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Before
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Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall and The Long Road to Justice
On February 26, 1946, a black man from Houston applied for admission to The University of Texas School of Law. By this seemingly simple act, Heman Sweatt began a journey that would begin a new era in American education—indeed in American society.
Heman Marion Sweatt (1912-1982)
In 1946, the Houston Informer, one of the largest and most influential black newspapers in the country, wrote, “As a symbol, Heman Marion Sweatt marks the emergence of the Negro in Texas as an adult and citizen."
During the drama, Grover Sellers, the Texas Attorney General, reassured white Texans that, “Heman Sweatt will never darken the halls of The University of Texas.”
By the time his lawsuit came before the U.S. Supreme Court, Sweatt found himself a player in a master plan the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had for ending racial segregation in the United States. One of the authors of that strategy, and its chief soldier, was Thurgood Marshall, who would one day become the first black Associate Justice of the Supreme Court. The end of enforced racial segregation was not an event but a process—decades in the making. A crucial chapter in that story begins with an overlooked drama—the tale of Heman Sweatt.
From 1947 through 1949 the Sweatt case worked its way through Texas courts, and not surprisingly, each court relied on the accepted law at the time, the separate-but-equal doctrine. The NAACP understood that to end segregation ultimately the United States Supreme Court would have to reverse or at least emasculate the separate-but-equal doctrine. This happened when it ruled on Sweatt in a unanimous decision on June 5, 1950.
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Reading before the Heman Marion Sweatt Symposium for Civil Rights April 22, 2010 The University of Texas at Austin
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