A painting (by Norman artist Mike Wimmer) of Amos T. Hall, Thurgood Marshall, and Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, the first woman of color to be admitted to the University of Oklahoma Law School, hangs in the halls of the Oklahoma Senate Chamber. This may be the only public monument to Judge Hall. It is time for the state to take a new look at his accomplishments — in Oklahoma and throughout the nation — and find more ways to memorialize him.
Amos T. Hall was born on October 2, 1896, in Bastrop, Morehouse Parish, Louisiana. He graduated from Rust College, Holly Springs, Mississippi, and then Gilbert Industrial College in Baldwin, Louisiana. He returned to his hometown to teach elementary school before moving to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. Hall married Ella, who stayed at home to raise their two daughters, Adelle and Sammie. A short time after moving to Tulsa, Hall led a capital campaign to build the Carver Youth Center on Pine Street in North Tulsa.
Hall worked as a custodian at First United Methodist Church, where he found and began reading an old set of law books. Developing an interest in law and justice, he eventually became a Justice of the Peace, a position which did not require a law degree and continued to study law at night. Though he was entirely self-taught, he passed the bar exam in 1925 and was admitted to the Oklahoma Bar Association and the Tulsa County Bar Association.
Hall Begins his Fight for Justice
Hall’s first cases to make statewide news began in the mid-1940s. On May 22, 1945, LeRoy Benton was arrested, held for 20 days without being charged with a crime, questioned incessantly, and denied access to a lawyer. A mob gathered outside of the police station, and law enforcement officers told him that unless he confessed to murdering Mrs. Panta Lou Liles, they would turn him over to the mob to lynch him. He confessed and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in November, 1945. His defense lawyers were Amos T. Hall and B. C. Franklin. On February 18, 1948, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals agreed that Benton was illegally coerced to confess. The court reversed Benton’s conviction and ordered him set free.
In 1947, Emma Lee Freeman, a teacher at Douglas High School in Oklahoma City, filed a complaint against the Oklahoma City School Board to ask that she be paid the same salary as a white teacher who had identical training, doing the same work. This came at the same time as a case filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with the United States District Court to equalize teacher salaries. As the attorney for the Oklahoma Association of Negro Teachers, Hall argued the Freeman case. On October 17, 1948, the federal judge ruled that Oklahoma’s school boards must give Black and white teachers equal pay. This case likely prepared him for the largest legal fight of his lifetime, a case that went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court and in part laid the groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U. S. 483 (1954).
Black Students Fight to Attend OU
Segregation of all public facilities in Oklahoma, including schools, was the law of the land since the passage of Senate Bill One in 1907. Roscoe Dungee, founder of The Black Chronicle newspaper and president of the Oklahoma chapter of the NAACP, wanted to begin fighting segregation in public schools. With no accredited law school for Black students in the state, it seemed that this would be an excellent place to start. Dungee spoke with the family of Lemuel and Ada Sipuel, who both wanted to attend law school. Lemuel decided to attend Howard University in Washington D.C., so Ada agreed to apply to the University of Oklahoma (OU), knowing that she would be denied admission and then sue the school. She had graduated from Langston University with top honors in 1945 and knew she was qualified to apply to law school.
Ada Lois Sipuel applied to the all-white University of Oklahoma, then the only taxpayer-funded law school in Oklahoma, on January 14, 1946. After being denied admission, she filed a petition with the District Court of Cleveland County, Oklahoma. The court denied her petition, and she took her case to the Oklahoma Supreme Court. All the while, Amos T. Hall and Thurgood Marshall (at the time the Chief Counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund) worked in her corner as her legal team. After two long years, the case made its way to the U. S. Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court decided unanimously in Sipuel’s favor on January 12, 1948. The ruling stated that “The State must provide it for her in conformity with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and provide it as soon as it does for applicants of any other group.” Sipuel was admitted to the law school at OU two weeks into the 1949 summer session, becoming the first African American woman to attend an all-white law school in the South.
Her case was hard-fought, not just on a legal basis but also personally and financially. Throughout Sipuel’s legal battle, she received threatening phone calls and hate mail. The NAACP provided as much assistance as possible to cover legal fees. However, she, Marshall, and Hall still needed to raise donations, which they collected from churches and individuals throughout the state. Even after she was admitted, the school did not provide an equal learning experience for her and other Black students. She was made to sit separated from other students, roped off and labeled “colored” by a sign.
George McLaurin, a 61-year-old instructor at Langston University, applied to OU’s College of Education to pursue a doctorate in school administration in January, 1948. He was denied admission, applied again in September, and denied again. McLaurin filed a lawsuit against the university at the U. S. District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City. The federal court ruled that the school should admit McLaurin, but they did not specify whether the school was to uphold the state’s segregation laws. University president George Lynn Cross and the regents of the school instructed workers to build a small room with wooden railings that separated McLaurin from the rest of the class.
Other Black students admitted to the university were subjected to having to eat at a separate table in the cafeteria (and at times made to eat at different times than the other students), separate restrooms, having a segregated desk in the library, and having to sit at desks outside the classroom doorway. Amos Hall agreed to take McLaurin’s case to the Supreme Court.
McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950) argued that “[McLaurin’s] objection to these facilities is that to be thus segregated from the other students so interferes with his powers of concentration as to make study difficult, if not impossible, thereby depriving him of the equal educational facilities.” The U. S. Supreme Court agreed with McLaurin and ordered on June 5, 1950, that the university end its on-campus segregation of McLaurin and a fellow student in the same class, Maude Florence Hancock Wilson.
Chaos or Community?
In the decades following World War II, nations that had endured centuries of colonial rule by Europe were beginning to fight for their independence. These struggles motivated some groups and individuals in the U. S. to call for violence to gain their freedom. Leaders throughout the country, including Amos Hall, were pressured to pick sides: continue nonviolence, or fight back? Though not inherently violent, the Black Power movement began to gain power, especially among a younger generation who did not feel that progress was fast enough.
During the 1950s, Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress used the call-and-response chant “Amandla! (Power!)” to call for the end of apartheid and white minority rule in South Africa. The cry resonated with activists in Europe and the U. S. who felt that Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s strategy of nonviolence did not go far enough to further the global movement for Black equality. In 1961, Maya Angelou and other civil rights leaders led an aggressive demonstration at the United Nations in protest of the assassination of Patrice Émery Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the independent Democratic Republic of Congo. Shortly after Lumumba’s success in gaining independence for the country from Belgium, he was jailed by the Congo’s army leader Joseph-Désiré Mobutu and executed by a firing squad. Lumumba’s assassination became a rallying cry for Black activists in the U. S. opposing colonial powers’ opposition to democratic independence for nations in Africa and South America.
One year later, the Jamaica Labour Party, fearing a working-class Black uprising and unrest in newly independent Jamaica, banned The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Black Power activists such as Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael. Nina Simone’s criticism of nonviolence was the focus of her Carnegie Hall performance in March, 1964, and further helped put the movement in the national spotlight. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some civil rights leaders felt the legislation had not gone far enough, and the civil rights movement seemed to be at a crossroads. Some in the movement (most notably the Nation of Islam and the Free African Society) even looked back to earlier generations’ Black separatist ideas of Prince Hall, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington.
Seven prominent Negro leaders wrote a declaration of principles which appeared as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times on October 14, 1966. The statement was titled, Crisis and Commitment and asserted: “We are committed to integration, by which we mean an end to every barrier which segregation and other forms of discrimination have raised against the enjoyment by Negro Americans of their human and constitutional rights. …We reject the way of separatism, either moral or spacial.” The statement included the endorsement of the president of the National Council of Negro Women Dorothy Height, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters A. Philip Randolph, executive director of the NAACP Roy Wilkins, executive director of the Urban League Whitney M. Young, Jr., and executive secretary of the Conference of Prince Hall Grand Masters, Masons of America Amos T. Hall.
The statement rejected violence but asserted Black Americans’ right to free assembly and self-defense against attack. Hall and his colleagues also criticized the inaction of the nation’s white citizens, arguing that protests and civil unrest resulted from systemic oppression. “It is not an abdication of responsibility, but an affirmation of it, to say that society cannot perpetuate discrimination against Negros and then blame the victims or their leaders for the outbursts of those who have been made desperate.” The statement went on to say that white “weariness” regarding civil rights would plunge the nation into further violence and oppression, calling ambivalence disastrous to the country.
Martin Luther King was forced to immediately voice his opinion on the controversial declaration and the Black Power movement in the press. He denounced violence, pointing out that the practice of nonviolence won the civil rights struggles in Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery, Alabama. He supported Crisis and Commitment’s condemnation of violence and its call for racial integration. In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, King stated, “In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man. …We are bound together in a single garment of destiny. The language, the cultural patterns, the music, the material prosperity, and even the food of America are an amalgam of black and white.”
Elected as the first Black Judge in Oklahoma
Hall also served as the attorney for the State Conference of Branches of the NAACP. He was appointed Special Judge of the District Court of Tulsa County in 1969 and served until 1970. In 1970 he was elected Associate District Judge of Tulsa County and served in that capacity until his death in 1971. Judge Hall was the first African American to be elected to a countywide office and the first African American to be elected a judge in Oklahoma.
The association of lawyers, American Inns of Court , described Amos Hall as “a very kind, considerate and personable man. He had an innate humility that made him appear soft spoken. But when basic legal rights were involved, he was a dynamic advocate and a truly outstanding and articulate trial lawyer.”
Jimmie Lewis Franklin wrote of Hall in Journey Toward Hope: A History of Blacks in Oklahoma, “Death cut short his service as an associate district judge, but he made a profound impact on Oklahoma history during his more than forty years of public life. The aid he gave to young lawyers helped to strengthen the profession in the state, and it also insured their interest in the progress of Black people to which Hall had dedicated his life.” Today, the Northeast Oklahoma Black Lawyers Association (NOBLA) honors notable attorneys in the state working for civil rights and diversity with the annual Amos T. Hall Award.