PRES. HARROZ: Hi, I'm Joe Harroz, President of the University of Oklahoma. I want to welcome you to our Conversations with the President. This platform gives me the chance to talk to some of the great people who make OU so special. Make sure you are subscribed to Conversations with the President, and you'll be the first to know when new episodes are released. Let's get started.
First things first. Welcome back to the show, so glad that you've joined us. We are almost a month into the spring semester. Just driving over here, it was great to see Adams Hall is down. There is a new dorm rising out of the space. There is a lot going on here at the University of Oklahoma after a monster record class last year. Applications, here is a quick sneak preview, are up double digits again over last year. So things are great right here. Record research is taking place driving the economy. So much excitement. We are almost ready to announce $1 billion on the march to the $2 billion campaign, and we are edging our way closer to the SEC. So a great time here at the University of Oklahoma.
The one thing is our north star is that we will always be a place of opportunity and excellence, and that brings us to our topic today, which is exciting. This is Black History Month. It's a time for us to think about our past and the future, and where we are going and what lessons we can learn from our past to learn about black identity and representation.
We have two remarkable guests that are here with us today. One I have known for a good while and one I felt like I have known for a very long time and have heard about since I was very young. So Dr. Karlos Hill and Marilyn Luper Hildreth are here today. Let me do just a couple of quick introductions of each of you, talk a little bit about the guest who we are going to talk ‑‑ who is not here physically, but is here in spirit and in so many other ways, which is Clara Luper. First, let's talk about the two of you and what you bring to this table.
The first is Dr. Karlos Hill. Dr. Karlos Hill, if you know anything about the University of Oklahoma, you know who he is. He is an author that has published a lot of great works. He is Regents Professor of the Clara Luper Department of African and African‑American studies here at the University of Oklahoma. It was named that in 2018, and I was honored and privileged to be there during that naming. Author and community engaged scholar who brings a historical perspective to difficult racial events with which we must understand and reckon and learn from. He is author of three books, most recently the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, Photographic History, which is on my table in my office since you hand‑delivered it to me right after it was published. And last year you published the new edition of Clara Luper's memoir, Behold the Walls, the chronicles of the Oklahoma City sit in movement that we are going to be talking about. Also, the founder of the Tulsa Race Massacre, Oklahoma Teachers Institute, which supports the teaching of the history of the Race Massacre to thousands of middle schoolers and high schoolers.
And then Marilyn Luper Hildreth, who I just learned an important fact about that I'm not going to spoil. It's not in these cards about you and we will talk about it. Marilyn is the oldest of the latest Clara Luper's three children.
MARILYN HILDRETH: No, no.
PRES. HARROZ: How many?
MARILY HILDRETH: I am the middle child.
PRES. HARROZ: The middle child.
MARILYN HILDRETH: My brother is the oldest.
PRES. HARROZ: Why would I get that wrong.
MARILYN HILDRETH: I don't know. I thought I would help you out.
PRES. HARROZ: And I will stop talking and start listening, and we are actually going to learn something about it. So let me finish this and then we will get to the real facts as we know them. That is on me.
When you were seven years old, you were one of 13 children who participated in the historic Katz Drugstore sit‑ins. We are going to talk about that more in‑depth. You currently serve on the committees for the Clara Luper Sit-In Plaza, Clara Luper Legacy and the Oklahoma Clara Luper Civil Rights Center and spend your time giving motivational speeches that continue your mothers important legacy. And your mother, here is a quick ‑‑ this will be the Wikipedia overview and then we will get to the actual details, but for our listeners, if you don't know about Clara Luper, you are in for an absolutely important story and lesson.
Clara Shepard Luper attended the University of Oklahoma, but first went to Langston to receive her first degree, and then as I understand it, was the first African‑American, the first black student in the history education department and graduated with her Masters in 1951. After graduation, she was a history high school teacher, mentor to the NAACP Youth Council. We will talk about the Katz Drugstore sit‑in, but she is a remarkable individual. Passed away in 2011. And while she passed at the age of 88, her memory lives in so many ways and her lessons live in so many ways. So Marilyn, let's turn to you and get to the non‑Wikipedia version of your mother. Tell us about her and about what she means to you.
