The landmark Supreme Court case of Sweatt v. Painter, which involved the University of Texas School of Law, made his mark in Austin and in the fight for civil rights.
Background
In 1946, Heman Marion Sweatt applied for admission to the University of Texas School of Law at Austin. Then-UT president Theophilus Painter, on the advice of the state attorney general, rejected Sweatt’s request on the grounds that the Texas constitution prohibited integrated education.
With the help of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Sweatt filed a lawsuit against the university seeking admission. At the time, no law school in Texas admitted African Americans. A Texas court continued the case, giving the state time to establish a separate law school for blacks in Houston.
That school became Texas Southern University; his law school was later named after Thurgood Marshall, one of the attorneys who brought Sweatt’s case to the United States Supreme Court and who served as the court’s first African-American justice.
Supreme Court ruling
Texas courts upheld state policy based on the “separate but equal” doctrine established by the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson. In Sweatt v. Painter, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the separate school established for blacks lacked “substantive equality” for a number of reasons, including the fact that the school had fewer faculty members and a smaller law library and other facilities.
Additionally, Marshall argued that a separate black law school was not enough because a key part of a lawyer’s education should be debating ideas with people of diverse backgrounds. The court’s decision upheld Sweatt’s right to equal educational opportunity, and in the fall of 1950, he entered UT law school.
Legacy
The Sweatt ruling helped pave the way for desegregation at all levels of public education and served as a precedent for the Brown v. Board of Education that was dictated by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954.
UT Law School now has a professorship and scholarship named after Sweatt, and the school hosts an annual symposium on the effect of the Sweatt case on diversity and education. The UT Tarlton Law Library houses many archival sources, oral history interviews, and published work on the case, as well as a full set of appeals briefs and the original district court trial transcript.
In 2005, the Travis County Courthouse, where the original case was tried, in downtown Austin was renamed after Sweatt; A bronze plaque with his story stands outside the entrance.
