[2] She is best known for her leadership role in the 1958 Oklahoma City sit-in movement, as she, her young son and daughter, and numerous young members of the NAACP Youth Council successfully conducted carefully planned nonviolent sit-in protests of downtown drugstore lunch-counters, which overturned their policies of segregation.
You see, I have lived long enough to know that people are people.” Luper continued desegregating hundreds of establishments in Oklahoma and was active on the national level during the 1960s movements.
She went to high school in the all-black town of Grayson, Oklahoma, and attended college at Langston University where, in 1944, she received a B.A.
[9] The message and success of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery bus boycott influenced her activism, along with personal tragedies related to segregation.
[10] With the Youth Council, she wrote and staged a play entitled Brother President about King's philosophy of nonviolence.
[12] From 1958 to 1964 Luper mentored the members of the NAACP Youth Council during its campaign to end the segregation of public accommodations through sit-ins, protests, and boycotts.
During her start as a civil rights leader for the NAACP Youth Council, she had plans to desegregate the restaurants and diners in Oklahoma.
[11] On Tuesday afternoon, August 19, 1958, Luper, her son and daughter, and a group of Youth Council members entered the segregated Katz Drug Store in downtown Oklahoma City and asked to be served.
The success of Civil Disobedience in Oklahoma could also be attributed to the lieutenant of the police force at the time, Bill Percer.
She was active in the NAACP and attended the association’s annual conference every year with the Oklahoma City Youth Council.
She also took part in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches where she received a deep cut in her leg on "Bloody Sunday" when 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with tear gas and billy clubs.
She was later reassigned to John Marshall High School (Oklahoma) where she continued to teach history and media studies.
The scholarship is meant to emphasize values that Clara Luper stood for, including community service, leadership, and education.
[2] The Clara Luper Post Office Building, named in 2021, is located at 305 Northwest 5th Street in Oklahoma City.
[22] On March 7, 2018, University of Oklahoma President David L. Boren announced the naming of the Department of African and African American Studies in honor of longtime educator and civil rights leader Clara Luper, who made many contributions to diversity and inclusion efforts in Oklahoma.
“We honor Clara Luper as a trailblazer for human rights and as a symbol of the university’s commitment to equal opportunity for all people,” said OU President David L. Boren.
The U.S. House approved legislation September 16, 2020 to rename the downtown post office in Oklahoma City after civil rights pioneer Clara Luper.
On December 18, 2020, the U.S. Senate approved the naming of the Clara Luper Post Office in downtown Oklahoma City, OK. As part of the OKC MAPS project the Oklahoma City Council is planning a 20,000 square foot building with commemorative civil rights era displays.
Clara Luper's book Behold The Walls (1979) is an acclaimed first-hand account of the campaign for civil rights in Oklahoma City during the 1960s.