MARILYN HILDRETH: My mother was born in Hoffman, Oklahoma in Okfuskee County. She was at the top of her class, but there were only six people in her class. She would fondly tell us all of the time that in Hoffman, when they received the textbooks, because of the fact it was segregated, they had textbooks with only half of the pages on it. And I think that is where she developed the ability to end a story or continue a story because they had to make up the end to the chapters because there were no pages. And she said you can always achieve something if you could just think it out for a minute. And that is who she was. My mother was a unique individual. She loved education, she loved children, and she looked at them as if they were pure diamonds. She could look at a child and say children can learn, the only thing we need to do is to teach them. She wrote a play entitled Brother President when she was teaching at Dundee High School in Spencer, Oklahoma. And in this play, it was about the Montgomery Board encounter the morning of Martin Luther King Jr.
In the audience that night, Herb Wright, the executive director ‑‑ news director of the NAACP was in the audience. He was so impressed with the play that he invited her to bring the one student to New York City and she said no. She would not take one student unless she could take all of her diamonds. He said Clara Luper, you know we don't have no money to take the students to New York City. The people in Spencer, Oklahoma saw the opportunity and they raised money selling pickles and chicken dinners and catfish dinners to get us to New York City. And I want to tell you that I think that there was a change in point of my life because most of us had never had the opportunity to leave Oklahoma and most of the kids, some of them had not even been to Oklahoma City. When she planned the schedule, she planned for us to go the northern route. That is interesting because we never had the opportunity to go into a restaurant and sit down and eat a hamburger or even drink a Coke here in Oklahoma. We could not even live across Seventh Street in Oklahoma City. We could not even ‑‑ when we go downtown to shop, we could not even try on clothes or a hat or nothing.
So when we got to New York City ‑‑ Harriet Tubman once said a little bit of freedom is a dangerous thing. And we felt so good because we had the opportunity to walk into a restaurant and sit down and drink a Coke just like anybody. But we had to come back to Oklahoma. And we had to come back through the south where it was either color this, white this, sit in the back, do this. You can't eat here. And by the time we got back to Oklahoma City, we said no, we can't live in the city that is still doing that. Why don't we try to make Oklahoma City like some of the places in the north where people can be free to go in and drink a Coke. I know it doesn't sound like much to you, but to young people that had never had this opportunity, it was a joy that I cannot express.
PRES. HARROZ: How old were you at this time?
MARILYN HILDRETH: Oh, let's see. Oh, about eight and a quarter. But it gave us a different outlook on life that what could be done, and thus we started meeting with the NAACP. We had an NAACP Youth Council and we met out in our front yard. Our house did not have air condition. Shotgun house, but kids loved to come over to our house. We negotiated with the Restaurant Association here in Oklahoma City for over two years. After negotiating with them, they came back and said no, we will never serve you because our white patrons don't want to sit next to you in a restaurant.
PRES. HARROZ: So the idea was that it wasn't them that were being racist, it was their clientele that were being racist.
MARILYN HILDRETH: Yes. So that was okay with us, but I suggested if they don't want to sit next to us, why don't we just go to Katz Drugstore and sit next to them and stay there until they served us.
PRES. HARROZ: Tell us where Katz drugstore was.
MARILYN HILDRETH: On Main in Oklahoma City on Main and Robinson.
PRES. HARROZ: So who came up with this idea?
MARILYN HILDRETH: I did.
PRES. HARROZ: Now this is what I was going to tell you at the beginning of the show. Dr. Hill, I call him Karlos. He has all of these fancy professor titles, but I didn't know this until I came in and Karlos can you ‑‑ she is being modest. Do you want to backstop the story and give us a little bit of the history of how the famous ‑‑ and tell us about the Katz Drugstore.
