User talk:Oklahomachicka

Ada Lois Sipuel (1924-1995)

Ada Lois Sipuel was born on February 8, 1924 in Chickasha, Oklahoma. She was an excellent student; she graduated from Lincoln High School in 1941 as the valedictorian. She then enrolled in Arkansas A&M College at Pine Bluff. After a year she transferred to Langston University in the September of 1942, where she majored in English and dreamed of being a lawyer. On March 3, 1944, she married Warren Fisher. Then on May 21, 1945 she graduated from Langston University with honors. At the urging of NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Ada agreed to seek admission to the University of Oklahoma’s law school to challenge Oklahoma’s segregation laws and to achieve her lifelong goal to become a lawyer. So on January 14, 1946, she applied for admission to the university. Oklahoma University’s president, Dr. George Lynn Cross advised Ada that there was no academic reason to reject her application for admission, but that Oklahoma’s statues prohibited whites and blacks from being in a class together. And the laws also made it a misdemeanor to instruct or attend classes made up of mixed races. The university’s president, Cross, could have been fined fifty dollars a day and the white students could have been fined twenty dollars a day. So on April 6, 1946 Ada filed a lawsuit in the Cleveland County District Court, with the support of civic leaders from all across the state, it was a three-year legal battle. Thurgood Marshall, and attorney but later was a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, represented her. Unfortunally she lost her court case in the county district court and appealed it to the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which sustained the ruling of the lower court, finding that the state’s policy of segregating races in education did not violate the federal constitution. Then after that unfavorable ruling from the Oklahoma Supreme Court, she then filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation’s highest tribunal ruled in Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma that Oklahoma must provide her with the same opportunities for securing a legal education as it provided to other citizens of Oklahoma, on January 12, 1948. To carry out the ruling the case was remanded to the Cleveland County District Court. Then after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Ada’s favor, the Oklahoma Legislature, rather than admit her to the OU law school or close the law school to students of both races, decided to create a separate law school exclusively for her to attend. The new school was put together in five days and was set up in the State Capitol’s Senate rooms, in was called Langston University School of Law. Ada refused to attend the university, so on March 15, 1948 her lawyers filed a motion in the Cleveland County District Court contending that Langston’s law school did not afford the advantages of legal education to blacks substantially equal to the education the white students received at OU’s law school. This inequality, they argued, entitled her to be admitted to the University of Oklahoma College of law. Then the Cleveland court ruled against her, finding that the two state law schools were equal. The Oklahoma Supreme Court, predictably, upheld the finding. After the second ruling, her lawyers announced their next move which was to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court again. But Oklahoma Attorney General Mac Q. Williamson refused to go back to Washington D.C. and face the same nine Supreme Court justices just to argue that Langston’s law school was just the same as OU’s law school. On June 18, 1949, which was more than three years after Ada first applied for admission to the University Of Oklahoma College Of Law, she finally got accepted. Langston University’s law school was closed twelve days later. Ada was generally welcomed by her white classmates, but she was still forced to sit in the back of the class, behind a row of empty seats and a wooden railing with a sign designated “colored.” The university gave all black students separate eating facilities and restrooms, separate reading sections in the library, and roped-off stadium seats at football games. The conditions persisted through 1950. The end of segregation in higher education had already begun. A group of six black Oklahomans applied to the University of Oklahoma’s graduate schools in disciplines ranging from zoology to social work. All were denied admission under the same reason Ada was denied admission. Then Thurgood Marshall selected one of the six students, which was George W. McLaurin, to present another challenge to segregation in higher education. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents they ruled that the restrictions of segregation imposed on George at OU impaired and inhibited his ability to study, on June 5, 1950. The decision meant that all blacks could no longer be segregated at OU and now they could be admitted to graduate schools at all state-supported colleges and the universities in the nation. Ada finally graduated from the University Of Oklahoma College Of Law in the August of 1952. In 1968 she earned a master’s degree in history from the University of Oklahoma. Ada joined the faculty of Langston University in 1957 where she served as chair of the Department of Social Sciences after practicing law in Chickasha, briefly. In the December of 1987 she retired as assistant vice president for academic affairs. The University of Oklahoma awarded her an honorary doctorate of humane letters. Unfortunately, on October 18, 1995 Dr. Ada Lois Sipuel died. So in honor of Ada the university subsequently dedicated the Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher Garden on the Norman Campus. And at the bottom of the bronze plaque commemorating her contribution to the state of Oklahoma, the inscription reads, “In Psalm 118, the psalmist speaks of how the stone that the builders once rejected becomes the cornerstone.”