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April 4
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1950
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June 5
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1950
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Heman Marion Sweatt v Theophilus Shickel Painter
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70 S Ct 848 94 L Ed 1114 1950 US LEXIS 1809
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339
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629
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Cert to the Supreme Court of Texas
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The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires that petitioner be admitted to the University of Texas Law School
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1949-1953
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Vinson
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''unanimous''
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'', , was a
U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the "
Separate But Equal " doctrine of
Racial Segregation established by the 1896 case ''
Plessy V. Ferguson ''.
The case involved a
Black man, Heman Marion Sweatt, who was refused admission to the
University Of Texas School Of Law on the grounds that the Texas State Constitution prohibited integrated education. At the time, no law school in Texas would admit blacks. The Texas trial court, instead of granting the plaintiff a writ of
Mandamus , continued the case for six months allowing the state time to create a law school only for blacks.
The trial court decision was affirmed by the Court of Civil Appeals and the Texas Supreme Court denied ''
Writ Of Error '' on further appeal. Sweatt and the
NAACP appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
W.J. Durham and
Thurgood Marshall presented Sweatt's case.
The Supreme Court reversed the lower court decision, saying that the separate school failed to measure up because of quantitative differences in facilities and intangible factors such as its isolation from most of the future lawyers with whom its graduates would interact.
The documentation of the court's decision includes the following differences in facilities between the University of Texas Law School and the separate law school for blacks. The University of Texas Law school had 16 full-time and 3 part-time professors and the separate law school had 5 full-time professors. The University of Texas Law School had 850 students and a
Law Library of 65,000 volumes. The separate school had 23 students and a library of 16,500 volumes.
The court held that, when considering graduate education, intangibles must be considered as part of "substantive equality."
with the dean of
Fordham Law School ,
William Treanor ]]
The 'separate' law school and the college is the modern-day
Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas. The law school is known today as the
Thurgood Marshall School Of Law .
