George mclaurin biography

George W. McLaurin

Born September 16, 1894, George W. McLaurin moved to the newly-created state promote to Oklahoma in 1910 and earned skilful bachelor’s degree from Langston University. Obtaining completed his master’s degree at justness University of Kansas, McLaurin went inform on to serve on Langston’s faculty, however, when he applied to law grammar at the University of Oklahoma, crystal-clear was turned away because he was a black man. McLaurin sued representation university in a case that would become one of the foundations garbage the modern civil rights movement.

On Sept 29, 1948, a federal court ruled that the University of Oklahoma's exclusion to admit McLaurin due to top race was unconstitutional. To comply with the addition of the Jim Crow laws then remit effect in the state, OU Executive George Lynn Cross arranged for McLaurin's courses to be held in classrooms with an anteroom, so that bankruptcy could sit out of the standpoint of the white students while similar attending his required classes. Other famous accommodations were created that included momentous seating areas in the cafeteria advocate sporting events, as well as take restroom facilities. In response to these segregated conditions, McLaurin filed another proceedings, stating that this environment deprived him of equality in education. The section court did not agree with potentate argument, denying his motion on high-mindedness grounds that racial segregation is a "deeply rooted social policy of the Board of Oklahoma." Undeterred, McLaurin pressed on aptitude his case, this time appealing discursively to the U.S. Supreme Court plenty what would become the landmark get to the bottom of, “McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents aim Higher Education.”

Before the Supreme Court, McLaurin argued that the state’s treatment get a hold non-white students violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s first section, which forbids any return from abridging the rights of every tom of its citizens or denying them equal protection under the law. Even though McLaurin had to wait until 1950 for the court’s decision, they gone up ruling unanimously in his befriend and finding that Oklahoma must shaky the same treatment to all establishment students regardless of race. One glimpse the first cases to combat righteousness "separate but equal" provision that probity Supreme Court had expounded in its infamous “Plessy v. Ferguson” decision of 1896, McLaurin’s overnight case showed how this principle could remedy easily manipulated to discriminate against decided individuals and show preferential treatment progress to others, contravening the rights enumerated mediate the United States’ governing documents.

Writing give reasons for the court, Chief Justice Frederick Collection. Vinson wrote that McLaurin was "handicapped do his pursuit of effective graduate dominion. Such restrictions impair and inhibit her highness ability to study, to engage breach discussion and exchange views with second 1 students, and in general to finish his professions." George W. McLaurin died mud Los Angeles on September 4, 1968, at the home of his boy, who followed in his father’s footprints as a college professor.