Blacks in the Law
Blacks in the Law

Author: Geraldine R. Segal

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2016-11-11

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1512806404

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In Blacks and the Law, Geraldine R. Segal carefully and completely details the history and current status of black lawyers, judges, law professors, and law students in the United States. Extensive research into all available materials for Philadelphia, supplemented by interviews and questionnaires, results in an unrivaled study of the situation in one city. Her findings are then placed in a national setting by using comparative data from fifteen other American cities. The wealth of data presented here shows the persistence of high degrees of racial exclusion and underrepresentation practiced by the legal profession over many years. Countervailing these findings are success stories of enormously motivated and determined blacks who have overcome great obstacles to attain high positions as lawyers and judges. Within the legal establishment, increasing numbers of whites have dedicated themselves to lowering barriers to black participation. Blacks and the Law brings to light the racial prejudices of the white American legal community as well as its efforts to overcome such biases. It also shows the massive effort black people have made to achieve significant but limited progress toward integration of the legal profession and indicates the amount of work still ahead. This study is therefore of vital interest to all members of the legal profession, students of race relations, social mobility, and the professions, Philadelphians, and others who follow the struggle for racial equality.

A Step toward Brown v. Board of Education
A Step toward Brown v. Board of Education

Author: Cheryl Elizabeth Brown Wattley

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2014-10-22

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 080614789X

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In 1946 a young woman named Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher (1924–1995) was denied admission to the University of Oklahoma College of Law because she was African American. The OU law school was an all-white institution in a town where African Americans could work and shop as long as they got out before sundown. But if segregation was entrenched in Norman, so was the determination of black Oklahomans who had survived slavery to stake a claim in the territory. This was 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 America. Cheryl Elizabeth Brown Wattley gives us a richly textured picture of the black-and-white world from which Ada Lois Sipuel and her family 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 situated within the history of civil rights litigation and race-related jurisprudence in the state of Oklahoma and in the nation. Hers was a test case organized by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and, as precedent, strike another 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, ultimately, 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.