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Wayne Pounds, Prof. Emeritus
Aoyama Gakuin Univ., Tokyo
In a 1951 speech discussing the implications of recent Supreme Court rulings, the great African-American spokesman and leader W. E. B. DuBois posed the hidden question that black educators across the country were asking themselves: “what becomes of all the Negro teachers?” (281).
The question comes in a 1985 collection of DuBois’s posthumously published writings called Against Racism, the editor of which describes the background as follows:
In the 1950s, in the midst of the McCarthy period, Du Bois ran as a candidate for the U. S. Senate on the Progressive party ticket in New York, and in 1950-51 he was indicated, tried, and acquitted of being "an unregistered foreign agent" in connection with his leadership in the effort to ban the A-bomb. In January 1951 he spoke by invitation at the Yale University Law School at a meeting to celebrate three decisions issued in 1950 by the U.S. Supreme Court: Sweat v. Painter, holding that the plaintiff, a Black man, had to be admitted to the Law School at the University of Texas; McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, holding that the Black plaintiff, while a student at the Graduate School of the University of Oklahoma, must not be discriminated against; and Henderson v. U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission and Southern Railway, holding illegal segregation of diners aboard interstate railroads. (276)
That is, the question is posed against a background in which a few enlightened decisions from the higher judiciary stand out like beacons in the darkness of racism:
the present legal discrimination against Americans of Negro descent still renders them today the most suppressed and insulted group of similar size and accomplishment in any modern civilized land. We can only turn back to Czarist Russia and Hitler's Germany to find a modern parallel. (277)
The one not-so-new and very diseased wrinkle in the American fabric was created by the FBI’s and Senator Joe McCarthy’s view of the pro-desegregation movement as pro-communist. This distorted racist vigilance had Martin Luther King in its gunsight from the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 to his assassination in 1968. In what follows, we’ll see the same tactic used against black educators in small towns in Oklahoma.
In the portraits below, I want to focus on the lives of some fifteen teachers at Chandler’s Douglass School and other black schools around the state, but background material on school integration is so voluminous it threatens to inundate the primary focus on individuals. Given the limitations of a personal essay like the present one, I’ll hold back the flood waters by examining only a few representative publications from the mile-wide shelf of background: Richard Kruger’s monumental study of the Brown vs. Topeka decision, Simple Justice; “The Displacement of Black Educators Post-Brown” by Michael Fultz; and Edward B. Cayton’s 1977 doctoral dissertation A History of Black Public Education in Oklahoma. I have supplemented these three with a short essay at the Oklahoma Historical Society, which offers the quickest description of the big picture in Oklahoma.
The Beginning
The organization of African-American educators in Oklahoma begins with the Teachers’ Association organized by Ida B. Wells in 1893, a very honored and famous precursor. The association included black teachers in fourteen counties and twenty-six communities of Oklahoma Territory. By 1900 these teachers had enrolled a total of 3,929 children in the territory's separate schools. In December 1907, one month after statehood, sixty-seven black teachers of the former Twin Territories met at Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston to reorganize their associations into the statewide Oklahoma Association of Negro Teachers (OANT). Inman E. Page, then in his ninth year as Langston College president, hosted the meeting.
OANT pursued a variety of activities during the 1930s. Frederick D. Moon of Lincoln County led cooperative ventures with the Langston Alumni Association. A 1935 project resulted in legislation that provided tuition to send black teachers and others to out-of-state colleges and universities (blacks then could not attend any college or university in Oklahoma other than Langston, by state law). This measure operated until 1948 when Oklahoma schools began to provide graduate and professional training, and it ended in 1955 when public schools were desegregated. Or rather, it began to end, for it took over a decade for Jim Crow resistance to be overcome.
One immediate side-effect of the Supreme Court rulings is that black teachers in Oklahoma began to lose their jobs. They tried to put up a fight through OANT, as appears in The Daily Oklahoman for July 1955, which gave the story a full column:
The Oklahoma Association of Negro Teachers [on] Thursday chartered legal action to combat what was described as “the wholesale firing” of members in 12 counties where integration has taken place. [Their attorney Amos T. Hall of Tulsa] said he will fly to Washington to consult with Thurgood Marshall, head of the legal department of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, before starting proceedings.
