As the home of Oklahoma City's NAACP Youth Council, the Freedom Center served as a hub for civil rights activity for many years. Clara Luper served as the Youth Council's sponsor. A career public-school teacher, Mrs. Luper taught her students and others in the community, including clergy members, non-African-Americans and business and civic leaders, to employ nonviolent means to protest injustices. This was shown most famously through drugstore and department store sit-ins that effectively ended longtime race-based segregation and other discriminatory policies. She led by example, demonstrating her personal commitment by going to jail 26 times for peaceful protests. Under her leadership, Oklahoma City's NAACP Youth Council began the local sit-in movement on August 19, 1958, more than a year before the Greensboro sit-ins began.

Just as civil rights efforts continued to address new issues after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Oklahoma City’s NAACP Youth Council sought new activities once their goal of integration of public places had been largely achieved. When speaking of the founding of the Freedom Center, Luper noted intent to build on the success of the sit-ins: “we needed something to keep the movement going, and to keep the youth involved.” By the summer of 1967, arrangements were made to acquire a former Mobil gas station at the corner of NE 25th Street and what was then N. Eastern Avenue, now N. Martin Luther King Ave.

Luper told reporters that the center’s goals were to “provide opportunities for deprived children to grow up properly, to learn the value of self help and to see the adult world supported by a sense of belonging.” For the next forty years, the Center worked diligently toward that goal, providing classes, activities, and summer programs for countless Oklahoma City youth. Beyond these community minded goals, though, the Freedom Center served as the headquarters for the NAACP Youth Council, and would be indelibly linked to Oklahoma City’s most important civil rights battles for decades to come.