On a warm Monday in downtown Oklahoma City, relatives, former classmates and civic leaders gathered at the Clara Luper National Sit-In Plaza to remember Richard O'Dell Brown, 85, one of the original NAACP Youth Council members who helped ignite Oklahoma City's sit-in movement. They stood among the life-size bronze figures that now re-create the 1958 Katz Drug Store lunch-counter protest that changed the city.
Memorial at Clara Luper Plaza
The plaza, built on the original Katz Drug Store site, centers on a four-ton bronze reproduction of the lunch counter with life-size statues of Clara Luper and the students who joined her, creating what organizers describe as a permanent place of public memory, according to KGOU. Speakers at Brown's memorial pointed out that his likeness is among the figures and said the monument keeps the group's story in front of young Oklahomans who may be hearing it for the first time.
Funeral and visitation
Brown, who died last Wednesday, was honored at the plaza Monday, with a formal funeral service set for 11 a.m. this Saturday at Fifth Street Baptist Church, 801 NE 5th Street, according to The Oklahoman. Family members and organizers used the occasion to connect the city's history of direct action to ongoing civic work they say still carries the spirit of the sit-ins.
His role in the sit-in movement
Brown was one of the original 13 young people who launched the sit-in demonstrations that helped end segregated service at downtown lunch counters, a group now captured in the plaza's bronze installation through local memorial projects and coverage. "He was young when he walked in but he walked in knowing who he was," Rev. Tyson told mourners at the service, as quoted in The Oklahoman. Oral histories and local interviews also record that Brown was a nephew of Clara Luper, a detail preserved in the Voices of Oklahoma archive on the era's activists.
The remembrance comes as Oklahoma City officials move forward with plans for a Clara Luper Civil Rights Center under MAPS 4, a project the city says will expand exhibits, classrooms and public programming to preserve and teach the sit-in story, according to the City of Oklahoma City's release on the project.
