2026 Annual Brown Lecture: Admitted But Not Equal
November 5 @ 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Join AERA for the 2026 Annual Brown Lecture in Education Research, featuring Daniel Solórzano, Professor of Education and Chicana/o and Central American Studies, and director of UCLA’s Center for Critical Race Studies in Education at UCLA Ed&IS.
What does it mean to be admitted to a university but still denied the opportunity to attend as an equal?
In the 2026 Brown Lecture, Daniel G. Solórzano examines that question through the story of George W. McLaurin, an educator who, at 54 years old, became the first Black student admitted to the University of Oklahoma in 1948. Although McLaurin was permitted to enroll in its doctoral program in educational administration, the university segregated him from his white classmates—in the classroom, library, cafeteria, and other spaces across campus.
Drawing on archival research and the scholarship of pioneering legal scholar Derrick Bell, Solórzano explores McLaurin’s challenge to the university’s treatment of him, culminating in the landmark 1950 Supreme Court case McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents. He recovers McLaurin’s fuller story as an educator, husband, and father and considers what his experience—and the decision that helped lay the groundwork for Brown v. Board of Education—reveals about the difference between gaining access to an institution and attending as an equal.
At a time when questions about racial inequality and equal opportunity remain deeply contested, the lecture assesses how patterns of exclusion can persist within educational institutions even after formal legal barriers have been removed—and what McLaurin’s legacy asks of researchers, educators, and policymakers today.