ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses early civil rights struggles, demonstrating the importance of the historical situation and intersection of cultural goals in the development of institutionalized means to achieve social change. In the preceding chapter the competing ideologies of racial inclusion and exclusion were examined in the border state of Kansas. This belief system underpinned an uneven system of racial segregation limited primarily to its public schools. We now turn to a different border state, Oklahoma, which developed its own system of segregation on a different trajectory than Kansas. Like Kansas, Oklahoma’s geographical location bordering northern, southern, and western states shaped its ideologies of race. Its cultural values of liberty and freedom were also tempered by northern abolitionism and free soil mentalities, southern racial exclusion, and Western frontier beliefs about rugged individualism.
