The Sipuel Legacy | Created by Beverly Kirk from Oklahoma City, OK.

The Sipuel Legacy

Created by:

Beverly Kirk from Oklahoma City, OK

Exhibit:

Racism: In the Face of Hate We Resist

Artist Statement:

In Sipuel vs Board of Regents, on January 12, 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled to force the University of Oklahoma law school to admit Ada Lois Sipuel, the school’s first African American woman. At age 24, a newlywed, she was the first Black woman to attend an all-white law school in the South. She earned a master’s degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1951.

Ada Sipuel was the older sister of my own children’s Grandma Huggins. I’d fondly tell her story, and my grade school children would ask, “Why wouldn’t they let her into the law school…since she was really smart?” “It was simply because of the color of her skin,” I’d explain. “The laws of Oklahoma didn’t let Black kids sit in the same classroom as white children in 1946.” My children would later interview Aunt Lois [Ada Lois Sipuel] and write a term paper about our own very famous person in American history.

Ada’s brother, Lemuel, after returning from World War I, had also wanted to attend law school at the University of Oklahoma. The local NAACP and Thurgood Marshall urged him to fight for admission. However, Lemuel had lost enough years to the war, and decided to attend Howard University, rather than fighting a court battle. He later practiced law in Chickasha and Oklahoma City. Ada, following in her brother’s footsteps, joyfully decided to accept the challenge of the struggle for equal education. Her court victory was a step on the path toward ending school segregation for every boy and girl, and resonates to the social justice issues surrounding George Floyd’s struggle for freedom in 2020.

I daydream about whether the brutality of the 8 minutes and 46 seconds which George Floyd suffered while dying felt as long and brutal as the years during which my aunt Ada, my mother, and my grandparents yearned to be free of segregated lunch counters, housing, trains, buses, and schools in our precious America. Yes, they yearned to breathe free!

My aunt Ada was sharp tongued and quick witted whenever she spoke the truth about racism in America at our family gatherings or in campus lecture rooms. I am amazed that she never expressed bitterness and hate for her unjust treatment at the University of Oklahoma. We, who live out the Oklahoma Sipuel legacy, choose to embrace the multifaceted hope of MLK, JFK, LBJ, Medgar, Angela, Shirley C., Malcolm, Trayvon, Barack and John Lewis as we teach our grandchildren how to live Black in America.

45" x 45"
T-shirts, cotton fabric and batt, African fabrics; machine appliqué, pieced and quilted.