Whoever Attorney Hall was, it would appear that he had the good sense to lay the case before the highest black authority in the country.
H. C. Whitlow, Tulsa principal and chairman of the association’s integration committee, said more than 30 Negro teachers have been let out by school boards which have started de-segregation. He said after hearing reports of the dismissals, the committee decided to go to the courts to try to “protect some of the teachers’ jobs where it was regarded the teacher was released because of race.”
The committee, in session at Oklahoma City’s Douglass high-school, issued this statement:
“Several competent legal authorities hold that regardless of the absence of tenure law in the state, where teachers were released because of race, it is a violation of the 14th amendment.” . . . Whitlow said the group was ”particularly concerned” about the aftermath of the integration announcement in Perry, where he said all of the ten Negro teachers were fired.
A the same time, he said it was reported the Perry board had hired three new white teachers, “just out of A&M college.” Integration there means a previously Negro school will be abandoned, he said. Most of the teachers dismissed over the state hold master’s degrees, he added.
Whitlow said at Davis the school board moved the former Negro elementary school to the white school grounds and fired all five Negro teachers. He stated Pawnee also discharged the entire Negro teaching staff of six persons as did Kingfisher, which lets its five Negroes go. In Seminole, three Negro teachers were retained and four released, according to the executive committee.
There are exceptions, but on the whole it seems as if school boards are getting rid of teachers on the dark side of the color line. One exception to the group firings was in Tulsa, probably because of the Booker T. Washington school’s size and athletic reputation.
The largest school system to integrate so far is Tulsa. Whitlow said the Tulsa board had dismissed no Negro teachers. The association, representing all of the state’s Negro teachers, is headed by Joe Johnson of Cushing.
In retrospect, we know that OANT’s efforts to obtain a judicial hearing of the Oklahoma case was in vain, perhaps because the NAAC felt that they had larger fish to fry. (In a later essay in this series, I will consider the principal ship of Joe S. Johnson in Cushing.)
In response, the OANT organized a program to prepare for transition to school desegregation and to protect black teachers' welfare. Most notable were the development of research studies and communications designed to retain black teachers in desegregated school systems. On October 28, 1955, OANT decided to merge with Oklahoma Education Association (OEA). Even as it disbanded, OANT worked to retain employment for black teachers after 1955. Nevertheless, as many as four hundred of them, many holding graduate degrees, were replaced by inexperienced white teachers who were recent college graduates. OANT members had earlier begun to join OEA, and OANT was entirely dissolved by 1958.
The Sequel
Focused on the state as a whole is Edward Cayton’s 1977 doctoral dissertation, A History of Black Public Education in Oklahoma, which expands the coverage provided by the OHS above.
During a period of about twenty years, from 1890 to 1910, blacks migrated to Oklahoma from the south in larger numbers, lured into the state with the promise of a black state held out by black entrepreneurs like the Kansas-based Edward McCabe, but already, by the 1890s, the dream was disintegrating in the face of the deeply ingrained racism of the white majority. In 1897, the Territorial legislature passed a new education law which states, “It shall hereafter be unlawful for any white child to attend a colored school or for a colored child to attend a white school.” (Clayton 23-24)
That was the kiss of death for McCabe’s dream. Though in some counties such as Lincoln frontier conditions brought about de facto integration, such arrangements disappeared in 1907 when the first act of the new legislature was to inaugurate a set of Jim Crow laws borrowed from Texas, setting a stone seal to the earlier kiss of death.
Officially the 1907 act was known as “The Better Schools Amendment,” which provided that black and white children must attend separate (racially segregated) school facilities, a situation that would endure for half a century--until the Supreme Court rulings of 1954 and 1955.
“The influx of blacks from various southern states had an obvious effect upon education in Oklahoma, especially in eastern Oklahoma, during the Territorial period,” Cayton writes. “Illiteracy among blacks in Oklahoma dropped from 35 percent in 1990 to 17.77 percent in 1910, “The increase [in literacy was] accomplished [despite] the use of three or four textbooks for a maximum term of three months in a sod or log cabin [conditions permitted by the Supreme Court’s infamous separate-but- equal ruling]. The improvement came about because education in eastern Oklahoma was under control of the Five Civilized Tribes.”
