University of Oklahoma

University of Oklahoma mainly at Norman, state supported; coeducational; chartered 1890, opened 1892. The schools of medicine and nursing, with hospitals and a research foundation, are at Oklahoma City. Research facilities include an earth sciences observatory at Leonard and a biological research station at Lake Texoma.

McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents For Higher Education, 339 U.S. 637 (1950), argued 3–4 Apr. 1950, decided 5 June 1950 by vote of 9 to 0. Vinson for the Court. McLaurin was a companion case to Sweatt v. Painter (1950), which defined the separate but equal standard in graduate education in such a way as to be unattainable. George W. McLaurin was an Oklahoma citizen and an African‐American. Hoping to earn a doctorate in education, he applied for admission to graduate study at Oklahoma's all‐white university at Norman. Initially denied admission on the basis of race, McLaurin was ordered admitted by a federal district court. But because Oklahoma law required that graduate instruction must be “upon a segregated basis,” McLaurin found himself enshrouded in the segregationist equivalent of a plastic bubble: in class, he sat in a separate row “reserved for Negroes”; in the library he studied at a separate desk; in the cafeteria he ate at a separate table. McLaurin sought relief from these measures by returning to the district court, and eventually appealing to the Supreme Court. The case was argued and decided simultaneously with the Sweatt case in which applicant Heman Sweatt was seeking admission to the University of Texas's all‐white law school.

In a brief and blunt ruling, Chief Justice Fred Vinson ordered an end to McLaurin's separate treatment. Such practices, Vinson observed, denied McLaurin “his personal and present rights to the equal protection of the laws” (p. 642) as required by the Fourteenth Amendment. McLaurin, Vinson wrote, “must receive the same treatment … as students of other races” (p. 642).

See also Education; Race and Racism; Segregation, De Jure; Separate but Equal Doctrine.

Augustus M. Burns III

Zox, Larry (1936– ). American abstract painter, born at Des Moines, Iowa. He studied at the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Drake University, Des Moines, and the Des Moines Art Center (where George Grosz was a visiting teacher), then settled in New York in 1958. In 1963 he began creating series of paintings in which each work was based on a standardized compositional scheme but differed in colour from the others in the series. These works—often large in scale—have been classified as Minimal or Systemic art, and the strong, aggressive colours of his paintings sometimes approached the hallucinatory effects of Op art. In the 1970s the forms in his paintings became softer and more irregular.