Wheeler Park Zoo

Wheeler Park was once the home of Oklahoma City's zoo until 1923. A municipal zoo, the park was originally open to all people, but became segregated after statehood in 1907. City park commissioners were afraid white attendance would drop-off and cause the streetcar company not to build a line into the park if African Americans were allowed to visit the zoo. Ralph Ellison and his mother made an attempt to challenge the admission rules in 1918 without success.

At five or six years of age, near the time he began to attend Douglass School, Ralph Ellison witnessed not only the boundaries of race in Oklahoma City, but his mother's courageous attempt to scale them. Around 1918, she met resistance when trying to enter the Wheeler Park. Incensed, Ida chose to not return to the zoo; her precocious son Ralph, tried hard to understand. Later remembering parts of the conversation he had with her about why they couldn't return, Ellison explained how he had first asked whether the animals were sick, then turned to other possibilities: "Had someone done something bad to the animals? No. Had someone tried to steal them or feed them poison? No...Could white kids still go?" Apparently badgered by the innocence of such questions, Ida made a fateful decision to make another trip to the zoo. The visit went without incident until a plainclothes guard ask her what white folks she had come with. Her ire raised, Ellison remembered his mother spitting back, "I'm here...because I am a tax-payer, and I thought it was about time that my boys have a look at those animals. And I don't need any white folks to show me the way." Ida Ellison's courage was noticed then and remembered later by her son: "Mama certainly had courage…Do you remember the time she took us out to the zoo and took her time and showed us all of the animals before the cop came up to tell us we had to leave because we were Negroes? She knew that Negroes paid taxes to support the public parks and she meant for us to see the animals, law or no law."

Callahan, John F. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. New York City, New York. Modern Library, 1995.