Sweatt v. Painter

Context

The backdrop for Sweatt v. Painter was the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson, on which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1896. After the Civil War, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution outlawed slavery in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted on July 9, 1868, in large part to secure the civil liberties of newly freed slaves. The key section of the Fourteenth Amendment is Section 1, which states:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Thus, the Fourteenth Amendment extends “equal protection of the laws” to all citizens.

In 1883 the Supreme Court heard a set of cases that had been consolidated into what are called the Civil Rights Cases. The Court’s ruling in the Civil Rights Cases was a setback for African Americans, for it held that the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to the actions of government. Thus, segregation on the part of government was unconstitutional, but segregation on the part of private parties, including businesses, was not. Worse, the Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional. That act had said that

all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.

In the wake of the Civil Rights Cases decision, numerous states and municipalities, particularly (but not exclusively) in the South, passed so-called Jim Crow laws that segregated African Americans and kept them in subservient positions. One well-known law was Act 111, also known as the Separate Car Act, which the state of Louisiana passed in 1890 and required separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroad cars. To challenge the law, the Citizens’ Committee to Test the Separate Car Act enlisted Homer Plessy, who was one-eighth black (and thus black according to Louisiana law), to ride in a railroad car reserved for whites. While he was on the train, Plessy announced that he was black and submitted to arrest for violating the act. The committee had ensured that a detective was in the car to make the arrest.

Plessy’s case wound its way to the Supreme Court, which in an eight-to-one decision held that the separate accommodations called for in the Louisiana law did not violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Writing for the majority, Justice Henry Billings Brown stated:

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

The lone dissenter was Justice John Marshall Harlan, who famously wrote:

But in view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.

Harlan’s view would ultimately gain acceptance, but for the next half century the Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson upheld the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Determined to attack it was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its Legal Defense and Education Fund. Under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston and, later, Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP made the decision to launch an assault on Jim Crow in the courts by focusing on education.

One of the first cracks in the separate-but-equal doctrine appeared in the mid-1930s with the Murray v. Maryland case (sometimes referred to as Pearson et al. v. Murray). It was argued by Marshall, who himself had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because he was black. Marshall’s argument before the Baltimore City Circuit Court was that because the “white” and “black” law schools in Maryland were unequal, the only remedy was to allow the plaintiff, Donald Gaines Murray, to enroll in the University of Maryland Law School. The Maryland Court of Appeals agreed, ruling in January 1936 that “the state has undertaken the function of education in the law, but has omitted students of one race from the only adequate provision made for it, and omitted them solely because of their color,” and Murray was admitted.

The crack widened in 1938 with the Supreme Court’s decision in Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada. ( Ex rel. is an abbreviation of ex relatione, a Latin expression used in the law to mean “on behalf of.”) The Court ruled that states with a school for white students must provide in-state education to blacks, either by allowing blacks and whites to attend the same school or by creating a second school for blacks. The problem with this ruling, of course, was that any such educational institution hurriedly thrown together solely for blacks was unlikely to be equal to all-white institutions in facilities, faculty, and prestige, but at least the Court was beginning to chip away at the denial of higher education to African Americans by all-white institutions.

During World War II, issues involving national security preoccupied the Court. After the war, however, civil rights began to dominate the Court’s docket, and wider fissures opened in the separate-but-equal doctrine. The time for change was ripe. During the war, President Franklin Roosevelt had desegregated the defense industries and federal government hiring. After the war, the public was growing more aware of the atrocities that had been committed by Nazi Germany, including the wholesale denial of civil rights to Jews and other groups. On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981, desegregating the military, and that year the United Nations passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

In this climate, other key Supreme Court cases challenged the separate-but-equal doctrine. In 1948 the Court ruled in Sipuel v. Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma that Oklahoma was required to admit qualified African Americans to the previously all-white University of Oklahoma Law School. This was only a partial victory, for when Ada Lois Sipuel was finally admitted, she was compelled to sit in a raised chair apart from other students behind a sign that read “colored.” She was also required to use a separate entrance to the law school and eat alone in the cafeteria. Later that year, the Court struck down restrictive racial covenants in housing in Shelley v. Kraemer. (A covenant is an agreement, in this case an agreement by a property owner not to sell his or her property to non-Caucasians.) On the same day that the Court issued its decision in Sweatt v. Painter, it also issued its decision in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, ruling that African Americans admitted to a state university had to be granted full access to the school’s facilities.

Heman Sweatt was born in 1912 in Houston, Texas. He graduated from college in 1934 and worked as a schoolteacher before entering the University of Michigan Medical School. He soon returned to Houston, however, and found work as a postal clerk. In the 1940s he became active in the civil rights movement; he attended meetings of the Houston branch of the NAACP and worked on voter-registration drives. During his efforts to end discrimination among postal workers, he became interested in the law and decided to pursue a law degree. His suit against the University of Texas Law School was a test case. The Houston NAACP had wanted to find an African American who would apply to the law school and, after that person inevitably had been rejected because of race, file suit. Sweatt volunteered to assume that role. As the case wound its way through the court system, Sweatt gave public presentations at NAACP fund-raising events; he was also subjected to threats and harassment. Finally, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the case on April 4, 1950, and issued its decision on June 5.