
Before Brown v. the Board of Education, there was Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher.
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
Most of us are familiar with Brown v. Board of Education, a class action suit, with Oliver Brown as the named plaintiff, which ended with a landmark decision by the Supreme Court in which the Warren Court, in 1954, declared unanimously that state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional.
Many of us are not aware of the history of a decision that led up to Brown, Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla.
In this case, the plaintiff, Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, pictured above, was handed a victory, and was allowed to enter law school in Oklahoma.
You will note familiar names involved with her case:
The petitioners, acting on behalf of Miss Sipuel, were Thurgood Marshall of New York City, and Amos Hall, of Tulsa (also on the brief Frank D. Reeves). The respondents, representing the defendants, the university and the State of Oklahoma, were Fred Hansen, of Oklahoma City, the First Assistant Attorney General of Oklahoma, and Maurice H. Merrill, of Norman (also on the brief Mac Q. Williamson, Attorney General). This was a landmark case in the early civil rights movement. The case reversed Lee v. State of Mississippi, and was also a precursor for Brown v. Board of Education – 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
According to Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, who sat in the gallery and watched Marshall argue the case before the court on Thursday, January 8, 1948, Marshall was: “respectful, forceful and persuasive – so persuasive that on the following Monday – only four days after the argument – the Court unanimously ruled in Sipuel's favor.” In addition, Ada Sipuel was: “not only an excellent student, but was welcomed by her classmates who did not agree with the exclusionary policy that the State had unsuccessfully tried to defend.”
Today is the anniversary, of the date, June 18, 1949, when she was granted admission after having been barred—twice.
As a young child, when I heard "Oklahoma" I simply thought of the Broadway show by that name. a state peopled by white folks dancing in fields of wheat as the wind came sweeping down the plains. It wasn't until I got older, that I learned about the states racial history, in respect to both Native Americans, and its black population. I wrote about the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the Destruction of Black Wall Street, here. Oklahoma had a full set of Jim Crow laws, with 18 on the books between 1890 and 1957.
Just who was Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher?
From Chickasha, Oklahoma she was the daughter of a minister. Her brother planned to challenge segregationist policies of the University of Oklahoma, but went to Howard University Law School to not delay his career further by protracted litigation. Sipuel was willing to delay her legal career in order to challenge segregation. In 1946, she applied at the University of Oklahoma and was denied because of race, and in 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Oklahoma must provide instruction for Blacks equal to that of whites.
In order to comply, the state of Oklahoma created the Langston University School of Law, located at the state capital. Further litigation was necessary to prove that this law school was inferior to the University of Oklahoma law school. Finally, in 1949, Sipuel was admitted to the University of Oklahoma law school becoming the first African American woman to attend an all white law school in the South. By this time she was married and pregnant with the first of her two children. The law school gave her a chair marked "colored," and roped it off from the rest of the class. Her classmates and teachers welcomed her, shared their notes and studied with her, helping her to catch up on the materials she had missed.
Sipuel had to eat in a separate chained-off guarded area of the law school cafeteria. She recalled that years later some white students would crawl under the chain and eat with her when the guards were not around. Her lawsuit and tuition were supported by hundreds of small donations, and she believed she owed it to those donors to make it. She graduated in 1951 with a Master's degree, and began practicing law in her hometown of Chickasha in 1952.
Fisher died October 18, 1995 after a long career as an
educator.
In August 1952 Fisher graduated from the University of Oklahoma College of Law. She earned a master's degree in history from the University of Oklahoma in 1968. After briefly practicing law in Chickasha, Fisher joined the faculty of Langston University in 1957 where she 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.
Towards the end of her life, she had more to do with the University of Oklahoma.
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.
This tribute to her was produced at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, where she was inducted (in memoriam) into OU Law's Order of the Owl Hall of Fame on Nov. 8, 2011.
For further reading, I suggest, A Matter of Black and White: The Autobiography of Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher

This history, of the battle against racism, and an ultimate victory in the nation's highest court, should serve also as a reminder of the power of SCOTUS, and why we need a court willing to decide fairly for the rights of the disenfranchised.
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Racial integration has long been a symbol of American progress, but Stephen Crockett Jr. wonders whether white students attending predominantly black educational institutions will be remembered as a step forward or a sideshow. WashingtonPost: When Whites Attend HBCUs, Is That Progress?
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In the last few weeks, two white women have come out about their experiences as Howard University students; the first, Alyssa Paddock. in an essay published in The Washington Post; the second, Jillian Parker, in a music video about her love for a black football player called “Mr. Football.”
Both the essay and video brought the public to their virtual soapboxes, a.k.a. Facebook and Twitter, to voice either their support or displeasure. Some commenters argued that Howard is hollowed ground, and that the presence of white students feels like an infringement on cultural space. Others shrugged it all off as a natural next step to a completely desegregated America.
