Bizzell Library: The Room Where Segregation Was Forced to Move

The building you are near is a National Historic Landmark, not because of its elaborate Collegiate Gothic architecture, though that alone would justify a look, but because of what happened inside it in nineteen forty-eight and nineteen forty-nine, events that helped dismantle the legal framework of segregation in American higher education before Brown versus Board of Education.

Bizzell Memorial Library opened in nineteen twenty-nine, named for William Bennett Bizzell, who served as University of Oklahoma president from nineteen twenty-six to nineteen forty-one. The five-story brick structure, designed by the firm Layton Hicks and Forsyth, became the intellectual center of the campus.

In nineteen forty-eight, Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, a Black Oklahoman represented by NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, sued the University of Oklahoma Law School for refusing to admit her solely because of her race. On January twelfth, nineteen forty-eight, the Supreme Court ruled nine to zero that Oklahoma must provide her with legal education equal to that offered to white students.

George McLaurin's case was even more specific. A retired professor admitted to the university's doctoral program in education in nineteen forty-eight, McLaurin was forced to sit in a segregated alcove in the mezzanine of Bizzell Library, separated from white students. He was assigned a separate desk in the anteroom. He sued again. In McLaurin versus Oklahoma State Regents, decided in nineteen fifty, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that segregation within an institution, even when the institution was nominally integrated, violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

The McLaurin case established that separate but equal was not possible within the same building. Four years later, Brown versus Board would cite McLaurin as precedent. The mezzanine alcove where George McLaurin was forced to sit still exists in this building. History sometimes has a precise address.