Sweatt v. Painter
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| Sweatt v. Painter, et al. | |||||||||||||
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| Argued April 4, 1950 Decided June 5, 1950 |
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| Holding | |||||||||||||
| The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires that petitioner be admitted to the University of Texas Law School. | |||||||||||||
| Court membership | |||||||||||||
| Chief Justice: Fred M. Vinson Associate Justices: Hugo Black, Stanley Forman Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Robert H. Jackson, Harold Hitz Burton, Tom C. Clark, Sherman Minton |
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| Case opinions | |||||||||||||
| Majority by: Vinson Joined by: unanimous |
Sweatt v. Painter, , 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 Bahá'í[1] 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."
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[edit] Trivia
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.
[edit] See also
- McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950)
