In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favour of Oliver Brown, who fought against state segregation laws. Brown v. Board of Education established that separate educational facilities in the United States were inherently unequal and were therefore in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. constitution. The desegregation of schools was a major steppingstone in the ongoing fight for equal rights. What you probably don’t know, however, is that before Brown, there was Sipuel v. Board of Regents, which was trailblazed by Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, who dedicated her life to securing legal education for Black Americans. The Sipuel decision mandated that the state of Oklahoma provide education for Black students equal to that of white students, affording Black students admission to white schools and acting as a precursor for Brown v. Board of Education.
Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher was born in 1924 and grew up in Chickasha, Oklahoma, where a firm wall of segregation separated white and Black Americans. Throughout her life, she faced experiences that shaped her into the person she would become: an unsung hero of civil rights history. In the U.S., “separate but equal” was a legal doctrine established in 1896 that guaranteed “equal protection” under the law to all people, which also applied to public equipment and facilities. In Oklahoma, where segregation was mandatory, transportation, education, and most other forms of human interaction were separate and segregated. In Chickasha, there were five schools for white students and five schools for Black students; however, Black schools were often one room, limited to one teacher, and operated outside of the city’s limits. At the time, Chickasha spent 47 dollars annually to educate a white pupil and only 37 dollars to educate a Black pupil because funding came from different tax resources. During Fisher’s early life, white and Black Americans were kept separate, but in no way were they treated as equal.
In 1945, Fisher’s family doctor suggested that she enrol in the law program at the University of Oklahoma (UO). This law program was not legally accessible to Black Americans despite the lack of a law program at Langston University, where Fisher had completed her undergraduate degree. Upon rejection, Fisher met with OU’s president, who presented her with a written statement confirming that she had been denied acceptance because she was Black. With that, Fisher began an assault on the Oklahoma Constitution in what would be a four-year legal battle for equal opportunities.
The case went to the Supreme Court in January 1948, which decided that Fisher should be entitled to a secure legal education afforded by a state institution. As such, the state of Oklahoma established a new law school for Black students, which Fisher refused to attend as it was not in any way equal to UO. It closed its doors in 1949 due to a lack of funds, allowing Fisher to enrol in the law program at UO.
Fisher was the only Black woman in a class of 300 white men, where she was forced to sit in the ‘colored section’ of only a single seat in the back of the room. Fisher – having worked harder than her classmates not only because she wanted to, but because she had to as a Black woman – graduated from law school in August 1951 and went on to become a lawyer and eventually a professor at Langston. Her case set the precedent for the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which mandated that segregated schools be dismantled with deliberate speed.
Fisher became more involved with political activism as she got older, having realized that she could have a greater effect on students as a professor than as a lawyer and achieved this as she rose from instructor to Assistant to the Vice President of Academic Affairs at Langston. Fisher saw herself as a troublemaker who fought for what was right, leaving behind a legacy that changed the course of civil rights in the United States.
Social movement scholarship has focused primarily on men as leaders, while feminist scholarship often focuses on white women. The odds were against Fisher during her fight for change, but they are still against her in the way that we consume and digest history. Her race and gender put her at a societal and historical disadvantage; according to historian Bernice McNair Barnett, Black women are often assumed to have been uninvolved in movements or feminist organizations, and, therefore, are seen as unconcerned with equality.
The success of the civil rights movement is often bracketed by the Brown decision and events in the 1960s that forced the U.S. government to recognize Black voices. Without Fisher’s years of dedicated work in the 1940s, the Brown decision may still have been attainable but would have required four years’ worth of additional litigation that Fisher endured. Before and during the civil rights movement, Black women initiated protests, fought for their rights, and incited change in an environment that silenced them because of their race and gender. Fisher dedicated her life to equal rights and desegregation, which not only allowed Black Americans equal academic opportunities but paved the way for civil rights activists and their achievements in the 1960s.
When we reflect upon the civil rights movement, it’s necessary to hold the utmost gratitude for the actors that dedicated their lives to political change. What we don’t do enough of, unfortunately, is appreciate the women that made it happen.
Thank you, Ada Lois.
Author’s note: I urge you to read Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher’s memoir, A Matter of Black and White. For additional reading on intersectionality and the civil rights movement, I recommend Christina Greene’s article titled “Women in the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements” and Bernice McNair Barnett’s article titled “Invisible Southern Black Women Leaders in the Civil Rights Movement: The Triple Constraints of Gender, Race, and Class.”