An Interview with Christina L. Beatty: The Legacy of Clara Luper

Christina L. Beatty is the Project Director for the Freedom Center and the Clara Luper Civil Rights Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. This $25 million initiative will commemorate the life and work of the civil rights activist Clara Luper (1923–2011). In 1951, Clara Luper earned a master's degree in history from the University of Oklahoma and taught history for decades in the Oklahoma City Public Schools system. We recorded this conversation on August 9, as Beatty prepared for the 64th anniversary of Oklahoma City's first sit-in at the Katz Drugstore in Oklahoma City. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

JWH: Welcome, Christina. Thanks so much for joining us to speak today about your work. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you came to your present position?

CLB: Absolutely. I always like to start with the fact that I'm a fifth generation Oklahoman. I think it's important for people to understand that Black people have been here since before statehood. On my father's side, my family migrated here from Kentucky during the landruns, so the roots run very deep. We still own forty acres in Lincoln County.

I landed with the Freedom Center after chasing intersections of arts, history, and culture with community development for almost fifteen years now. I grew up here in Oklahoma City but went away for college to Rice University in Houston, Texas. I went further away to graduate school at the University of Chicago and lived in Chicago for seven years. It was there that I began to learn about historic preservation and the importance of saving significant buildings so that the built environment can help tell an authentic and compelling narrative. Saving historic buildings was part of a community-driven heritage tourism strategy to tell the story of how Chicago was shaped by the Great Migration and the proliferation of Black culture that resulted. To receive a National Heritage Area designation from the National Parks Service, you have to tell a nationally significant story and identify defensible geographic boundaries.

While many heritage areas are rural and much larger in scope, like mountain ranges, we looked at the restrictive real estate covenants and how segregation shaped the southside by concentrating Black culture within those boundaries. I lived in a three-story courtyard walk up that was literally around the corner from where Nat "King" Cole lived as a child, and down the street from a home once owned by Ida [End Page 147] B. Wells Barnett. Part of 47th Street was named after Lou Rawls, and 36th after Sam Cooke near his elementary school. The history was palpable. I worked for the Hyde Park Jazz Festival for several years, which was about keeping the legacy of jazz alive on the southside of Chicago even though most of the historic venues were gone. We use programming to invite people to the southside, show them that there was culture to be experienced south of downtown and that it wasn't as scary a place as people might think.

Fast forward and I've been back in Oklahoma City for more than eight years now. My first opportunity was serving as Community Arts Director for the Oklahoma Arts Council, which is the state agency that supports arts education and programming through grantmaking. I worked directly with organizations across the state that produced exhibitions, performances, and festivals. It was a tremendous re-introduction to the state—in my first month, I traveled to Miami in the far northeastern corner of the state and Guymon in the Panhandle. I managed the Cultural District Initiative which helped communities to leverage their arts and cultural resources as part of their economic development strategy. That might look like festivals downtown or refurbishing an old theater or other buildings that people wanted to save and convert into a cultural space. I left the Arts Council in 2019 to lead public programming for Oklahoma Contemporary in its transition from a 30+ year home at the fairgrounds to a new, purpose-built facility in Automobile Alley...

Read the full article in the Journal of Women's History (purchase and rental options available).

Source: Journal of Women's History, Volume 34, Number 4, Winter 2022