Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher pursued higher education in the face of state laws in Oklahoma and sixteen other states that mandated racially segregated education. Her effort to enter the University of Oklahoma began when she walked into the president's office in Evans Hall in January 1946, and it took more than three years and two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court. Throughout that struggle, she showed composure, dignity, patience, courage, and an absence of bitterness that led thousands of Oklahomans on and off campus to see the justice of her cause, with the university's students, faculty, and president, George Lynn Cross, among her warmest supporters. The Sipuel case became a legal landmark that pointed the way to the elimination of segregation in all American public education, and the precedents established by her deeds helped make the university one where diversity is a source of strength. She graduated from the law school in 1951, earned a Masters degree in History from the university in 1968, spent many years as a professor and Chair of Social Sciences at Langston University, and in 1992 was appointed to the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma in recognition of her lifetime of service.