For as long as she lives, Marilyn Luper Hildreth plans to continue telling her mother’s story through re-enactments, marches and even music.
“My mother used to say, ‘One day, somebody’s gonna write about us, somebody’s gonna talk about it, I guess, even if it’s we ourselves,’ because it was hard to tell our story,” said Hildreth, the older daughter of the late Oklahoma City civil rights icon Clara Luper.
“Nobody was interested in what we were going through as a race of people, that we were still having to eat out of a brown paper sack out behind the building, during that time of history.”
On Aug, 19, 1958, Luper and 13 of her students — including her two older children, Calvin and Marilyn — walked into the then-segregated Katz Drug Store in downtown OKC and ordered Cokes at the lunch counter, initiating one of the first civil rights protests of its kind in the country. It took place two years before the famous sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The 2025 Freedom Fiesta Celebration, marking the 67th anniversary of the OKC sit-ins, is planned for Aug. 14-17 with a series of free, public events around Oklahoma City:
A concert at 6 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 14, at the Oklahoma History Center, 800 Nazih Zuhdi Drive
The Freedom Story and Art Show at 6 p.m. Friday, Aug. 15, at the Northeast Oklahoma City Health and Wellness Center, 3748 N. Lincoln Blvd
The annual Sit-In March and Reenactment at 9 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 16, with participants meeting at Frontline Church, 1104 N. Robinson, and marching to Kaiser’s, 1039 N. Walker.
A church service at 6 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 17, at Fifth Street Baptist Church, 801 NE Fifth, with keynote speaker Bishop James B. Walker, presiding prelate of the Seventh Episcopal District of the Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church.
Hannibal Lokumbe embraces Marilyn Luper Hildreth during a 2022 jazz concert as part of the Freedom Fiesta celebration at the Yale Theater in Oklahoma City. Hildreth is the daughter of educator and civil rights leader Clara Luper.
Freedom Fiesta concert to spotlight composer Hannibal Lokumbe’s new album featuring OKC Philharmonic
The Aug. 14 Freedom Fiesta opening concert will feature performances by the Ambassadors’ Children’s and Youth Choir, Star Spencer High School’s The Brothers of Stomp, 12-string touch-style guitarist Lorne Lee and pianist Joseph “JT” Tillman, who attended Oklahoma City University as a Clara Luper Scholar.
Saxophonist Ann-Etta Booze, the founder and CEO of Creative Music Academy Inc., and drummer Elijah Booze, one of the academy’s students, also will perform, said Joyce Jackson, a member of the Clara Luper Legacy Committee, which organizes Freedom Fiesta.
Capping the program will be an appearance by Texas-based composer and jazz trumpeter Hannibal Lokumbe, whom the Oklahoma City Philharmonic commissioned to write “Trials, Tears, Transcendence: The Journey of Clara Luper.”
The OKC Philharmonic, accompanied by acclaimed opera singer Karen Slack, percussionist Brannen Temple, the Ambassadors’ Concert Choir, Canterbury Voices and Hildreth as narrator, premiered the orchestral and vocal tribute in concert in May 2023 to mark the centennial of Luper’s birth.
The Oklahoma City orchestra’s world-premiere presentation of the Luper tribute is the centerpiece of Lokumbe’s new album “Veils of Justice: Trials, Tears, Transcendence, The Journey of Clara Luper,” due out Aug. 22 on all major streaming platforms worldwide and on physical CD through the OKC Philharmonic.
Early copies of the CD, along with copies of Lokumbe’s new biography “Spiritual Soundscapes of Music, Life, and Liberation,” will be available to buy at the Aug. 14 event, said OKC Philharmonic Music Director Alexander Mickelthwate.
“We are just really excited. It’s a big deal for us, of course. It’s the second commercial release during my tenure,” Mickelthwate told The Oklahoman. “The goal is to send it to the Grammys at the end of August. We are in time for that deadline, so we’ll send it out there and then see what happens.”
Music Director and composer of the OKC Philharmonic, Alexander Mickelthwate, hugs Marilyn Luper Hildreth in 2022 during the reenactment of the Oklahoma City sit-Ins.
Along with “Trials, Tears, Transcendence,” the album features three more compositions by Lokumbe, including two featuring Oklahoma performers:
Along with the rest of this year’s Freedom Fiesta festivities, Hildreth said she is excited to be a part of the opening concert as well as the Lokumbe album release.
“As long as I live, I’m gonna keep telling this story, because it hadn’t been easy — and I don’t want these kids to think that it’s easy. That’s why they have a responsibility to continue to fight,” she said.
For more information on Freedom Fiesta 2025, go to https://www.claraluperlegacy.com.
This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: 2025 Freedom Fiesta Celebration events will take place across OKC
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