Under early educational guidelines, black schools could not have white students or white teachers--the Constitution labeled them as “separate schools”--and it is under these guidelines that Chandler’s Douglass School was created about 1913 and existed until 1955. Philanthropical organizations like the Julius Rosenwald Fund--which between 1917 and 1948 was responsible for the construction of more than 5,000 rural schools for black children across the nation--provided some relief to the inequalities of “separate but equal” ( Cayton 29-33).
but Chandler schools never qualified for their largess.
Cayton makes some other important points which I will herewith summarize below.
1) Another immediate effect of the 1954 Supreme Court Decision was the loss of jobs by Negro teachers. Although black children were allowed to attend the white school, few black teachers in the rural areas of Oklahoma were accepted as teachers (113).
2) After 1954, the number of black administrators in Oklahoma steadily declined. There were a number of reasons for this decline but they primarily pointed to the initial impact of the 1954 Supreme Court Decision. When the school boards and superintendents throughout Oklahoma realized that desegregation was the law of the land, they began to act. First, they fired the black principals because the schools they administered were usually the first closed. In the smaller districts through out Oklahoma where formerly there had been one or two black principals, now there were none (71-72).
3) Black children usually were from one to four grades behind in their studies. If there was any transportation provided, it was a school bus discarded by the white school in the district because it was no longer considered fit for service. These schools usually taught grades one through eight. If a black child did manage to complete the eighth grade, it was quite likely that there was no high school available for him to further his education. Normally, there was one separate school in a county that provided high school opportunities. Some districts did provide run-down school buses to transport children from neighboring districts which did not have a separate high school. Meanwhile, throughout Oklahoma there were consolidated school districts that were for white children only. These schools were usually within walking distance of many of the black children who had to ride buses for distances as far as fifty miles one way in order to get to a school. On days when the weather was extremely bad, it was not unusual for a bus load of children to arrive at school after noon, half frozen, and often wet. During the course of a day such as this, half-empty buses carrying white children would drive past a broken-down bus loaded with black children and make no offer of assistance (49).
An additional personal name to mention here might be that of Lewis Burton, formerly employed as principal in Chandler. Dismissed after the 1954 Supreme Court decision, he became a teacher in the Oklahoma City Public Schools. Cayton quotes the principal statement from Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka Kansas: "We conclude that in the field of education, the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal" (112). A key concept here, that segregation by its very nature was damaging to black children, was supplied by the dean of Oklahoma’s black historians, John Hope Franklin, born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma in 1915 to attorney Buck Colbert Franklin (1879–1957) and his wife Mollie (Parker) Franklin.
Another Oklahoman, Dr. Frederick Douglass Moon, noted that Oklahoma public schools took no action toward desegregation in the year following the decision on May 17, 1954. To be sure, there were many meetings held and some planning done; but, every where “there was the attitude of waiting until the Supreme Court tells us what to do” (Cayton 113).
Cayton lists three principal effects of the Brown ruling: (1) One immediate effect which was found upon close inspection was that where integration did take place, the black schools were usually the schools which were closed and the blacks integrated, or desegregated, into the previously white school. The sociological and psychological effects of the destruction of the black school need further study, as it had a drastic effect on the black community. In many communities, the only thing upon which blacks could look with pride was their schools. When the school ceased to exist, in many instances, pride in the local community suffered.
(2) The "loss of jobs by Negro teachers" described above and in more detail in the chapters that follow.
(3) Probably the most important far-reaching effect was that it was the beginning of a new way of life for the people of Oklahoma. Folkways and mores gradually changed. People began to be accepted for what they were rather than rejected on the basis of the color of their skin. With the racial mixing of students in public schools, students began to participate in the sports programs, in the bands, on debate teams, and in all other areas of school life. This carried over into all other phases of life.
These changes did not take place in 1954 or 1955. All had not completely taken place even ten years later, but the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court was the beginning of a series of changes. Cayton notes that during the 1958-59 school year, the number of Negro students attending racially mixed classes increased by nearly 2,000.
