At a town hall meeting Saturday in a predominantly black Oklahoma City neighborhood, there were reminders of the very public civil rights victories of the past and of the more private everyday struggles still occurring. “We went downtown and we sat and we sat and we sat, until the walls of segregation started coming down,” Marilyn Luper Hildreth recalled to a packed auditorium at Fairview Baptist Church on NE 7 Street. Hildreth’s mother, school teacher Clara Luper, organized the 1958 sit-in of the Katz Drug Store after months of trying to negotiate with the owners about a rule prohibiting blacks from sitting at the lunch counter. The protest led to others in the city and in other states.

U.S. Rep. Kendra Horn, D-Oklahoma City, organized the town hall meeting on Saturday, two days before Martin Luther King Day and a few days after she introduced legislation to rename the downtown Oklahoma City post office after Clara Luper. Horn said Saturday that Luper and the others who participated in the sit-ins — some of whom were at the town hall on Saturday — fought a system that was justified by some because it was the way things had always been. Saying “that’s just how things are” is “a way of keeping voices silent, is a way of keeping us stuck where we are and a way of ensuring that we don’t move forward to include the contributions of people whose voices have been left out," she said.

That same obstacle was overcome by black World War II pilots who came to be known as the Tuskegee Airmen, said Mahlon Smith, president of the Charles B. Hall chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen. The airmen, some of whom became the first black U.S. military pilots to fly in battle, served their country so others behind them could do the same, Smith said. “I’m a beneficiary of that opportunity,” said Smith, a pilot who served 24 years in the military as an aircraft mechanic. Not long after Smith spoke, an African American woman who is an aircraft mechanic and scheduler at Tinker Air Force Base, stood up to say that she still faces bias and discrimination on her job. Horn promised the woman that she would look into her allegations.

Horn’s district does not include Tinker, but the congresswoman sits on the Armed Services Committee, a position she has used to look into problems with family housing on the base. Another person raised concerns about the lack of a grocery store, gas stations and other services in the historically black area of east Oklahoma City, while others talked about the city's growth leaving people behind and even crowding some out.

State Rep. Ajay Pittman, a Democrat who represents the area, said she had introduced legislation to allow electronic food stamp benefits to be used online to take advantage of stores that deliver groceries. J.D. Baker, a special assistant to Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, said the Homeland chain has pledged to open a store at NE 36 and Lincoln and officials are working to attract other investments to the area. The city is also developing rapid transit to make it easier for people to travel to other parts of town.

Also speaking at the town hall were Jabee, a musician and actor from Oklahoma City who said the civil rights icons of the city helped inspire him; and CeCe Jones-Davis, who is advocating for clemency for Oklahoma death row inmate Julius Jones.

Hildreth recalled the 60th anniversary observance of the Katz Drug Store sit-in and marching with kids the same age as some of those who participated in 1958. She remembered thinking, “Please don’t let these kids have to go through what we did 60 years ago.”