Bizzell Memorial Library

In January 1948, a 61-year-old retired professor named George McLaurin applied to the University of Oklahoma to pursue a doctorate in education. He already held a master’s degree from the University of Kansas and had taught at Langston University. His application was denied solely because of his race- Oklahoma law made it a misdemeanor to operate or attend any school where both white and Black students were enrolled. McLaurin sued, won, and enrolled in October 1948- but was relegated to a designated desk on the mezzanine level of Bizzell Library, barred from the main reading room, and forced to sit in anterooms adjoining his classrooms. On June 5, 1950, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that this segregated treatment violated his Fourteenth Amendment rights. The case, decided the same day as Sweatt v. Painter, marked the end of the “separate but equal” doctrine- four years before Brown v. Board of Education. McLaurin never completed his doctorate, but this five-story Cherokee Gothic library, designed by Layton Hicks & Forsyth and completed in 1929, became a National Historic Landmark in 2001 for its role in dismantling segregation in American higher education.