The number given was 10,246, or about one-fourth of the total Negro school population. Statistics also pointed out that there were only thirty-three all-Negro high schools, where in 1954, there had been ninety-six. There were only thirteen all-Negro junior high schools and 131 all-Negro elementary schools left in the state. (269)
A number of desegregation plans were developed, Cayton reports:
Most black high schools were simply discontinued. A few staff members were integrated into the previously all-white schools. Others were dismissed. Some previously all-black elementary schools were discontinued. In the large cities, districts of attendance were realigned to admit a number of blacks. Transfer programs were set up in some districts. Segregated housing patterns in some cities prevented complete desegregation, as many whites s till held to the neighborhood school concept. In the smaller towns and in rural areas the black schools were often closed and all students attended the previously all-white school. However, it was in the smaller towns and in rural areas where integration progressed most rapidly. (270)
It should be stated that the separation of races in the public schools of Oklahoma was slowly fading. Again, this was far more evident in the rural areas than in the larger cities.
In 1960 there were only eight all-Negro high schools in Oklahoma. Three of these were located in all-Negro communities, while five were in districts where there were two or more high schools. Superintendent Hodge states that by the 1960-61 school year he no longer requested information according to race from local school districts.
Black teachers were still losing their jobs. By the fall of 1961, approximately 394 Negro teachers had lost their positions due to integration in various locations throughout the state. (271-272)
According to Cayton, at least, these teachers did not, for the most part, remain jobless. He reports:
They lost their jobs in rural and in small town areas, but many of them were hired by the Oklahoma City System, Tulsa System, Muskogee and Lawton Systems. A few left Oklahoma and went to work in other states. Some were unable to find jobs as teachers and they accepted employment in other areas, others retired. (Cayton 273)
Credit for finding employment for the teachers who had been dismissed went to many persons and groups. Former officers of the Oklahoma Association of Negro Teachers, the National Education Association, the Oklahoma State Department of Education, school superintendents (both in Oklahoma and throughout the country), colleges for professional and business training, the Urban League of Oklahoma, and many other organizations for social welfare and groups of concerned citizens brought aid and assistance to displaced teachers. Many people gave unsparingly of them selves to meet the great demands of the social revolution of integration in Oklahoma. (Cayton 121).
My own findings do not agree with this assessment that jobless black teachers and administrators found work elsewhere. The reader is invited to peruse the essays that follow and then decide.
Another academic source reports that an important consequence of desegregation was the major displacement of 32,000–38,000 teachers in the 17 Border States. The firing and non-rehiring of African American teachers as well as the failure to replace Black teachers who retired also played a major role in the lack of development of African American educators after the Brown decision:
After Brown, many school systems retained all of their white teachers, even those with only provisional certification, while dismissing many fully certified African American teachers. An African American teacher who retired or moved away was often replaced by a white teacher or not replaced at all. (Lash and Ratcliffe 329-330)
None such cases are seen in the present essays, in which the jobless teachers simply faded away into the silence and died. The major exception was Roosevelt Gracey, because of his involvement in proto-Civil Right activities and because he had been a principal at Douglass School.
Not that there were no efforts by black teachers across Oklahoma to deal with the problem. A July 1955 articles in The Daily Oklahoman reports on OANT.
The Oklahoma Association of Negro Teachers Thursday charted legal action to combat what was described as “the wholesale firing” of members in 12 counties where integration has taken place.
Members of the Association voted to retain the services of Tulsa attorney Amos T. Hall, who said he would fly to Washington to consult with Thurgood Marshall, head of the NAACP and soon to be a Supreme Court justice:
H. C. Whitlow, Tulsa principal and chairman of the association’s integration committee, said more than 30 Negro teachers have been let out by school boards which have started de-segregation. He said after hearing reports of the dismissals, the committee had decided to go to the courts to try to “protect some of the teachers’ jobs where it was regarded the teacher was released because of race.
Still at the state level, useful background on Oklahoma’s response to the Brown v. Topeka case is supplied by the Oklahoma Historical Society’s article on Civil Rights.
Brown, Thurgood Marshall's greatest courtroom triumph, declared separate but equal schools unconstitutional, and Democratic Gov. Raymond Gary, a white Southern Baptist, endorsed the decision, a path that few Southern governors followed. The lower federal courts sought to implement Brown's directive, but not without considerable opposition. Federal District Judge Luther Bohanon followed the Warren Court's precedents and issued comprehensive federal court orders that eventually integrated Oklahoma's schools, but he was vilified for his courageous decisions. His principal case, Dowell v. Board of Education of Oklahoma City Public Schools (1961), traveled up and down the ladders of the courts until finally, the Supreme Court being in recess, a one-Justice decision by Justice Brennan sustained Judge Bohanon's order.