DR. KARLOS HILL: Katz Drugstore, in short, launched the modern civil rights movement in terms of its sit‑in phase. Marilyn Luper initiated that by her suggestion on August ‑‑ on the evening of August 19th, 1958, to her mother and her brother Calvin Luper, but as well as the NCAACP Youth Council in that evening. She challenged them even to go down to Katz Drugstore because her older brother, Calvin, did not think it was a good idea. So kind of what began as a guest became a real plan that mother Luper, Clara Luper, supported. And so 13 of them went down to Katz Drugstore, single file line inside, and quietly sat down and that started a revolution that continued for another six years until every significant business in downtown Oklahoma City was desegregated. And that was started by her suggestion at nine years old to go to Katz Drugstore.
PRES. HARROZ: Marilyn, that is incredible. Do you recall being there?
MARILYN HILDRETH: Oh, yes.
PRES. HARROZ: Tell me what you remember.
MARILYN HILDRETH: I remember I could not understand how adults could be so mean to young people because they would spill coffee on us, walk by and kick us, talk about our national heritage and they didn't even know my name, but they talked about us. And they were really mean to us. Let me tell you something, they trained us in the passive, non‑valiant resistant.
PRES. HARROZ: Who trained you?
MARILYN HILDRETH: Mom. She took her philosophy from Gandhi and Martin Luther King and the young people had to be prepared mentally to go down and face intimidation from people, mean people.
PRES. HARROZ: It is really stunning. I mean, it is your idea at nine years old. Your brother takes the opposite side of it, your older brother, Calvin. And did Calvin go with you?
MARILYN HILDRETH: Yes, he thought I was crazy.
PRES. HARROZ: But he went with you anyway.
MARILYN HILDRETH: Yes, yes.
PRES. HARROZ: And your mom referred to her students and her kids as her diamonds. As I understand it, one of those 13 was also Dean Stan Evans from the College of Law who I had the honor to work with and is one of my dearest friends.
MARILYN HILDRETH: Well Stan was not one of the original sit ins, he was there the next day.
PRES. HARROZ: Got ya.
MARILYN HILDRETH: And in Oklahoma City, we were building a Sit‑in Plaza where you see the 13 original sit‑inners, but all of the sit‑inners, whether it was second day, third day or fourth day have a bond that is so tight that it was scary. We knew that we had to stick together. One example was I was in front of ‑‑ I am trying to think of what location it was, Panama's Cafeteria, and I saw a man walking down the street. This man had in his hand a rope, and on the end of the rope was a chimpanzee. And I was sitting there, and I said oh Marilyn, what is that man doing in Oklahoma City with a chimpanzee? Well, the closer he got to me, I realized the man was coming directly at me and he threw the chimpanzee on me. And my mother told me this, she said after it was all said and done, I'm so glad that he chose you to throw the chimpanzee on instead of one of the other kids because I understand, and God was going to take care of you. I don't know if I could have explained that to another parent.
PRES. HARROZ: No, isn't that amazing how people can be so dehumanizing as to do that and to do that to a child. I mean you were a kid, and someone was that callous and cold and dehumanizing and looked at someone because of the color of their skin, so fundamentally different. Karlos, as you look at this historically, you have already said it was a seminole event, the Katz Drugstore. What did that precipitate historically in Oklahoma City and in Oklahoma.
DR. KARLOS HILL: The Civil Rights Movement in Oklahoma, that is what the actions of Clara Luper precipitated. It was a watershed movement in the sense that it precipitated other student led sit‑in movements later. The famous 1960 Greensboro sit‑in. It is precipitated by the 1958 sit‑ins in Oklahoma City. There were reverberations from it, but what I really want to see from what Marilyn said is, it is not only that mother Luper taught them non‑violent civil disobedience, she really taught them radical love. She taught them to love people who despised them, who spit on them, who kicked them as she described. That was her main lesson to her students, to love people who didn't love you. And in loving them, right ‑‑ her message to them was we're not trying to change laws, we are trying to change and transform people and so you have to let those people then, not just try to change policies. So radical love was really the main legacy of Clara Luper, nonviolent civil disobedience.
