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Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, Oklahoma Lawyer born

Ada Sipuel Fisher

*Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, a Black lawyer, administrator, and activist, was born on this date in 1924.

From Chickasha, Oklahoma, she was the daughter of a minister.  Her brother planned to challenge the segregationist policies of the University of Oklahoma. Still, he went to Howard University Law School to avoid further delay in his career by protracted litigation. Sipuel was willing to delay her legal career to challenge segregation.  In 1946, she applied to 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.

Oklahoma created the Langston University School of Law, located in the state capital to comply. 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. She was married and pregnant with the first of her two children by this time.  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 catch up on the missed materials.

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. Hundreds of small donations supported her lawsuit and tuition; she believed she owed them 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.

In 1992, Oklahoma's governor, David Walters, appointed her to the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, which she noted in an interview, "completes a forty-five-year cycle." She further stated, "Having suffered severely from bigotry and racial discrimination as a student, I am sensitive to that kind of thing," and she planned to bring a new dimension to university policies. Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher died on October 18, 1995.

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