Chapter Objectives

Chapter Overview

In this chapter, students will learn that progress in race relations and equal treatment has not followed a straight line, and it still does not. Even as schools and universities in Oklahoma integrated, racial discrimination persisted. Even as drugstore lunch counters opened to Black people, racial discrimination persisted. Black athletes made great strides as members of previously all-white teams, but this did not mean that they experienced equal treatment either on or off the field. Learners should think about the Civil Rights Movement not as a single timeline of major events but rather as a collection of local and national events that reflected the power of direct action, civil disobedience, and legal challenges to create change on small and large scales.

Shortly after the end of World War II, seventeen-year-old Albert Johnson Sr. got on a bus in Lawton, Oklahoma. The seats in the Black section were full, so he remained standing. A Black noncommissioned officer (NCO) in the back of the bus kept staring at Albert, as if the power of his stare would make Albert sit down in one of the empty seats for white people. He sat down. A white man on the bus said, “Boy, where I’m from in Arkansas, ‘n******’ don’t sit next to white people. Get up.” Albert got up. The Black NCO said, “I just fought a war so that you can sit down, so you better sit back down.” Albert sat back down.

FIG. 11.1

Albert Johnson, Sr.

Albert Johnson, Sr. was born at Fort Sill in 1927 and grew up in a military family. He was a teenager during World War II and experienced racism firsthand during a time when tensions flared over the place of Blacks in America. After college, Johnson spent the next several decades as an educator, and after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling in 1954, he helped desegregate public schools in Lawton. The following decade, he watched as his own son was denied access to a Lawton water park because of his race. But Johnson remained optimistic about the possibility for change, and until his death in 2022, he maintained his commitment to bettering the lives of those around him. He described education as “an infinite experience afforded one formally and informally.”

Courtesy of the Albert Johnson, Sr. Family.

World War II interrupted—and then sped up—African American efforts to gain equality in Oklahoma and throughout the United States. American involvement in the war led to even more racism against Black people. This was not new and had happened in previous wars. What was new, however, was the way that this war showed people in other countries the way that America was acting on matters of race. Americans said they were fighting for democracy abroad, but people in other countries could point out the way that Americans were not treating a large amount of their own people equally. This made America look bad and is why the “Double Victory” (or “Double V”) campaign became so important. The idea of “Double Victory” was that African American soldiers were fighting both for victory over fascism abroad and racism at home. Black Oklahomans saw their daily lives shaped by racist policies. And when World War II ended, several factors led to increased activism on the part of African Americans. From the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s, Oklahomans struggled over the place of African Americans in the state.

The civil rights activism and court challenges that happened in Oklahoma during the mid-twentieth century were based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which was adopted in 1868, just three years after the Civil War ended. The Fourteenth Amendment protected African Americans in several ways. In addition to providing citizenship to African Americans and others who are born or naturalized in the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees them due process of law and equal protection under the law. This means that the laws of the nation apply, or should apply, to all citizens, no matter in which state they live. They should have the same rights and the same protections. By the end of the Reconstruction period, though, many states had found ways to circumvent or get around these protections when it came to the treatment of African Americans. Oklahoma would do the same when it became a state in 1907. Remember that Oklahoma’s own constitution applied differently to Black people than to everyone else. Inequality was written into the Oklahoma constitution, and taking it out would be no easy task.

In the late 1930s, civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) started looking at Oklahoma as an important place to fight for civil rights. Roscoe Dunjee, editor of the Black Dispatch and president of the Oklahoma State Conference of Branches of the NAACP, had long hoped to see Oklahoma’s segregation laws removed. Marshall made no secret of his intention to fight against Oklahoma’s segregation practices in colleges and universities. Founded in 1897, Langston University, the state’s only member of the Historically Black College and Universities (HBCU), offered bachelor’s degrees, but African American students who wanted to earn a master’s degree or doctorate were forced to go out of state to attend graduate school.

The absence of graduate schools for African American students in Oklahoma seemed to obviously break the “separate but equal” law established in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. The NAACP certainly thought so, and its leaders wanted to change Oklahoma law so that African American students, like all other Oklahoma students, could go to graduate school in law, medicine, education, and other fields without having to leave their home state. And the NAACP had the larger goal of integration of all schools and public accommodations. Months before American entry into World War II in 1941, the Oklahoma State Legislature, guessing that the NAACP was already doing work to change the law to make it more equal, decided to pass its own laws before this could happen. They succeeded and passed Oklahoma Title 70, making it a misdemeanor for white and Black students to attend the same school. Legislators took this step in order to discourage any effort in the state to desegregate schools.