From staff reports Chickasha native Ada Lois Sipuel was a pioneer in the civil rights movement.
According to the Oklahoma Historical Society, Sipuel was born Feb. 8, 1924, in Chickasha, graduated from high school there as the valedictorian of her class, and initially enrolled in Arkansas A&M College at Pine Bluff.
After one year she transferred in 1942 to Langston University, where she majored in English and dreamed of being a lawyer. On March 3, 1944, she married Warren Fisher, and on May 21, 1945, graduated from Langston University with honors.
Langston did not have a law school and state statutes prohibited Blacks from attending white state universities. Instead, Oklahoma provided funding that enabled Blacks to attend law schools and graduate from schools in other states.
At the urging of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 21-year-old Fisher agreed to seek admission to the University of Oklahoma's law school in order to challenge Oklahoma's segregation laws and achieve her ambition of becoming a lawyer.
She applied for admission to the OU College of Law on Jan. 14, 1946. After reviewing Fisher's credentials, the university’s president, Dr. George Lynn Cross, advised her that there was no academic reason to reject her application for admission, but Oklahoma statutes prohibited whites and Blacks from attending classes together. The laws also made it a misdemeanor to instruct or attend classes comprised of mixed races.
Cross would have been fined up to $50 a day and the white students who attended class with her would have been fined up to $20 a day. Represented by future Supreme Court Justice On April 6, 1946, with the support of civic leaders from across the state, Fisher filed a lawsuit in Cleveland County District Court, prompting a three-year legal battle.
She was represented by a then-young attorney, Thurgood Marshall – who a few short years later successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case, that “separate but equal” educational facilities were certainly not equal and therefore were inherently unconstitutional.
Marshall was later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
After losing her case in the Cleveland County district court, Fisher appealed to the Oklahoma Supreme Court. The state’s highest court sustained the ruling of the lower court, finding that the state's policy of segregating whites and Blacks in education did not violate the U.S. Constitution.
Fisher then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Jan. 12, 1948, the nation’s highest tribunal ruled in Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma that Oklahoma must provide Fisher with the same opportunities for securing a legal education as it provided to other citizens of Oklahoma.
Following the Supreme Court’s favorable ruling, the Oklahoma Legislature – rather than admit Fisher to the OU law school or close the law school to students, Black and white alike – opted to create a separate law school exclusively for her to attend. The new school, named Langston University School of Law, was thrown together in five days and was set up in the State Capitol’s Senate rooms.
Fisher refused to attend the sham Langston University School of Law, and on March 15, 1948, her lawyers filed a motion in Cleveland County District Court contending that Langston’s law school did not afford the advantages of a legal education to Blacks substantially equal to the education whites received at OU’s law school. This inequality, they argued, entitled Fisher to be admitted to the University of Oklahoma College of Law.
Once again the Cleveland County court ruled against her, finding that the two state law schools were “equal.” The Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld the finding.
After this second adverse ruling Fisher’s lawyers announced their intention to again appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Belatedly, Oklahoma threw in the towel However, Oklahoma Attorney General Mac Q. Williamson declined to return to Washington, D.C., and face the same nine Supreme Court justices – who included famous Justices William O. Douglas, Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, and Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor with the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg during the trial of the major Nazi war criminals after World War II.
As a result of this concession, on June 18, 1949, more than three years after Fisher first applied for admission to the University of Oklahoma College of Law, she finally was admitted. Langston University’s makeshift law school closed 12 days later.
According to the Historical Society, Fisher was forced to sit in the back of the classroom behind a row of empty seats and a wooden railing with a sign designated “colored,” and could not eat in the school cafeteria. All Black students enrolled at the University of Oklahoma were provided separate eating facilities and restrooms, separate reading sections in the library, and roped-off stadium seats at the football games. These conditions persisted through 1950.
In June 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in yet another lawsuit from Oklahoma that the restrictions imposed by segregation impaired and inhibited the ability of a Black student to study. The decision meant that Blacks could no longer be segregated at OU.
Fisher graduated from the University of Oklahoma College of Law in August 1952, and she earned a master’s degree in history from OU in 1968.
After briefly practicing law in Chickasha, she joined the faculty of Langston University in 1957 and served as chair of the Department of Social Sciences. She retired in December 1987 as assistant vice president for academic affairs. In 1991 the University of Oklahoma awarded Fisher an honorary doctorate of humane letters. Stone once rejected becomes cornerstone On April 22, 1992, Gov. David Walters symbolically righted the wrongs of the past by appointing Dr. Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher to the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma – the same school that had once refused to admit her to its College of Law. As the governor said during the ceremony, it was a “completed cycle.” The lady who was once rejected by the university was now a member of its governing board.
Dr. Fisher died on Oct. 18, 1995, at the age of 71. In her honor the University of Oklahoma subsequently dedicated the Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher Garden on the Norman campus. At the bottom of a bronze plaque commemorating her contribution to the state of Oklahoma, an inscription reads, “In Psalm 118, the psalmist speaks of how the stone that the builders once rejected becomes the cornerstone.”