Eternal Echoes
Eternal Echoes is the TFAM South series honoring Black trailblazers, uplifting key stories and moments in Black history, and resisting efforts to erase them.
HIGHLIGHT STATE: Oklahoma
Amos T. Hall was born in 1896 in Louisiana. He attended Rust College in Mississippi and Gilbert Industrial College in Louisiana. He moved to Tulsa in 1921 and began studying law books he found in a church. Completely self-taught, Hall passed the bar exam in 1925. He worked with B. C. Franklin in a case concerning whether coerced confessions were constitutional, and they were successful in getting their client’s conviction reversed. As that case came to a conclusion, he served as the lawyer for Emma Lee Freemen, who sued the Oklahoma City School Board for equal pay for Black teachers and won. At the same time Hall worked on these cases, he also represented Ada Lois Sipuel in court with Thurgood Marshall. Hall then went on to represent George McLaurin in his case.
Amos T. Hall stands with Roscoe Dunjee and Clara Luper as major architects of the Civil Rights Movement in Oklahoma during the critical decades of the 1940s and 1950s. Precedents that Hall helped to establish would contribute to the overturning of the system of legal segregation that dominated much of the country for over half a century.
(Hall is on far left)
