“The Group” Faces Down Racism in Lawton

Clara Luper’s ability and willingness to see people who supported racist policies as people and not as “the enemy” was one of her most powerful skills. She made eye contact with them. She talked to them. She challenged them. But she did not regard them with hate. In this way, her approach resembled that of civil rights supporters in Lawton, Oklahoma’s third largest city at the time. In 1963, a diverse group of Lawton residents decided that they needed to do something to address racial discrimination in their city. An organization that referred to itself as simply “The Group” formed with the intent to challenge segregation. The Group included whites, Blacks, and Native Americans. It included a representative from Fort Sill, along with religious leaders in the community, civic leaders, other professionals, “and just plain folk” who wanted to help work to end segregation.

The Group started its work by meeting on Wednesday nights. Members took turns hosting potluck dinners in their homes in part because the racial diversity of the group made it nearly impossible to find a restaurant that would serve them together. During its first meetings, the Group created a list of all segregated establishments in Lawton. Then they sent members to talk to the owners or managers of these segregated establishments to ask them to consider integrating. The Group decided to change minds one relationship at a time. So they made personal connections with the owners of segregated restaurants, hotels, and movie theaters. When possible, two people of different racial or ethnic backgrounds went together to meet with owners. More often than not, someone in the Group already knew the owner and so they were able to use individual relationships to fight for desegregation.

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The Group’s Protest at Lawton City Hall, 1966

The Group’s grassroots efforts to desegregate Lawton were largely successful. They used varied forms of advocacy, including persuasion, peaceful protests, and the power of Fort Sill to make nonintegrated businesses off-limits to base personnel. This 1966 photo shows some Group members at a protest at the Lawton City Hall. This protest took place after a vote to integrate public facilities did not pass.

Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

The efforts made by the Group to secure a truly integrated city of Lawton offered a great example of grassroots activism and showed the type of success that is possible when diverse groups of people come together to work for the same goal. Dr. E. A. Owens was the only Black doctor in Lawton in the mid-1960s, and he was also president of the Lawton chapter of the NAACP and a founding member of the Group. According to Owens, “by personal contact, about 95% of the public accommodations were opened to all” by 1967. There are a few reasons why this is remarkable and important to consider. Much of the integration that the Group achieved happened because of the personal relationships that the Group used to try to change the minds of the people they met. Indigenous rights activist LaDonna Harris (Comanche) was also a member of the Group, and she talked about the message that she and other members heard all too often when they tried to get a restaurant to serve African Americans. Harris said the most common response from the owners was, “If we don’t want to eat with them, why do they want to eat with us?” The Group saw themselves as educating their fellow citizens about the need to treat everyone equally.

Another important part of the Group’s effort to integrate came from their relationship to Fort Sill. In 1948, President Harry Truman issued an executive order to desegregate the armed forces. This did not happen immediately, but it did put the military on the cutting edge of social change. This meant that by the time the Group organized in 1963, Fort Sill was integrated, but the city of Lawton was not. Lawton had grown alongside Fort Sill, and many of the businesses in Lawton during the 1960s could not have survived without customers from the base. This gave the Group an important and relatively unique tool to use in the integration efforts. Fort Sill allowed the Group to say that establishments that refused to integrate would be off-limits to base personnel. It was not clear at the time if Fort Sill would have followed through on this threat, but either way it gave the Group a powerful economic weapon for those times when appealing to people’s morality and using personal relationships were not enough.

Amusement Parks and Swimming Pools

The Group and its Fort Sill allies succeeded in integrating much of Lawton, but one place that stayed segregated was the city’s only amusement park, Doe Doe Park. In June 1966, Clara Luper joined forces with civil rights advocates in Lawton to organize a march from Oklahoma City to Lawton to protest the refusal of Doe Doe Park to allow admission to African Americans.

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March from Oklahoma City to Lawton

Protestors on the second day of the march from Oklahoma City to Lawton to challenge Doe Doe Park’s policy of “whites only.” While many of the actions to desegregate Lawton were accomplished without violence, efforts to integrate Doe Doe Park led to tenser interactions. The park was eventually integrated but then closed a short time later.

Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

Over two hundred people participated in the march. More than fifty demonstrators were arrested. It was the largest civil rights demonstration in Lawton to date, and certainly the most tense and dangerous. Bill Hutchins, Sr. owned the park. He claimed that because the park was private, the 1964 Civil Rights Act did not apply. A federal court ruling in April 1968 agreed with Hutchins, ruling that the park did not meet the criteria of a public accommodation and could not be forced to integrate. Despite the ruling, Hutchins decided to integrate the following month. It might be that he just wanted to prove the decision was his to make. His family said that was his reason. It might also have been because the commanding general of Fort Sill decided that members of the military were no longer allowed to go there. By 1968, the United States was busy fighting in the Vietnam War and Lawton’s population and economy grew with the increase in military personnel from Fort Sill.

