Sweatt v. Painter

Impact

One specific impact of the case was the establishment of what is today Texas Southern University in Houston, with an enrollment of more than nine thousand undergraduates and more than two thousand graduate students. The university was established on March 3, 1947, in response to Sweatt’s lawsuit. At the time, the Houston College for Negroes was part of the Houston public school district. The state assumed control of the college, which then formed the core of what was originally called Texas State University for Negroes. The law school is now called the Thurgood Marshall School of Law.

The chief goal of the NAACP in the 1930s and 1940s was to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson. Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP had hoped that Sweatt v. Painter would have given the Supreme Court that opportunity. They were disappointed. The Court, under the leadership of Chief Justice Vinson, was essentially conservative, and Vinson himself was reluctant to overturn earlier Supreme Court decisions. He said as much in his decision in this case when he wrote: “Because of this traditional reluctance to extend constitutional interpretations to situations or facts which are not before the Court, much of the excellent research and detailed argument presented in these cases is unnecessary to their disposition.” Near the end of his decision he stated explicitly that Plessy would not be reexamined. Put simply, the Court declined specifically to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson.

Matters did not end there, however. Civil rights advocates in 1950 recognized that Sweatt v. Painter, along with McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents and earlier cases with a bearing on equal protection in the realm of higher education, had undermined the separate-but-equal doctrine and that it was only a matter of time before the doctrine would collapse. That time arrived four years later with the watershed case Brown v. Board of Education, which Marshall argued before the Court. In a unanimous decision, the Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, held that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and that racial segregation in public schools—then mandated by law in the District of Columbia and seventeen states in the South and Midwest—violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. (It should be noted that sixteen states in the Northeast, Midwest, and West specifically outlawed racial segregation in schools, and another eleven states had no laws on the matter.) This decision finally drove a stake through the heart of the separate-but-equal doctrine.

Sweatt enrolled at the University of Texas Law School in 1950. The case had taken a toll on his physical and emotional health, however, and he withdrew from the school in 1952. He then received a scholarship from the School of Social Work at Atlanta University and completed a master’s degree there in 1954. In the ensuing years he worked for the NAACP in Cleveland, Ohio; returned to Atlanta as the assistant director of the city’s chapter of the Urban League; and taught at Atlanta University. In 1987 the University of Texas Law School inaugurated the annual Heman Sweatt Symposium in Civil Rights and offers an annual scholarship in his name.