OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – A young Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher had visions of becoming a lawyer.

But, she was a Black woman in 1946: her parents were just one generation removed from slavery; there was segregation in the state since its statehood; the only Black university in Oklahoma did not have a law school.

Little did she know, she was history in the making.

“The NAACP were kind of rallying up to challenge the separate education issue, and they were looking for candidates that they could have to apply to challenge the school system,” said her grandson Emake Fisher.

“She offered to do it, which was super courageous for a young African-American woman at that time,” he added.

“[It’s] not that she had no fear, it’s that she walked through the fear still, with her head held high.”

In an archived video interview, Ms. Fisher said she learned the shameful cost of segregation when she showed up to the University of Oklahoma in person to apply for law school admission and was denied by administrators.

“[They] said she was qualified in every respect except that se is negro, and under the laws for the state of Oklahoma, ‘I will for that reason, have to deny her admission,” she said in the prior interview.

Ms. Fisher would go on to fight her battle for admission in the court system.

“I went through the district court to Cleveland County, where I lost…the state Supreme Court, where I lot, the United States Supreme Court, where I won,” she said.

Two years would pass before the Court would rule in favor of her right to enroll.

The unanimous federal Supreme Court decision unanimously decreed that her education should be equal and provided as soon as it was for any other applicant:

The petitioner is entitled to secure legal education afforded by a state institution. To this time, it has been denied her although during the same period many white applicants have been afforded legal education by the state The State must provide it for her in the 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 v. Board of Regents of the Univ. of Oklahoma., 332 U.S. 631 (1948)

However, it would take another year and a half before she would step foot into the law school as an admitted student.

It was June of 1949, and even then, the only seat available to her was in the back of the room, with a desk that said colored and in a chain around the front of it.

“The tenacity that she had to have [the] endurance that she had to have…even in the process of integration, they still wanted to create the same type of mindset,” said Emake.

“She took the way that was right. But with the most amount of resistance . And she grew and we grew as a people, as a nation.”

Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher was one of only two law school plaintiffs with the NAACP who would successfully graduate and practice law.

The groundbreaking Brown vs. Board of Education case that would ban racial segregation in public schools across America was still years away.

“She made us aware. That is not the end all of the work. There’s so much more to  do. But it was most definitely a step in the right direction,” Fisher added.

The University of Oklahoma has endowed a chair to honor Ms. Fisher’s legacy; it is the highest faculty distinction.

The Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher Chair in Civil Rights, Race and Justice in Law focuses on teaching and research as well as empowering future lawyers who are passionate about legal reform.

“The African-American community understood full well what the dangers were in challenging racial segregation and the racial status quo,” said Carla D. Pratt, who currently serves as the inaugural Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher Chair.

Seventy-five years later, Ms. Fisher’s legacy still leaves a mark.

“I was a little farm girl in rural Oklahoma who never even thought that I could be a student at the University of Oklahoma,” said Dr. Pratt.

“To hold a chair named for Dr. Ada Lois Fisher…I am her wildest dream come true,” she added.

“I honestly don’t think I would be here today; she really was a trailblazer,” said Alyssa Sloan, President of the Black Law Student Association.

Fisher graduated from the University of Oklahoma College of Law in August, 1952.

She also earned a master’s degree in history from the University of Oklahoma in 1968.

In 1991 the University of Oklahoma awarded Fisher an honorary doctorate of humane letters, and in April, 1992, she was appointed to the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma.