CLARA LUPER, A LEADER OF CIVIL RIGHTS SIT-INS
Published: June 11, 2011
Her name does not resonate like that of Rosa Parks, and she did not garner the kind of national attention that a group of black students did when they took seats at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., in February 1960. But Clara Luper was a seminal figure in the sit-ins of the civil rights movement.
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Associated Press
Clara Luper in 1971.
Ms. Luper, who led one of the first sit-ins — at a drugstore in Oklahoma City 18 months before the Greensboro action — died Wednesday at her home in Oklahoma City, her daughter Marilyn Hildreth said. She was 88.
Ms. Luper was a history teacher at Dunjee High School in 1957 when she agreed to become adviser to the Oklahoma City N.A.A.C.P.’s youth council. The youngsters asked what they could do to help the movement.
On Aug. 19, 1958, Ms. Luper led three other adult chaperons and 14 members of the youth council into the Katz Drug Store in Oklahoma City, where they took seats at the counter and asked for Coca-Colas. Denied service, they refused to leave until closing time. They returned on Saturday mornings for several weeks.
The sit-ins received local press coverage. Eventually the Katz chain agreed to integrate lunch counters at its 38 stores in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas and Iowa. Over the next six years, the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter held sit-ins that led to the desegregation of almost every eating establishment in Oklahoma City.
“The actions that Ms. Luper and those youngsters took at the Katz Drug Store inspired the rank and file of the N.A.A.C.P. and activists on college campuses across the country,” Roslyn M. Brock, the group’s national chairwoman, said Friday.
Ms. Luper’s activism extended beyond the sit-ins. A week after that first protest, 17 white churches in Oklahoma City let members of her youth group attend services. At another church, a pastor asked two youngsters to leave, The Associated Press reported at the time. “God did not intend Negroes and whites to worship together,” he told them.
Ms. Luper was arrested 26 times at civil rights protests. Now a street is named after her in Oklahoma City, and flags flew Friday at half-staff in her honor.
Born Clara Mae Shepard on May 3, 1923, to Ezell and Isabel Shepard, Ms. Luper grew up near Hoffman, Okla. Her father was a brick worker, and her mother was a maid. “When she was a child, her brother got sick and they wouldn’t treat him at the hospital,” Ms. Hildreth said. “That really triggered her.”
Ms. Luper is also survived by another daughter, Chelle Wilson; a son, Calvin; a sister, Oneita Brown; five grandchildren; eight great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild. Her husband, Bert Luper, died before her.
Ms. Luper graduated from Langston University in 1944. In 1951 she earned a master’s degree in history from the University of Oklahoma, where she was the first black student admitted to a graduate history program. She taught at Oklahoma City high schools until she retired in 1991.
On the blog Stories in America, she said her father “had never been able to sit down and eat a meal in a decent restaurant.”
“He used to tell us that someday he would take us to dinner and to parks and zoos,” she said. “And when I asked him when was someday, he would always say, ‘Someday will be real soon,’ as tears ran down his cheeks.”
A wise and stalwart lady, Ms. Clara Luper fought the good fight to end segregation.
For more on Ms. Luper, click the following links:
“Oklahoma Civil Rights Icon Clara Luper Dies at 88“
Digital Library: Clara Shepherd Luper
The following is a video on Ms. Luper and a group of her students who staged their sit-in protests at the Katz Drugstore lunch counter. The video also highlights Ms. Luper’s civil rights activism and the effect it had on many others:
“A Conversation with Clara Luper“: (Originally broadcast on October 4, 2010 on the OETA Network/PBS)
Sign Ms. Luper’s guestbook here.
In her quiet dignity and preserverance, Ms. Luper stood against racial segregation and made life better for all those who came after her.
Rest in peace, Ms. Luper.
Rest in peace.
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EDGAR TEKERE, ZIMBABWE INDEPENDENCE LEADER
Published: June 9, 2011
JOHANNESBURG — Edgar Zivanai Tekere, who was imprisoned for a decade with Robert Mugabe during the struggle to end white minority rule in Rhodesia, and later unsuccessfully challenged Mr. Mugabe’s political domination of what had become an independent Zimbabwe, died on Tuesday in the eastern city of Mutare, Zimbabwe. He was 74.
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Alexander Joe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Edgar Tekere
The cause was prostate cancer, a family friend, Ibbo Mandaza, said.
In a memoir published in 2007, Mr. Tekere largely blamed Mr. Mugabe for building a nation whose people “live mostly in fear of their own government, of a state machinery, born out of the forces of liberation, but now, regrettably, more associated with ruthlessness and naked force.”
Mr. Tekere said he accepted his “share of responsibility” for the failure of his generation to establish institutions that would have safeguarded democracy.
In 1963, Mr. Tekere helped found the Zimbabwe African National Union, or Zanu, in Rhodesia. The following year, the party was banned, and Mr. Tekere and Mr. Mugabe, then the party’s secretary general, were jailed as Prime Minister Ian Smith’s government sought to crush demands for black majority rule. After their release in 1975, both men crossed into Mozambique, which had become a base for a guerrilla war.
At independence in 1980, Mr. Tekere was considered even more militant than Mr. Mugabe, who was then advocating reconciliation with whites. That same year, Mr. Tekere and a bodyguard were found to have murdered a white farm manager just months after independence, but Mr. Tekere was freed under an Ian Smith-era law that shielded government ministers from criminal charges if they believed they were acting to suppress terrorism.
Mr. Tekere was demoted from his post as manpower minister, and he became a critic of the public corruption that defined Mr. Mugabe’s rule. In 1988, Mr. Tekere was expelled from Zanu-PF, the successor to Zanu. He subsequently formed his own party, ran for president against Mr. Mugabe in 1990 and lost.
Mr. Tekere was born on April 1, 1937, in a village called Nyang’ombe. He is survived by his wife, Pamela, and a daughter, Maidei.
Despite years of bad blood, Mr. Mugabe was quoted by the state-controlled newspaper on Thursday as saying that Mr. Tekere’s death had brought back memories “of our escape from Rhodesia to join thousands upon thousands of young Zimbabwean fighters housed in various rear bases in Mozambique.” Mr. Mugabe, 87, who is still in power 31 years after independence, described Mr. Tekere as “fearless and highly temperamental.”
Zanu-PF, the ruling party, declared Mr. Tekere a national hero on Thursday, qualifying him to be buried at Heroes Acre on the outskirts of Harare, the capital.
Mr. Tekere had angrily declared over the years that he did not want to be buried among “among thieves and killers” in Heroes Acre, said Mr. Mandaza, who wrote the introduction to Mr. Tekere’s memoir. But Mr. Tekere’s family accepted the honor.
“He earned it,” Mr. Mandaza said of Mr. Tekere. “His status will rehabilitate the concept of being a national hero.”
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Ann