PRES. HARROZ: That is a fascinating take. When you look at every day, every generation, in every circumstance, just the idea of loving your neighbor as yourself, which all of the major religions have some version of that as a fundamental principle, but to love someone, the radical kind of love where you love someone who doesn't know you, but hates you without knowing you. That is a fundamentally different kind of love. It's not convenient, it's not easy, and it is counter to our base human nature. And I think it's a great lesson right now. I mean we will get into the lessons of Clara Luper, but that idea of radical love is one that has resonance that certainly transcends even the dehumanizing elements of racism, right. And to every human interaction where somebody finds someone else to be less than human, less than themselves. Loving your brother and sister is easy when they love you back.
MARILYN HILDRETH: Yes, you are right. It's hard to love someone when they don't. To love you and to test you.
PRES. HARROZ: Yes, and the reaction is the exact opposite to what was to come after them, to want to hit them back twice as hard as they hit you. That is a very sort of tribal instinct to want to go after someone that comes after you.
MARILYN HILDRETH: As a child, I could never understand how you could hate me and not know me just because of the color of my skin. I could not understand that.
PRES. HARROZ: You know, in some ways though it's almost easier to understand our worst instincts than to actually engage in the most evolved instinct and the idea of radical love. I mean that is a beautiful thing, right. That is a beautiful thing that takes work that makes you check those things that are easy and do those things that are hard. There is the beauty of that that certainly is critical for us to live together in society in a constructive way and not just want to eliminate each other.
DR. KARLOS HILL: President, one of the things that I've tried to do is figure out how to operationalize the teachings of Clara Luper. What does it mean to engage with radical love today. How would Clara Luper engage in radical love today with students? And I think just having been able to sit with Marilyn as much as I have, I know that she just ‑‑ what was different about Clara Luper is the degree to which she cared about her students, and she would work with her students. She truly believed when she called her students her diamonds, she truly believed that within them, all of them had greatness. And it was up to mentors such as her to just rub that surface until the diamond showed, until the glare of the diamond showed. So she was all about spending the time with the students and the time was the love, to find that gem inside of them. So I think right now, that is how I try to show as much love to students as I can because I know that is the love that transformed Marilyn, transformed Stan Evans, and today, they are still activated by mother Luper's radical love. So I think for me, that is why I'm so adamant about telling her story.
PRES. HARROZ: Yes, it is a critical story. Before this show started, I was talking about Stan Evans, who by the way wasn't one of the original 13. He came later.
MARILYN LUPER: Yes.
PRES. HARROZ: I have learned that. But, you know, he is someone in my life that when I worked with him and watching him work with his diamonds, his students, and I am his colleague. Heck, I was his boss on paper as the dean of the law school and he was the associate dean for students, he taught me, he embraced me, and he always expresses love in a way that makes you sort of shine, to your point. In my office, I have a picture of Stan and it is just me hugging Stan. And it does every day make me realize ‑‑ I did not realize it was derivative of Clara Luper's teaching this radical love and how to take, you know, all of us that are poorly minted and to actually uncover the diamond and to make it shine. I am a direct beneficiary of those lessons.
DR. KARLOS HILL: And a student of Clara Luper too.
PRES. HARROZ: That is right. Isn't it wild how it is connected in a very direct way. What is the part of your mom's legacy that most folks don't know about, but about which you are really proud. We have talked about the central message, tell us something about your mom that doesn't often come up, but that you're really proud of.
