George W. McLaurin provided the Oklahoma civil rights case that damaged the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson “separate but equal” legal position beyond repair. He held a master’s degree from the University of Kansas and taught at the all-black Langston University until 1948. NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, Oklahoma attorney Amos T. Hall, and Black Dispatch newspaper editor Roscoe Dunjee supported McLaurin’s efforts, along with five other African American students, to pursue advanced professional degrees at the University of Oklahoma.
McLaurin’s cases worked in conjunction with Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher’s suit to open higher education to African Americans in Oklahoma and lay the foundation for Brown v. Board of Education.