Freedom Center unveils restoration with ‘Inside These Walls’ exhibition

---

OKLAHOMA CITY – Guests were packed shoulder-to-shoulder Friday inside the entrance of Eastside OKC’s historic Freedom Center as project directors and community leaders celebrated the space’s recent restoration by kicking off its inaugural multimedia/archival memorabilia exhibition “Inside These Walls.”

It’s an exhibition designed not only to mark the occasion and to welcome the public into the space, but also to reflect on the center’s long history as a hub of community action and support as the longtime headquarters of OKC’s NAACP Youth Council, led by Civil Rights icon Clara Luper.

“There’s so much rich history,” Freedom Center Executive Director Christina L. Beatty told the gathered crowd Friday about the legacy of the building and its years at the forefront of community organizing. “We’re just so glad to be able to bring it to life…we’ve done the best justice that we possibly can.”

Deep history

The unassumingly small building at NE 25^th St. and Martin Luther King Ave. holds an outsized place in OKC’s community organizing and Civil Rights history, and its current caretakers had their work cut out for them to honor and display it anew.

Originally a Mobil gas station, Luper and the Youth Council acquired the building in the late 1960s and converted it into a headquarters and cultural hub for organizing and public activism, but also for youth education, summer programs, and community outreach.

But though their efforts were successful, and their resolve strong, they still had to contend with the tensions and intimidations of the era’s deeply rooted racism.

“The building was firebombed within a year of the Youth Council moving in, because everyone was not happy about the work that was happening here,” Beatty told the crowd. “But that didn’t stop the Youth Council and that didn’t stop Clara Luper. The building has been rebuilt multiple times, the building has transformed over the years.”

Project separated from MAPS in favor of private funding

The Freedom Center was originally expected to be renovated and restored by a $25 million allocation from MAPS 4, as passed in 2019.

But a massive fundraising effort came together to secure private and nonprofit financing, allowing for a much faster project timeline and for the current leadership to retain control and ownership of the building.

With that new funding in place, the restoration project kicked into high gear and the original City funding was redirected toward the construction of the much larger, broader upcoming Clara Luper Civil Rights Center next door.

‘Inside These Walls’

This newest transformation not only rebuilds and restores the Freedom Center to its structural and architectural peak as it stood in the 1990s, but also dives into its community legacy with the opening of “Inside These Walls,” an exhibition built from video interviews, archival footage, historical materials, and informational storytelling available through interactive touchscreens.

“After Clara Luper passed, the building kind of fell into disuse and sat empty for about 10 years,” Corbin Taggert, Freedom Center’s lead archivist, told Free Press during Friday’s opening event. “Well, I say empty, but really just unused. It was full, full of the archives, just a gold mine of information.”

Those archives, and the deep-dives, reconstructions, and on-camera interviews that they spawned, began to form the basis of “Inside These Walls,” providing troves of documents, correspondence, registrations, licenses, and more, helping to paint a more clear and accurate picture of the building’s history.

Alongside scans and recreations of some of those historic documents in the exhibition are treasured physical markers of Civil Rights progress from across the decades, including the dress worn by Karen Wallace Douglas in 1995 when she became to the first Oklahoman crowned Miss Black America.

And of course, the building’s already iconic Black History Monument that’s stood proudly outside for years, has now shifted closer to 25^th St. to better welcome visitors to the Freedom Center.

‘This story is not over’

It all comes together now for the center’s triumphant re-opening, forming a large-scale picture of the vital accomplishments of Luper’s life and the legacy she built for the Youth Council, but also casting an encouraging light onto the small, but surely mighty, community of friends and supporters that together paved the way for generations.

“I appreciate everything that everybody’s done for Freedom Center, and to tell our story,” said Clara Luper’s daughter Marilyn Luper-Hildreth – an OKC community organizing legend in her own right – at the opening event Friday, charging the attendees to vote, act, and keep the spirit of the Youth Council alive in our current moment of racial division and extremist rhetoric.

“But this story is not over, we have to write our own,” she said. “We have to work together. We haven’t resolved this issue, and we won’t resolve it until everybody in this country is treated equally.”

For more, visit freedomcenterokc.org.

---