Amusement parks like Doe Doe Park were popular throughout the state, but they took a long time to integrate. They were even slower to integrate if they had swimming pools and if they could find a way to claim that they were private clubs rather than public facilities. As tense as the Doe Doe Park protests were in the mid-1960s, they were nothing compared to the tension and outright violence that erupted at the Springlake Amusement Park in Oklahoma City. While African Americans were allowed to go into the park, they were not allowed to go into the swimming pool. Some white people really did not want to share swimming pools with Black people. Springlake said that only people who belonged to an aquatics club were allowed to use its pool. The park was trying to get around the 1964 Civil Rights Act by creating a private club membership. This worked until Wedgewood Amusement Park, which was also in Oklahoma City, decided to open their swimming pool to everyone. Springlake then opened their pool to everyone, but afterward, in 1967, decided to change the swimming pool to an aquarium. Tensions remained high at Springlake between African Americans and whites, but things reached a boiling point in April 1971. A riot broke out at the park and it took half of the Oklahoma City Police Department to calm things down. The park closed after the riot and never reopened.

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Nonviolent Civil Rights Protest in Tulsa, 1963

Nonviolent civil rights protest in Tulsa in 1963. Many protestors wore shirts with the words “CORE Tulsa.” CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) was a nonviolent organization that pushed for racial equality during the Civil Rights Movement. One man holds up a sign here that says “We Shall Overcome.” The integration of Tulsa is especially important to consider given the city’s history of racial violence.

Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

Nonviolent Protests

The practice of nonviolence was a guiding principle for civil rights activists. Many of the groups and people that we honor today were committed to peaceful protest. Members of civil rights groups experienced violence, however. This came from white people and even government officials. Yet the activists thought their actions should follow the morals they wished others would hold. They used many methods, including boycotts, marches, voter registration campaigns, and sit-ins, to fight for equal rights and treatment for Black Americans.

Martin Luther King, Jr. played a vital role in the Civil Rights Movement as a model for nonviolent activism. His inspiration came from Indian activist Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi used peaceful protest to resist colonial violence and racism in India and South Africa. King was committed to nonviolent resistance as well. He took part in his first major protest in 1955. This was during the Montgomery bus boycott. In early December of that year, police in Montgomery, Alabama, had arrested a Black woman named Rosa Parks. They did this because she refused to give her bus seat to a white man. Montgomery laws required African Americans to sit in the “colored” section. That meant sitting at the back of the bus. They also had to give their seats to whites if the front of the bus was full. After Parks’s arrest, Black leaders planned a boycott of the bus system. Churches and the newspaper Montgomery Advertiser told locals about the protest. On December 5, 1955, 40,000 people participated in the boycott. The protests continued for months. Black Alabamans avoided using buses by carpooling, walking, and taking taxis at discounted fares. This protest launched Martin Luther King, Jr. into the public eye. It also ended bus segregation in 1956.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) is an important example of a peaceful civil rights organization. Ella Baker and other Black activist college students founded SNCC in 1960. The group dedicated itself to staging nonviolent protests. These promoted integration and voting rights. In 1961, SNCC members participated in a series of protests called the Freedom Rides. These took place in southern states. In 1946, the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Morgan v. Virginia that segregated interstate transportation was illegal. They further ruled in the 1960 case Boynton v. Virginia that segregated interstate facilities were illegal. Yet in 1947 many states continued to illegally segregate their interstate bus systems. In response, the Congress of Racial Equality, a civil rights group, started a protest. Many student activists participated in an integrated bus ride across state lines. These first rides did not spark much media attention. More than a decade later, in 1961, the rides, now called the Freedom Rides, resumed. Members of the SNCC and other organizations joined. Freedom Riders experienced harassment from police and local citizens in Virginia. Some were arrested. They faced violent mobs led by the Ku Klux Klan. Government officials in Alabama supported the mobs. Freedom riders were subject to violent attacks across the South. Students from all over the country joined the protests.

Another type of nonviolent protest came in the form of lunch counter sit-ins. In 1960, one of the most famous sit-ins happened in Greensboro, North Carolina. Four Black students began the sit-in at the local Woolworth’s lunch counter. By the fifth day of the protest, over 300 others joined. Woolworth gave in on the sixth day, but the store only made small changes to its policy. Police then arrested 45 protestors for trespassing. This sparked the students to organize a boycott of the store. After six months, the store became integrated.

All these examples show the effectiveness of nonviolent protest. They also show the courage of Black activists. These protesters faced discrimination, violence, and intimidation from white people. They knew that their actions could set off unsafe reactions. They also knew their actions could lead to unjust arrests. Yet civil rights activists kept fighting peacefully for what they knew was right.