MARILYN HILDRETH: I'll tell you one thing that I am truly proud of. It was very difficult for me to understand how somebody could be cruel to my mother. My mother went to jail 26 times, and I would see people in the area in the community stepping back and talking about her, and it was cruelty. She said that is okay, that is okay. I don't worry about that. You need some tough skin. If you don't have some, go down to the hardware store because you are going to need it. In this life, you are going to need it. Go buy some. And no matter what happened to her, she would always come back stronger and fight. She was feisty.
PRES. HARROZ: Isn't that amazing.
MARILYN HILDRETH: It is.
PRES. HARROZ: It is so easy to take the worst out of situations or even the obvious out of situations. When somebody hates you and does not know you and does it for dehumanizing ways, and then to still love them and say that's just part of it, go pick up your skin, some tough skin over at the hardware store.
MARILYN HILDRETH: Go to the hardware store.
PRES. HARROZ: You know it's interesting. I am sitting here and was struck when you sat down not just about the glow you have about you, but you've got a very cool, very trendy Oklahoma City hat on. And, you know, when you think about what you started, when you were, you know, a young girl, and what you had to go through, you clearly loved this state in a way that shows sort of a radical love. What do you see as the growth that you have seen and the growth that we need to have as a state?
MARILYN HILDRETH: I am so glad you asked me that because I have seen a lot of progress over the years. I have seen black history be included in the school system, but now I see it being taken out of the school system. I have seen the history of my people put in books and I now I'm seeing these books taken out of the classrooms and out of the library. We have come a long ways, but we have a long ways to go, and until the good people in America decide to stand up and speak out, we are in trouble. Because we are not going back. I tell them all the time, I'm not going back to a segregated society. I am just as important as the next person.
PRES. HARROZ: Yes, it's fascinating. Professor, one of the ways you and I have gotten to know each other better was around the Tulsa Race Massacre 100‑year anniversary and the work that you did around this. And It is fascinating because I grew up in Oklahoma City. I went to public school in Oklahoma City. I did not learn about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Now, with the memorial and all of the work you have done, it's in our schoolbooks, but there are materials being removed. You have a unique perspective. You studied this, and certainly here during Black History Month, it's a time to reflect. Same question to you that I asked Marilyn.
DR. KARLOS HILL: Thinking about mother Luper, I would just say what I am most amazed by to this day, and we were talking about this earlier, is for 50 years Clara Luper took students NAACP Youth Council students and then I just think students to the NAACP main meeting, annual meeting every year for 50 years. She found a way to raise money as she did to take them initially in 1958, 59. She did that for years on end until her death. And so what I know about mother Luper is that she ‑‑ her commitment to people, she deeply loved people, invested in people, and that is the spirit that I try to bring to studying her is the love that she had for people and the ways in which, to this day, you can ‑‑ I sit around the table with the Clara Luper Legacy Committee and it's nothing but radical love around the table inspired by her mother. And so I have been a beneficiary of just being able to learn the history, the felt history of the movement from Marilyn who is I would say, I have become definitely a student of mother Luper because Marilyn is my mentor. So in learning this history, and certainly in teaching this history, she has taught me how to do that. So I am just so grateful. What she said is what I would say. You know, I am deeply concerned in terms of the rollback. The one thing I have learned from Marilyn is our responsibility to make sure that it doesn't continue. It is activism, deep activism, organizing that will return that tide. Clara Luper left the playbook for what we need to do.
PRES. HARROZ: Yeah, I think it is fascinating. I did not expect to have that jewel of wisdom, but this idea that it is not just nonviolent protests, it's radical love. I love the perspective that it isn't changing the law that comes first, but changing of the people because that is who makes the law. The only way to get there is through our humanity. I also think it's fascinating, and I am sure that we have the subject matter expert here, Professor, but I think it's ‑‑ I don't know the origin of celebrating Black History Month, but I think it's fascinating and important that it's not just a heritage, right, but it speaks directly to the history because it is a history that you have to understand to be able to honestly reflect on where we are, what the trajectory is, and how setbacks can occur.