Which brings me to a set of questions: is the white student presence on these campuses a racial move forward, or is it all a joke or a conversational topic to be raised over brunch years from now? Will the stories of being a white student at a majority-Black college be sandwiched between summers in the Hamptons and post-grad backpacking through Europe? Is attending an HBCU for white students the equivalent of spending a summer in Ghana? Is a white person who sets out, decides, applies and then attends an all-black-university the equivalent of a Darwinesque social experiment? And, does practicing a minority get anyone closer to understanding the daily struggle of being a minority? Let’s face it; the white student who would even consider attending an HBCU is not the student who is need of a strong dose of black cultural awareness because they already have it.
Alyssa Paddock poses with friends at Howard University. (Courtesy of Alyssa Paddock)
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For Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain NAACP leader Medgar Evers, the memories of 1963 are still raw. Code Switch: Fifty Years After Medgar Evers' Killing, The Scars Remain.
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For Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain NAACP leader Medgar Evers, the memories of 1963 are still raw.
Her family lived in terror behind the locked doors of their Jackson, Miss., home — a modest, three-bedroom, ranch-style house in one of the first new subdivisions built for African-Americans in Mississippi's segregated capital city. A back window in the tiny kitchen frames the backyard where Evers-Williams once grew rose bushes and a plum tree.
The family moved to Jackson when Evers accepted a job as the NAACP's first field secretary in the South — a job that made him a target of the white supremacists who would stop at nothing to preserve Jim Crow.
"Medgar became No. 1 on the Mississippi 'to kill' list," Evers-Williams says. "And we never knew from one day to the next what would happen. I lived in fear of losing him. He lived being constantly aware that he could be killed at any time."
The house was firebombed. The kitchen phone rang constantly with threats. Scars from the attacks still remain today.
Finally, just after midnight on June 12, 1963, a bullet struck Medgar Evers as he pulled into the driveway. Inside the house, the Evers' three young children heard the gunfire.
Medgar Evers' widow, Myrlie, comforts the couple's 9-year-old son, Darrel, at her husband's funeral in Jackson, Miss., on June 15, 1963.
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The gift of life in Haiti. Miami Herald: Giving water.
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The water inspectors were negotiating with an irate homeowner over her illegal hookup when a neighbor signaled he wanted to talk.
“I would like to know how I can get water access,” physician Cyprien Jean-Jonas said from inside his one-room clinic.
Steps from Jean-Jonas’s front door was an underground well. And while many of his neighbors in this Port-au-Prince suburb had tapped into it for fresh water, Jean-Jonas said, “I don’t want to get it illegally.”
Moments like these are small but growing in Haiti where thousands of cholera deaths from contaminated water have residents increasingly worried about the quality of their water.
Now, a push by foreign donors and the Haitian government to improve access to safe drinking water is giving Haitians an incentive to legally pay for water which most buy on the streets by the bucketful or siphon off illegally.
“Customers are increasingly willing to collaborate with us,” said Beauchum Etienne, the supervising inspector who informed Jean-Jonas how to legally get service. “We talk to them about cholera and we tell them, ‘Going the legal route better increases the chances of controlling the water quality.’ ”
Children wash dishes at the shore of the Madan Belize village on Lake Azuei, near the Haitian/Domincan border. The vast majority of the residents of Madan Belize also drink the brackish waters of Lake Azuei. Felipe Jacome / For the Herald
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Voices and Soul

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
A small advert placed in a small newspaper offering a small remainder of an inherited largesse. A sitting in a small room. A drawing on a small canvas. Then, a small amount of color splashes texture as a small shadow emerges from a small corner just above the edge of the easel. A small beacon of light from a small and forgotten lamp illuminates the center and focal point of the small, artistic endeavor; telling a small story of the grand scheme of things.
A Still Life with Poverty.
There Came a Soul
She arrived as near to virginal
as girls got in those days—i.e., young,
the requisite dewy cheek
flushed at its own daring.
He had hoped for a little more edge.
But she held the newspaper rolled like a scepter,
his advertisement turned up to prove
she was there solely at his bidding—and yet
the gold band, the photographs ... a mother, then.
He placed her in the old garden chair,
the same one he went to evenings
when the first tug on the cord sent the bulb
swinging like the lamps in the medic’s tent
over the wounded, swaddled shapes that moaned
each time the Screaming Meemies let loose,
their calculated shrieks so far away
he thought of crickets—while all around him
matted gauze and ether pricked up
an itch so bad he could hardly sketch
each clean curve of tissue opening.
I shut my eyes, walk straight to it.
Nothing special but it’s there, wicker
fraying under my calming fingers.
What if he changed the newspaper into a letter,
then ripped it up and tucked the best part
from view? How much he needed that desecrated
scrap! And the red comb snarled with a few
pale hairs for God in his infinite greed
to snatch upon like a hawk targeting a sparrow—
he couldn’t say At least I let you keep your hair
so he kept to his task, applying paint
like a bandage to the open wound.
Pretty Ida, out to earn a penny
for her tiny brood.
He didn’t mask the full lips
or the way all the niggling fears
of an adolescent century
shone through her hesitant eyes,
but he painted the room out, blackened
every casement, every canvas drying
along the wall, even the ailing coffeepot
whose dim brew she politely refused,
until she was seated
as he had been, dropped
bleak and thick,
onto the last chair in the world.
-- Rita Dove
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