Edmond, like many towns in Oklahoma, has a long history of racial injustice. According to Derek Lee, the curator of collections at the Edmond History Museum, the University of Central Oklahoma played a significant part in bringing about change during the civil rights movement.
“As far as civil rights in Edmond go, I think the college was instrumental in advancing those,” Lee said.
According to edmondhistory.org, Edmond was 100% white into the early 1970s. In 1954, UCO, then called Central State University, admitted its first six African American students. An Edmond chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formed in 1969. The Oklahoman reported on the Edmond NAACP’s goals in its May 10, 1969, issue. One of those goals was for forty African American professors and instructors to be employed at Central State University, and “an investigation into the employment practices of the college.”
Lee said the Edmond chapter of the NAACP was “a little hard to get going.” A man named Speck Reynolds, who helped organize the Edmond chapter in 1969, had a small bomb detonated at his Edmond home shortly after the announcement of the NAACP chapter.
Lee said Clara Luper, a schoolteacher and activist who led the Katz Drug Store sit-in in 1958, spoke at UCO in 1970 about the lack of African American professors. Lee said while federal legislation made great strides when it came to civil rights, racist bias was still prevalent throughout the country, and society is “obviously still dealing with some of that today.”
“That probably takes longer than laws a lot of times to change,” Lee said.
Those attitudes prevented African Americans from finding housing or employment opportunities in Edmond. The president of the Edmond NAACP and a UCO student, Paul Clark, was quoted in a Nov. 4 edition of The Oklahoman as saying that an African American could not “get a job or buy a home in Edmond.” One of the NAACP’s stated goals when it formed in 1969 was “jobs for Black salespeople in Edmond retail stores.”
Lee said he has had trouble finding primary sources about the difficulty African Americans faced securing housing, but was told there was at one point a law in Edmond restricting the sale of property to African Americans.
“I’ve been through all the ordinances and talked to the city clerk, and haven’t been able to find any evidence of that,” Lee said. “It may not have been necessary that they actually had a law. With the way they promoted the town as white, there was a KKK chapter and racially restrictive covenants trying to prevent people of color from owning property in Edmond.”
Lee said he has spoken to many people who grew up in Edmond during the 1960s and early 1970s who don’t like to acknowledge Edmond’s racist history.
“It’s kind of in the past, and why, why would you talk about it now?” Lee said. “It’s happened, over and moved on. I think that’s a lot of people.”
Lee said Edmond had a population boom in the 1960s and 70s due to “white flight.” After public schools started to become racially integrated in Oklahoma City, many white families moved to Edmond and other Oklahoma City suburbs to prevent their children from attending racially integrated schools.
“The white flight happened kind of all over the country. It’s not just Edmond. It was pretty much everywhere after integration started in the schools,” Lee said.
The first African American professor at UCO was Paul Lehman, who moved to Edmond in 1976. According to edmondhistory.org, Lehman and his family were the only African Americans living in Edmond at that time. Lehman is a member of the Oklahoma Education Heritage Society Hall of Fame. Lehman was also inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame in 2017.
Lee said colleges can often be a good growing point for societal change, as they offer exposure to new ideas and people, and then those ideas spread into society.
