Rose State To Screen ‘Children Of The Civil Rights’ Documentary Published February 3, 2016

Midwest City, Okla. – The Rose State Black Student Association will screen “Children of the Civil Rights,” a 2015 documentary about the role of kids in the civil rights movement, including youth from Oklahoma City, at 6 p.m. Thursday in the Student Center main dining room.

A discussion with Joyce Jackson, who was involved in the movement, will follow the screening. 

“Children of the Civil Rights” tells the story about the strength of the young. It begins with a group of kids who conducted sit-ins for six years in Oklahoma City. The kids and their advisor, Clara Luper started in 1958, a year and a half before the Greensboro, North Carolina sit-ins.

Clara Luper and her youth continued the non-violent sit-ins for six years, they never made national news, but just about every restaurant in the city was desegregated before the Civil Rights Acts was put into law.

The director, Julia Clifford who is originally from Oklahoma, says she was inspired to make the film after learning her father participated in the sit-ins in Oklahoma City. A fact she had never known until 2006 after a visit home to her parents.

Also highlighted in the film, Congressman John Lewis a civil rights leader, tells his dramatic tale of Bloody Sunday. A day in 1965 when he and hundreds of others marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama and the violence they suffered at the hands of the Alabama State Troopers.