district’s borders. But while we may have been simple, we weren’t stupid. We realized that racial covenants, legally mandated neighborhood segregation and what few other of the Jim Crow laws still remaining on the books were doomed. If not today, then tomorrow. Before you knew it, our kids would have to go to school with…them.
**
“I don’t care what the goddamned court says,” my friends all agreed, although it was voiced by my friend, Dwain, grandson and nephew of western Oklahoma cotton farmers. “They better not let a nigger in this school. If I see a nigger walking down the hall? I’ll just walk up and bust him in the mouth. I don’t care what they do to me. But if everybody would do that? There wouldn’t be no niggers in our high school.”
This was more than four years after the nationally televised integration of Little Rock’s Central High School, when President Eisenhower sent in an army division to force Gov. Faubus and the school administration to actually obey the law.
We weren’t really slow learners. We were just all talk. “My daddy,” said Dwain, “says he’ll support me and they won’t dare kick me out.”
**
There were white Oklahomans who worked tirelessly for integration and an end to racism, and whose children didn’t grow up with that disease. I just wouldn’t know any of them until many years later. And if any of them lived in Midwest City, they certainly kept a low profile.
I would not be honest if I did not admit to my own racism and to acting on it occasionally. Blacks were such easy victims: they talked funnier even than whites, they drove Cadillacs when they could afford it, all of the men wore a “soul patch” on their lower lip. The blacks who worked were garbage men, maids and waiters.
At least, that’s how we saw them.
(For this life, they came to Oklahoma City from the Deep South? God, it must have been vicious down there.)
*
Mildred was only vaguely racist, not having met a black person until well after her thirtieth birthday, so I didn’t absorb race hatred with my mother’s milk, but only with every Oklahoma breath I took until college.
Mrs. Dishman (“Aunt Mary”), for instance, continued her hatred of Eleanor Roosevelt until her death. It wasn’t so much the Roosevelt politics anymore (“You never met a person as opposed to socialism and the whole Social Security plan as Bob [Mr. Dishman, aka “Uncle Dish”], but you never met anyone so grateful to receive that first Social Security check”), as the memory of Mrs. Roosevelt reaching out to black soprano Marian Anderson: “She was the first one to invite niggers to the White House!”
Always an out-of-step teenager, I loved Frank Sinatra as much as I loved The Beatles and The Stones. I thought Aunt Mary might also enjoy him, since he was closer to her generation, but she refused to listen to him. “He hangs around with that nigger that married a white woman.”
**
But hiding behind the fear, insularity and bigotry was a growing, sub-surface desire among the urban population to shed the old ways, and it manifested itself in a remarkable and unexpected lack of violence in race relations dating back to the ‘50s, when Clara Luper first entered the picture. She knew her oppressors and dealt with them more successfully than any young hothead could ever have done.
Certainly more successfully that I would have done, had I been in her place.
A high school history teacher, Mrs. Luper became inspired by the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, sparked by Rosa Parks and led by Martin Luther King, Jr. During a 1957 trip to New York to present a play she had written based on King’s teachings of non-violent civil disobedience, she and her students found few places for a group of black children to have lunch.
Back home again, she and her students decided to integrate Oklahoma City’s lunch counters. Peacefully, of course, in accordance with King’s teachings. They began with polite visits to the owners and managers of the city’s major drug stores and department stores, and then to the mayor and city manager. They wrote letters. They contacted churches, but neither the white nor the black churches were receptive.
When negotiations failed, Luper and twelve of her students (one only six years old) headed for the downtown Katz Drug Store. One of the children laid a five-dollar bill on the lunch counter and asked for “thirteen Cokes, please.”
The scene grew ugly but, strangely, never violent. The young protestors suffered verbal abuse from the staff, from white customers and the police, but other than an occasional “accidental” bumping, no physical abuse.
The next day the twelve children had grown to twenty-four and, by the fourth day, they were served. The Katz management announced that all of its stores in Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma would immediately integrate their lunch counters. It was August, 1958.
Although it received little national attention at the time, Luper’s effort was one of the first – and the first successful – “sit-ins” in the country. The Katz success came fully a year and a half before the celebrated Woolworth’s sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The day after the Katz victory, the group moved to the drug store across the street, where management informed them that the owners had already agreed to integrate their lunch counters.
Prior to the sit-in at Katz, there were reportedly only two eating establishments in Oklahoma City serving both blacks and whites, and both of them had segregated facilities. Less than three years after Katz, the NAACP Youth Council had desegregated more than 100 of the city’s eating establishments.
I didn’t know any of this at the time. I was not quite eleven years old. It would be more than a decade before I met Clara Luper, during yet another of the battles that defined her life. She was crying.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Luper,” I said. “It’s going to be all right.”
And eventually, it was. And without violence.
**
Midwest City was able to fend off segregation longer than many other communities. In a town where all of the residents were white (or at least not black, there being a few Indian families) and all of the real estate agents were white, laws and written agreements were not required to maintain the status quo. A nudge and a wink can serve as well as a law.
Eventually, even Midwest City bowed to authority and ever-growing public pressure. If it failed to welcome its new black residents with open arms and Christian charity, at least there was no violence and there were no troops. Only complaining and big talk. When the first black student was enroled in Midwest City High School in the early 1970s, it occurred almost without incident.
