Twenty-One Months of Hell and the Supreme Court to the Rescue in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents

Abstract

Twenty-One Months of Hell and the Supreme Court to the Rescue in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents DAVID W. LEVY I Under our federal system, which divides power between a central authority in Wash­ ington, D.C., and the authorities in the fifty states, conflicts are bound to arise. No matter how carefully some powers are delegated to the federal government and others assigned to the states, there will inevitably be areas where both the federal and the state governments claim primacy and where each insists on implementing its own policy. When it comes to describing and analyzing such situations, we are too often content merely to explore the legal arguments marshaled by both sides and the judicial decisions aimed at resolving the conflict. Not enough attention is given to the harrowing difficulties faced by those who have to navigate between state and federal dictates and who find themselves improvising measures that they hope will satisfy the opposing requirements imposed upon them. Between October 1948 and June 1950, officials at the University of Oklahoma were faced with just such a difficulty. In January 1948, a sixty-one-year-old African Amer­ ican named George W. McLaurin applied for admission to the University. He was a retired professor at Langston University, Ok­ lahoma’s all-black college, he had a master’s degree from the University of Kansas, and he hoped to earn a doctorate in Education.1 Langston offered no graduate work whatever, but the University of Oklahoma, in all of its fifty-six-year history, had never admitted a black person. McLaurin and five other African Americans had been encouraged to apply by the Supreme Court’s ruling three weeks earlier in Sipuel v. Board ofRegents.2 In that case, the Court declared that be­ cause black Oklahomans had no access to legal training at a state institution while whites had studied law at the University for decades, Oklahoma was obligated, under the “equal protection” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, to provide Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher the opportunity for a legal education SUPREME COURT TO THE RESCUE IN MCLAURIN V. OKLAHOMA 29 substantially equal to that provided to whites. Rather than admitting her to the University’s law school, however, the state, desperate to preserve segregation, flung together in three weeks a bogus law school for blacks. Fisher and her National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawyers, led by Thurgood Marshall, returned to the judicial system, arguing that the two schools could not possibly be considered equal. Meanwhile, the six African Ameri­ cans, each hoping to pursue graduate work in a field not available to them at Langston, saw in the Sipuel decision enough similarity to their own circumstances to move them to apply for admission. The NAACP chose McLaurin to make the test case. The segregation of blacks had a long history in Oklahoma education. It was prac­ ticed in the schools of four of the Five Civ­ ilized Tribes and legalized by the Territorial Legislature before statehood. Segregation in schools was enshrined in Oklahoma’s consti­ tution in 19073 and then enforced by the state legislature. In 1941, lawmakers fortified the system by mandating harsh daily fines against any administrator who enrolled a black stu­ dent in a white school (or vice versa), against any teacher who taught in a mixedrace classroom, and against any student who willingly sat in such a classroom.4 Never­ theless, McLaurin and his attorneys pressed their demand for admission through the state judicial system (unsuccessfully) and into the federal courts. Finally, on September 29, 1948, the three-judge federal district court for the western district of Oklahoma, citing Sipuel, ruled that McLaurin was entitled to be admitted to the graduate program he desired as long as Oklahoma offered that program to whites. The judges declared that those sections of the 1941 law that levied fines against administrators, teachers, and students were unconstitutional in this case. But then, they added a troubling sentence: “This does not mean, however, that the segregation laws ofOklahoma are incapable ofenforcement.”5 The judges obviously felt that—except in a case like McLaurin’s, where those laws infringed upon an individual’s constitutional...