Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher Garden - University of Oklahoma - Norman, Oklahoma - Oklahoma Historical Markers on Waymarking.com

Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher Garden

This peaceful garden is named in honor of Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher. Despite state laws in Oklahoma and sixteen other states mandating racially segregated education, she was quietly determined to secure the advantages of higher education for herself and for generations of African American young people who would follow in her path.

Her effort to enter the University of Oklahoma, which began when she walked into the President’s office in Evans Hall on a crisp day in January 1946, would take more than three years and two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Throughout that long struggle, she carried herself with such composure and dignity, with such patience and courage, and with so complete an absence of bitterness of any kind, that she led thousands of Oklahomans both on and off the campus to see the justice of her cause. To their lasting credit, the University’s students, faculty and its President, George Lynn Cross, were among here warmest supporters.

The Sipuel case was a legal landmark which pointed the way to the elimination of segregation in all of American public education. The precedents that her deeds established made this a different university, on where diversity is a source of strength. She made Oklahoma a better state. She made the United States a better nation.

Ada Sipuel Fisher graduated from the law school in 1951; she also earned a Masters degree in History from the University in 1968 and spent many years as a professor and Chair of Social Sciences at Langston University.

In 1992, in recognition of her lifetime of service, she was appointed a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma.

In Psalm 118, the psalmist speaks of how the stone that the builders once rejected became the cornerstone.

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