Even 20 years after Clara Luper's famous sit-in, no Black people had been employed by the city of Moore.

Until Nate Tarver.

Things were very different in 1979, Tarver remembered. He'd recently graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a bachelor's degree in journalism and, by his own admission, never really had any intention of being a police officer. But he was paying a utility bill in Moore when he saw that the city was hiring and decided to apply.

"I think I was naive, like a lot of 21- and 22-year-olds are at the time, as to what the political climate was, what the social climate was, so I had no clue that there were no Blacks that worked in the city of Moore," Tarver said.

Tarver, now retiring as chief of police for OU, has been recognized as a trailblazer in the Black commun

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