Civil Rights Work
Watts worked to desegregate public facilities and institutions during the 1940s and 1950s. He worked with Thurgood Marshall on the Ada Lois Sipuel challenge to segregation in the law school of Oklahoma University; consequently, the Supreme Court ruled in 1948, in Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla., that barring Sipuel from the school was unconstitutional. In the late 1950s, Watts and Oklahoma State Senator Gene Stipe entered a restaurant. When a waitress stopped them at the door and told them that the restaurant " not serve Negroes," Watts replied, "I don't eat Negroes. I just came to get some ham and eggs." He also worked to desegregate local institutions and, together with his brother, Buddy, ensured that his nephew, J.C. Watts, was one of the first black children to attend the newly integrated elementary school in their community. He rose to become the head of the NAACP in Oklahoma, and became friends with national leaders of the civil rights movement like Martin Luther King.
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Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil, rights and/or work:
“... two great areas of deafness existed in the South: White Southerners had no ears to hear that which threatened their Dream. And colored Southerners had none to hear that which could reduce their anger.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 16 (1962)
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“The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.”
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