Would-Be Lawyer's Case Helped Pave Way for Brown v. Board of Education
A little-known case brought by a would-be lawyer in Texas helped pave the way for the famous U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
But it gained some traction yesterday at a a symposium at Texas Southern University’s Thurgood Marshall School of Law, reports the Houston Chronicle, which recounts the story of the earlier U.S.Supreme Court decision.
After being denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law in 1946 because he was black, Heman Sweatt sued to integrate the institution, backed by the NAACP and a civil rights lawyer named Thurgood Marshall.
Seeking to keep the school segregated, the state legislature hustled to fund a separate law school for blacks at Texas State University. But the U.S. Supreme Court held in 1950, four years before its Brown ruling, that simply funding an alternative law school obviously didn’t provide an equivalent legal education to what was offered at the University of Texas.
In addition to the far superior faculty, library and physical facilities at the University of Texas, “[t]he law school, the proving ground for legal learning and practice, cannot be effective in isolation from the individuals and institutions with which the law interacts,” the supreme court noted in its written opinion.
“Few students and no one who has practiced law would choose to study in an academic vacuum, removed from the interplay of ideas and the exchange of views with which the law is concerned,” the court continues. “The law school to which Texas is willing to admit petitioner excludes from its student body members of the racial groups which number 85% of the population of the state and include most of the lawyers, witnesses, jurors, judges and other officials with whom petitioner will inevitably be dealing when he becomes a member of the Texas Bar.
“With such a substantial and significant segment of society excluded, we cannot conclude that the education offered petitioner is substantially equal to that which he would receive if admitted to the University of Texas Law School.”
Although the decision in Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629, was a significant victory for both the plaintiff and Marshall, its aftermath served as a reminder that achieving justice in court is not necessarily a recipe for doing so in daily life, the newspaper notes.
Sweatt went on to enroll in law school at the University of Texas, but was met with hostility including a cross-burning on the law school lawn. He never graduated and spent the rest of his life working for the NAACP and the National Urban League before dying in 1982.
The case also had a bittersweet aspect for Marshall, who of course was destined later to make history himself by becoming the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
In its unsuccessful effort to prevent integration at the University of Texas by establishing a separate law school for blacks, the legislature had converted a segregated Houston college for blacks into Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University) and created an affiliated law school.
Although Marshall fought the creation of the segregated law school, he agreed in 1976 to allow it to carry his name.
