Equal Protection Under the Law

Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma, January 12, 1948

In 1948, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the Gaines decision in Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma. Citing Gaines as a precedent, the Supreme Court ruled that denying African American students access to Oklahoma’s only public law school violated their right to equal protection under the law, a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. The state of North Carolina had been involved in a similar case a little over a decade before this decision, but it resulted in a very different outcome. A student named Thomas Raymond Hocutt filed suit after he was denied admission to UNC Chapel Hill’s Pharmacy School in 1933 solely on the basis of his race. He lost his case however, when James Edward Shepard the president of North Carolina College, Hocutt’s undergraduate institution, refused to supply him with a transcript, meaning he could no longer meet UNC’s admission requirements. Although it is difficult to definitively pinpoint Shepard’s motives, it is certainly possible he acted to protect the interests of his school. He claimed, in a letter he wrote to the director of the Division of Negro Education Nathan Carter Newbold that he thought African Americans should remain in control of their own educational institutions and that, rather than sending students to study out of state, professional programs should be added to historically black universities like North Carolina College. These sentiments suggest that he may have put what he believed to be the good of his university over the desires of one student.

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