You know, I think all of the time about the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It comes right after the Civil War, and right after the 13th Amendment. It is to grant all citizens the same rights as whites, that time males, and then they passed the 14th Amendment a year and a half later. So we are at 1867, and yet in the 1950s, a child has to tell her mother let’s go sit in because we should have the right to sit and eat with white people. You have to know the history, right. You can't just drop in and say it should all be the same, right. This is why I think it's ‑‑ this is why when it was suggested to me the topic of Clara Luper to be our show for this month and to celebrate during Black History Month. It meant so much because to know our local history, the history of this state and what Clara Luper has done and Marilyn what you have done, and your absolutely critical role in that, you have to know it and feel it to understand where you are and where you have to go. The lessons of radical love, it's just a beautiful thing. Like right now, you can take race off and put in something else right now. The only real anecdote for a lot of this is to follow those lessons of radical love. I think it is fascinating.
Marilyn, you are stuck with me. I like you. Tell me, unfortunately, these things are only like 25 minutes. I would like to make them ‑‑ my class lectures are an hour 50, and those are fascinating. Oddly enough, no students ever ask for extra time. But tell us, you are an absolutely fascinating individual and for those who are listening, you need to go back and watch this podcast because if you can't see Marilyn and the light that comes from her and the energy and the love that you produce, you are not getting the full impact. What have we not covered that you would like to say about your mom's legacy and your legacy?
MARILYN HILDRETH: My mom taught me that the beauty of America lies in the diversity of its people. All of us are different, and if we can sit down at the table together and start understanding our differences, anything is possible in this country. But then, when you start isolating yourself and putting you in the corner and you in the corner and someone behind, we are never growing the way we need to grow as a nation.
PRES. HARROZ: That is beautiful. Dr. Hill, I always love being with you and it's a hard act to follow right there. Hard act to follow. Your life's work is one that is fundamentally important, and so much of it is embodied in the life of Marilyn and her mother, and obviously you are a student and a scholar of that. What message during Black History Month which you like to give?
DR. KARLOS HILL: I would just like to stay on mother Luper's radical love, and I think that is her most potent legacy, what she left to the world is to teach people to love those who despise them. The reason why that's so important is when laws change and people's relationships to each other don't, we get the same thing, we get the same kind of society. Mother Luper's brilliance is we have to focus on loving each other and the relationships that we are going to create after those laws are passed. Creating relationships and love, when I say love, a deep, caring, concern for one another and creating those kinds of relationships are what will produce the kind of change, the lasting change that we want. And said the reason why I really want to focus on her radical love, that's her most potent legacy and that's what I think we most need to be thinking about and activated around right in 2024 if we want to bring the vision of the kind of society she wanted to have. Would you agree, Marilyn? You would agree.
PRES. HARROZ: I can't tell you all how meaningful this conversation has been. I was about to say it was enjoyable, and it was, but that does not do it credit. It does not give it credit. It is a critical lesson, and it applies to black history, and it applies to no matter what color you are or where you come from when we want to strike back at those who are treating us wrong and when the law is against us, this idea, it is transcendent. It is not just civil, peaceful disobedience, but it's actually radical love and that is absolutely beautiful. I will take it with me the rest of my life and now I finally understand Stan Evans. Right, he just learned it from Clara Luper. And you caused that the whole problem by starting the sit‑in. Thank you all for being here. It means a lot, and I know that all of us, I know I am better off for having engaged in this conversation. Thank you all for being here. It means a lot.
MARILYN HILDRETH: Thank you for having us.
DR. KARLOS HILL: Thank you, thank you.
PRES. HARROZ: And to all of you who are listening, you better watch this. As I said, if you don't watch it, you don't understand it because there is so much that emanates from these two amazing people. I'm blessed to have you both as a part of my life. Thank you all very much for all. For the listeners, this was a very special conversation with the president. Thank you for celebrating us with this episode. Thank you for being part of this black history episode and thank you for being part of the life of the University. Look forward to seeing you next time on Conversations with the President.
