Accountability for 'Dilbert' creator

Years ago I lived in an Army town spread out over the plains of southwestern Oklahoma. It was both the coldest and the hottest place I've ever been in my entire life. The cold lasted about three weeks but the heat was a good nine months there and once it set in it could roast the eyes out of your head — or at least that's how it felt to my pale-skinned, redheaded self.It was in the middle of one of those 113-degree afternoons that I first laid eyes on the sprawling Doe Doe Park, a shuttered old building in town, where families and children once fled the oppressive heat to dip in the massive swimming pool or whip around the massive skating rink. But not if you were Black. In a mostly treeless town where the wind usually came with tornadoes attached, escaping the heat was a serious concern most of the year — and at Doe Doe Park, the owners were willing to close up shop before they'd allow Black people in.On July 4, 1966 — I love that, Independence Day — about 200 mostly Black people gathered at the gates, singing hymns and patriotic songs, carrying posters and flags. It was the culmination of weeks of protests at the park, including a march from Oklahoma City, some 90 miles away, just a few weeks before while onlookers spit and threw rocks at the walkers.That holiday ended with 55 protesters arrested for trespassing — charges which had to hurriedly be dropped and refiled as other minor charges when city officials realized there was no trespassing law on the books.Two years later a federal judge ruled in favor of the park's owners, who had said all along they didn't have to abide by the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Doe Doe was a private park, they said, and thereby not subject to the whims of such hogwash as mandated civil rights, or, for that matter, just common decency. Their property, their say — and if they said Black folks couldn't swim in the same pool with white folk in the year of our Lord 1968, well then who was going to tell them different?And that's when this utterly predictable script from our country's too-often-predictable history takes an unexpected twist.Just a few weeks after the owners won their victory, they chose to integrate the park voluntarily. In interviews given to Oklahoma news outlets decades later, sons of the original builder said their father just didn't like anybody telling him what to do, so he fought all the way to federal court to prove his point — and then gave in, telling his sons it was the "right thing to do."History, and many others that lived in town at the time, speculate that the decision had less to do with a change of heart than it did with an order from the commanding general of Fort Sill, the massive Army base in town, that the park was off-limits to all soldiers and their families until it was desegregated.The park never really regained its footing, from what I heard. Some say the owner purposely raised prices, trying to make his park inaccessible to the new customers he was welcoming in. A promised development deal fell through in the mid-1980s, closing the business for good. It sat empty for years, 30 acres of unused land and huge buildings abandoned in the middle of town before finally being demolished, a sad note of forgotten, bitter history.I found myself thinking of Doe Doe Park this week when I sat down to try to write about this paper, among so many others across the country, finally kicking to the curb the comic strip "Dilbert" following the racist rant its creator, Scott Adams, delivered on YouTube last week. By now it's been talked about enough that we all know what he's said; I don't need to repeat it. Frankly it's not even the first time he's said outlandish stuff, it just seems like the more you've been in the spotlight the longer it takes for people to hear the foolishness you spout.To be clear, I'm not addressing what he said, really, I'm addressing all those who are offended that he's being "canceled."For decades he built an empire publishing comics, a podcast, books, a television show — all made possible by the free and unfettered expression of his speech. It's only now that his distributor has quit him, his book publisher has pulled out, and newspapers around the country are leaving him in droves. Adams can say he's being canceled all he wants, but what he's actually getting is accountability.I don't think we see a lot of it these days. To me, it's always going to look a bit like that beautiful old amusement park dry rotting away on the plains of Oklahoma, a reminder of accountability coming around to settle its tab.Contact Chronicle-Telegram columnist Rini Jeffers at rinijeffers@gmail.com.