2023 FAPA Award Winner

Shades of Color is based on the true, heart-warming stories of the first individuals of color to attend Northwestern Oklahoma State University, a mostly white school and western Great Plains area. Tough racial questions were asked. The time period was the 1960s, one of the bloodiest and deadliest in the United States since the Civil War. The observations, though, are as applicable today.

We were shades of color: red, black, brown, yellow, and white. We were Muscogee-Creek, Asian, Cherokee, Choctaw, Mohawk, Blacks, Osage, European, Mid-Eastern, Persian, Spanish, Comanche, Delaware, Cheyenne-Arapaho, Navajo, African but, primarily, white.

We were students, faculty, and staff of a small university located on the Salt Fork River along the northwest border of Oklahoma.

Yet, compared to many areas of the country around us, our lives were mostly calm and peaceful, like in the eye of a violent and destructive hurricane. ... Why?

Answers are revealed in Shades of Color. Let their heart-warming messages speak to you. A gauntlet of emotions will occur-laughter, sorrow, tears, and joy.

Learn of the impacts of the daily national issues of that time-civil rights; politics and corruption; Korea and Vietnam; and anti-war movements, riots, bombings, and deaths.

The truths of our history, though, may be even more important today in the twenty-first century and, as the final word is read and you see the reality of people and groups coming together, you'll also discover hope for the future of our Nation.