A Step toward Brown v. Board of Education: Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher and Her Fight to End Segregation

Amazon.com Price: $24.95 (as of 12/04/2019 05:49 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description


In 1946 a young woman named Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher (1924–1995) used to be denied admission to the University of Oklahoma College of Law because she used to be African American. The OU law school used to be an all-white institution in a town where African Americans could work and shop so long as they got out before sundown. But when segregation used to be entrenched in Norman, so used to be the determination of black Oklahomans who had survived slavery to stake a claim in the territory. This used to be the tradition that Ada Lois Sipuel sprang from, a tradition and determination that would sustain her through the slow, tortuous path of litigation to gaining admission to law school. A Step toward Brown v. Board of Education—the first book to tell Fisher’s full story—is at once an inspiring biography and a remarkable chapter in the history of race and civil rights in The united states.

Cheryl Elizabeth Brown Wattley gives us a richly textured picture of the black-and-white world from which Ada Lois Sipuel and her circle of relatives emerged. Against this Oklahoma background Wattley shows Sipuel (who married Warren Fisher a year before she filed her suit) struggling against a segregated educational system. Her legal battle is positioned throughout the history of civil rights litigation and race-related jurisprudence in the state of Oklahoma and in the nation. Hers used to be a test case organized by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to go the entire way to the U.S. Supreme Court and, as precedent, strike any other blow against “separate but equal” public education.

Fisher served as both a litigant, with Thurgood Marshall for counsel, and, later, a litigator; both a plaintiff and an advocate for the NAACP; and both a student and, in the long run, a teacher of the very history she had helped to write. In telling Fisher’s story, Wattley also reveals a time and a place undergoing a profound transformation spurred by one courageous woman taking a bold step forward.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » State and Local » A Step toward Brown v. Board of Education: Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher and Her Fight to End Segregation

Recent Products