To dismiss teachers because of race, it could well be argued, was a violation of the 14th Amendment. It probably was a violation, but the NAACP had national issues to respond to and couldn’t take the time to handle cases on a state-by-state basis.
At the state level, the Oklahoma Historical Society’s page on “The Better Schools Amendment” of 1907, casts some light on the 1950s:
Racial segregation in educational facilities did not, however, end with the constitutional amendment that prohibited separate schools. Functionally, segregation continued, and into the 1960s the School Code continued to contain the regulations mandating separate schools. In fact, some southeastern counties strongly resisted the process. In 1955–56, 273 schools were integrated, mostly in urban areas, and over the next ten years more districts responded. De facto segregation, based on where children lived within the district, continued to exist, despite lawsuits by African Americans like Alphonso L. Dowell, who in 1961 sued the Oklahoma City school district in order to gain admission for his son to the all-white Northeast High School. In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Oklahoma City must institute a policy of busing students around the district in order to comply with federal law.
“The Better Schools Amendment” didn’t mean “better.” It just meant separate, and separate the schools remained until the mid fifties.
To catch a glimpse of the national level, we will turn finally to Kluger’s monumental study Simple Justice, a 1975 book enlarged in 2004 which in its first 550 pages examines the long prelude to the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision, then the making of the decision once Eisenhower appoints Earl Warren the Court’s “Superchief,” and then the aftershocks that followed the decision.
Kluger makes it clear that the issues which I have raised in the section above, diverse as they may be, were problems of implementation, not ruled on by the Supreme Court, which in its wisdom not only left room for but actively encouraged local decisions to be made by local courts. The major decision came in two parts, what historians now refer to as Brown I and Brown II. Brown I, which came in 1954, made desegregation the law of the land, while Brown II in 1955 recognized the onerous burden that the first ruling placed on the deep south and the border states (like Oklahoma), deeply locked as they were into the Jim Crow system. “Brown II transferred the legal imperative of desegregation to the custody of state and local judicial officials as well as to public administrators” (Brown 2).
In Brown II, the Supreme Court ordered the lower courts “to require that the defendants make a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance with our May 17, 1954 ruling.” It ruled also that this start proceed with “all deliberate speed,” a famous oxymoron. As Kluger writes, “[The Court] recognized ”that what is possible in the everyday business of nations is rarely determined by ‘the mere imposition of a distant will” (749). The successful implementation of the desegregation ruling depended on local action. It depended even on places as far removed from the nation’s capital as small-town schools in Lincoln County, a low-population apron of land in the fly-over state of Oklahoma.
If that statement reflects a note of pessimism, it is deepened and amplified by a reading of Kluger’s final chapter, “Visible Man: Fifty Years after Brown.” The chapter was written for the 2004 edition of the book and its title is meant to contrast with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), It details the progress that black Americans have made since the publication of that novel.
The Supreme Court’s monumental ruling . . . both liberated and infuriated America’s black community--numbering 36 million souls by 2004, larger than Canada’s total population and that of all but a handful of African nations--because it gave rise to so much hope and yet left so many heightened expectations well short of fulfillment.
In his pessimism, Kluger quotes black leaders of the present day, beginning with the Tulsa-born Cornel West from his 1993 book, Race Matters, where he states what he calls ”a fundamental truth: white Americans has been historically weak-willed in ensuring racial justice and has continued to resist fully accepting the humanity of blacks.” More impressive yet, Kluger quotes the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, “the doyenne of American letters,” who said that “at no moment in my life have I ever felt as if I were an American” (752).
Such pessimism is in line with the conservative movement of the Supreme Court, increasingly responsive to William Rehnquist, who was first appointed by Richard Nixon. Hope reaches a nadir under Ronald Reagan, when Rehnquist becomes Chief Justice and we can first use the term resegregation.
