A monument in bronze for a teacher and her lesson for the ages
Oklahoma sculptor LaQuincey Reed stands with his clay model of civil rights leader Clara Luper that will become part of a bronze monument in downtown Oklahoma City. The monument will depict the first Katz Drug Store sit-in by 13 children led by Luper who were refused service because they were Black. (Photo by Kathryn McNutt)
OKLAHOMA CITY – The U.S. sit-in movement for desegregation in accommodations began in 1958 in Oklahoma City when 13 Black children sat down at a downtown lunch counter and refused to leave when they were refused service.
It was schoolteacher and civil rights leader Clara Luper who guided them, but that history lesson wasn’t taught for decades in the Oklahoma City Public Schools where she taught.
Soon it will be told to everyone who passes by an outdoor monument depicting the children at the Katz Drug Store lunch counter under the watchful eye of Luper and a figure embodying the “no service.”
The $3.6 million bronze monument will be installed at the Clara Luper Sit-In Plaza at Robinson Avenue and Main Street, where the drugstore once stood. It is just one project underway to celebrate the life and legacy of the civil rights icon.
Progress on all the projects was reported Wednesday during a forum hosted by the Greater Oklahoma City Chamber.
“We had not told this story even five years ago,” said John Kennedy, co-chair of the monument committee that includes Marilyn Luper Hildreth, Luper’s daughter who came up with the sit-in idea and participated. “We’ve spent five years putting this together.”
The committee decided on life-sized figures. When a school bus pulls up and lets children out at the plaza, “we want them to see these people are their size, these people that did that are their ages,” Kennedy said. “That’s one of the most powerful elements of this story.”
Brooklyn-based StudioEIS has created 14 of the figures, while local sculptor LaQuincey Reed consulted with Hildreth to create the original clay model of Luper.
“All are finished and will be heading to the foundry in Berkley, California,” Kennedy said. “It will be ready one year from today and we can’t wait to install it,” he said.
The other projects are the rehabilitation of the Freedom Center of Oklahoma City with private funding and the construction of the Clara Luper Civil Rights Center – a $26.8 million MAPS 4 project – at NE 25th Street and Martin Luther King Avenue.
The new museum will include interpretative civil rights exhibitions, community gathering spaces and educational programming. Its goal is to enhance the public’s understanding of Oklahoma City’s civil rights history and the significant role local efforts played in ending segregationist policies nationally.
In September, the Oklahoma City Council selected the nonprofit Freedom Center of Oklahoma City LLC as the operating partner for the civil rights center.
Christina Beatty, project director, said the design work for the Clara Luper Civil Rights Center will begin soon and construction is expected to start in late 2024. It should be open by 2027, she said.
The Freedom Center, 2609 N. Martin Luther King Ave., is a former service station that Luper and her partners acquired in 1967 as a place for the Oklahoma City NAACP Youth Council members to meet and be supported. It was active for about 40 years until Luper’s death in 2011.
“It’s a space where she extended her work as an educator beyond the classroom, as she did in so many spaces,” Beatty said. “It continued to be a part of the civil rights struggle in terms of the sanitation workers’ strike in 1969 and additional efforts such as the fight for fair housing.”
The center will be restored with private funding. The work is underway now and should be concluded this year, she said.
Hildreth said if her mother could see all this, “she’d say look at my children go.”
“We need to be out front and go. And when we see injustice, say it’s wrong,” Hildreth said. “We’ve come a long way in Oklahoma, but we sure have a long ways to go. We cannot stop the fight.”