By Andy Rieger

Transcript Managing Editor

In 1967, George Henderson’s faculty mentor at Wayne State University in Detroit told him not to pull up stakes and take a teaching position complete with $5,000 pay cut at the University of Oklahoma.

The state is full of rednecks and was a “second class place,” the mentor told him. “You can do better,” he advised. Besides, Norman was a known “sundown” town where African Americans were expected to be out of town by sundown or suffer the consequences. George and Barbara Henderson’s children voted the move down.

Henderson didn’t listen to the mentor or his children. On a plane, flying over the red-dirt Midwest headed to an Oklahoma interview, an inner voice took hold and Henderson made the decision to come to OU as one of the university’s first African American faculty members.

“It wasn’t my decision,” he told members of the Norman Rotary Club this past week. “A force much greater than George Henderson made that decision.”

Rotarians gave Henderson a standing ovation but the community’s welcome wasn’t always friendly.

“Norman was a place that prided itself on not having Negroes,” Henderson said.

Housing for the family of seven children and a mother-in-law was difficult. Homes suddenly became unavailable and off the market when the sellers learned the buyer’s race.

Henderson was ready to turn the offer down and return to Detroit. Realtor Sam Matthews, Dr. George Cross and members of the OU Sociology Department finally found a willing seller. Matthews was eventually blacklisted and suffered financially. Henderson called the Realtor and willing seller the real heroes.

“It wasn’t about money. It was about belief and integrity. It was about doing the right thing,” he said.

Once settled in their home on Osborne Drive, the Henderson family endured crank telephone calls, insults, egged cars, garbage thrown on their lawn, police and merchant harassment and one death threat. Why did they stay?

“For every nasty, surly incident, two to three good things would happen,” he said.

He described architecture professor Fred Shellabarger redesigning and supervising contractors enlarging the family’s home. Shellabarger wouldn’t take payment.

“Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. You put it on the scales and you say there is more good than bad.”