Kluger writes:
Among the Reagan budget-cutters’ first targets was the federal desegregation assistance program in the Department of Education, now summarily gutted. And in a policy change meant to appeal to working-class and Southern whites who had flocked to the Reagan banner, the U. S. government now pronounced desegregation a failure, not to mention costly and unpopular, and a no longer justifiable imposition of the federal judiciary on local sovereignty. . . . And so began the resegregation of America. (768)
This beginning is explained a few pages further on, when Kluger offers this amplification:
But the majority [of the Court] had spoken, in effect standing by its decisions in the Oklahoma, DeKalb County, and Kansas City cases that obedience to court-ordered desegregation was a form of temporary penance and once it had been paid, reversion to racially separate schools was perfectly acceptable as long as it had not been the explicitly discriminatory intention of local policy makers. All across America local school boards, with the Supreme Court’s blessing now, were being relieved of federal court supervision and wasting little time before stripping away the mechanisms of mandatory desegregation. (772)
Having shows us the historical moment in which the handwriting appeared on the wall, Kluger now moves into summary mode.
He cites the gains for African Americans between 1954 and 2004: they are significantly better off--better educated and housed, more gainfully employed, more self-confident--and he moves from larger matters (more corporate CEOs) to smaller (Academy awards for best actor and best actress). In terms of the poverty line, African Americans living at or below it had dropped from 55 percent in 1960 to 22 percent four decades later, though “that rate was still three times higher than the percentage for white families” [782].
The data for education, Kluger finds, “projected a mixed outlook,” though qualitatively “the upward leap . . . was astonishing”:
In 1950, only 13.7 percent of black youngsters graduated from high school; by 1999, the figure was 77.4 percent . . . . In 1967, about 13 percent of blacks in the eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old category attended college, with just 2.2 percent of them graduating; by the turn of the century, 30 percent in that age category were attending college, and 15.5 were graduating.
Kluger points out, however, the figures for white students in all of these categories were a good 10 percentage points higher.
After his detailed survey (of which I have given only highlights), Kluger returns to the human interest story of Toni Morrison’s statement that she had never in her life felt like an American. Her nephew Roy Wilkins, longtime executive secretary of he NAACP, replied: “Well, I have--all my life.” Wilkins stressed that:
He had never felt himself less of an American because he stemmed from slaves “who in their stolen lives built so much of this country.” Having begun his education before Brown in a segregated one-room school house in Missouri, Wilkins conceded that black living conditions in the United States remained far from satisfactory, “but the change has nevertheless been so dramatic that my belief in American possibilities remains profound.” At the end he held out hope for renewed citizen action “harnessed to our founding ideas to improve American life and even to transform some American hearts” (789).
Kluger’s book, over all, is the story of a struggle against overwhelming odds aided by the principle of hope--hope, the “thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson called it
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
Note to the Reader:
This book of essays began as a study of the fate of teachers in the Douglass School of Chandler, Lincoln County. The frame, however, seemed too small, so it was enlarged to provide a limited overview that would include other towns and their schools. It was never intended, however, to be encyclopedic in scope and thus does not try to be comprehensive. Certain key omissions may be stated here.
Boley is omitted because, as a historic all-black town, the Supreme Court decisions of 1954-1955 had little effect. Boley schools may have opened their doors to white students, but there is no evidence that any of the whites came. Boley had its own racial issue, constituted by the fact that the white majority of Okfuskee County didn’t like Boley and worked against its flourishing. The majority eventually succeeded by an unexpected route, as Oklahoma’s money for education diminished in the 1960s and Boley schools underwent consolidation. In 2007 the school district voted to close the high school.
Tulsa’s very fine and flourishing Booker T. Washington high school is omitted because it is important enough to have a Wikipedia article, which includes notes and references.
Bartlesville is omitted because it is partially covered by the essay on Roosevelt Gracey and his conflict there with the McCarthyite forces. The coverage is completed by Louise Robbins’ book and her follow-up essay, both of which I cite and which are online.
Likewise the career of Oklahoma’s best known black educator Frederick Douglass Moon is attractive, especially for a researcher like myself since he was also from Lincoln County (born in Fallis), but God’s plenty is already in print about him and I include an essay about his sister Irene in the present pages. A full essay about F. D. Moon appears at the Oklahoma Historical Society’s site https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=MO011.
A final limit is posed by the Civil Rights movement which has its historic origins in the Brown v. Topeka School Board Supreme Court cases of 1954 and 1955. Since it took a decade to rid the country of Jim Crow, major civil rights cases like the Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham Alabama on September 15, 1963 appear at the margins of my canvas, as for example in the essay on Cushing when students are mentioned demonstrating against the bombing.
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