Heman Marion Sweatt was a Houston postal worker. Born in 1912, he worked for the post office, where as local secretary of the National Alliance of Postal Employees he challenged the practice of keeping Black employees out of supervisory jobs. By the mid-1940s he wanted to study law. William J. Durham advised him to apply to the University of Texas, since the state had no law school for Black students, and when Lulu White of the NAACP asked for a volunteer plaintiff, Sweatt agreed to serve if he was turned down. On February 26, 1946, an NAACP delegation took him to the registrar's office in Austin, where university president Theophilus S. Painter kept his application until the attorney general ruled that segregation stood.
A house north of the Capitol
Sweatt sued on May 16, 1946. The judge refused to order his admission and gave the state six months to offer an equal course in law. When none existed, he dismissed the petition anyway. In February 1947 a temporary law school opened in a house on Thirteenth Street, north of the Capitol, where several University of Texas professors taught. Sweatt did not enroll. By then Thurgood Marshall and the other NAACP lawyers meant to attack segregation itself, and at trial that May Sweatt testified that he did not believe equality was possible under separation.
The cost was personal. The Handbook of Texas records that his life was threatened at the post office, vandals defaced his house, and he and his wife received threatening notes and calls. He developed ulcers and had at least one heart attack. Meanwhile the legislature created the Texas State University for Negroes in Houston, which the Handbook says many in Houston's Black community saw as a mixed blessing, since they wanted segregation ended.
What the Court weighed
The Supreme Court ruled in June 1950, and its opinion began with a count. The University of Texas law school had sixteen full-time professors, 850 students and over 65,000 volumes. The Houston school had five professors, 23 students and about 16,500 volumes. The justices then turned to qualities they called incapable of objective measurement, among them the faculty's reputation and "traditions and prestige." A school closed to groups making up 85 percent of the state's people, they added, would cut a lawyer off from the judges, jurors and witnesses he would one day face. Sweatt had to be admitted.
After the ruling
He registered on September 19, 1950, surrounded by photographers. Ill and worn out, he fell behind; his wife returned to Houston and divorced him, and he left law school in 1952. He earned a master's degree in social work at Atlanta University in 1954 and later worked for the NAACP and the Urban League. He died in 1982. The Handbook says the university read the ruling narrowly, admitting Black students only to programs not offered at Prairie View or Texas Southern.
In 1951 students from the Houston school came to Austin to ask the legislature to drop "for Negroes" from its name, and it became Texas Southern University that June. The Texas State Capitol they petitioned is open to visitors, and the George Washington Carver Museum grew from the branch library that served Austin's Black community.