Going to work for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Oklahoma was a natural fit for civil rights attorney Veronica Laizure, despite the fact she isn’t Muslim.
“I consider it sort of an adoptive community to myself as a nonreligious person,” she said on a recent segment of the “CAIR on Air” podcast.
The Oklahoma native now serves as executive director of the state chapter in addition to her role as staff attorney for the national organization.
“We realized what Oklahoma Muslims needed was not only a staff attorney to respond to things after they happened, we wanted to build a civil rights department that would help equip people to prevent these discrimination complaints from happening in the first place,” she said.
It’s a timely move given that Republicans have turned their sites on Islamic institutions and Muslims individuals and families in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections. Conservatives in Congress have resorted again to fearmongering about Sharia Law while the governors of Florida and Texas have labeled Islamic schools and nonprofits, including CAIR, as terrorist groups.
Veronica Laizure
Laizure said she has her work cut out for her because the need is so great in the deeply red state: “Muslims are less than half a percentage point of the state population and a relatively young population when it comes to Oklahoma history. So, a lot of Oklahomans have never met a Muslim, are completely unfamiliar with Islam as a religion, except for what they see on the TV or what they hear from the pastor at their church up the road.”
But the history of Islamophobia in Oklahoma also makes the state a frightening place for civil rights work, she added.
“Oklahoma has been the site of some really awful Islamophobia, most notably the anti-Sharia law passed in 2010 with 70% of Oklahoma voters agreeing that Sharia was a bad and dangerous thing without really understanding what Sharia Law is or means.”
CAIR and its Oklahoma chapter challenged the “Save Our State Amendment” and ultimately succeeded in having the law struck down by a federal appeals court.
The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 is another example of the state’s racist history that makes working for CAIR-Oklahoma urgent and meaningful, Laizure said.
“Oklahoma has been the site of some really awful Islamophobia,
The orchestrated attack by about 10,000 white Tulsans against the city’s “Black Wall Street” community resulted in the deaths of an estimated 300 Black residents, according to a U.S. Justice Department study released last year. Laizure said she learned next to nothing about the event while growing up in Oklahoma.
“So many Oklahomans never heard about it. I even remember in high school, it was a footnote, it was a sidebar in a history textbook. Not only did this history happen, this history was deliberately hidden from us, this was deliberately obfuscated from our education, from our children’s education,” she said.
The April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing also exemplifies the need for civil rights work, notably the ways Muslims were initially blamed and targeted for the attack before Timothy McVeigh was eventually captured, Laizure said. “When people in Oklahoma realized that hate is grown right here in our heartland and blaming other people for it isn’t going to work for us anymore, it created a wave of interfaith relationship building that has been the source of incredible strength for us.”
Educating Muslims and non-Muslims about these challenges is one of the key goals of CAIR-Oklahoma, she explained.
“We have not picked up on the dangers of focusing on the things that divide us instead of the things that unite us. We have not been able to coalesce around the common good. The good news is that we have all done this before and we have made it through. Our communities are built on tremendous resilience.”
It’s also important to remember that none of the challenges Muslims, LGBTQ citizens and other marginalized groups are facing are new, she said.
“I think of it as history being cyclical. The bad thing is that these things have happened already and continue to happen, but if we are careful and smart and we learn from our history and we watch other communities and how they have responded to their time at the top of the terror wheel, we start to see patterns about what resistance looks like when it’s sustainable.”
And there is hope, she said. “What we’re seeing now is a shifting in the definition of community building, and that is the lasting and sustainable change that will save us from the toxicity of politics when we can get past the small minutiae of things that make us different.”