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Sweatt v. Painter, et al.
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued April 4, 1950 Decided June 5, 1950
Full case name: Heman Marion Sweatt v. Theophilus Shickel Painter Citations: 339 U.S. 629; 70 S. Ct. 848; 94 L. Ed. 1114; 1950 U.S. LEXIS 1809 Prior history: Cert. to the Supreme Court of Texas
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
Case opinions
Majority by: Vinson Joined by: unanimous

Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950), 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 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."

Lead attorney on Sweatt, Judge Robert L. Carter with the dean of Fordham Law School, William Treanor

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.

• Sipuel v. Board of Regents of Univ. of Okla. - 332 U.S. 631 (1948)
• McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents - 339 U.S. 637 (1950)

State of Texas vs. NAACP case records, 1911-1961 1945-1961. Description: photocopied documents. 2 microfilm reels. Summary: Records document the 1956-1957 lawsuit that, in effect, outlawed the NAACP in Texas until the 1960s and also reflects the progress of the civil rights movement from the late 1940s to the 1960s.

Byron and Rannie Cook Papers, 1944-1962, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Summary: Correspondence, newspapers, clippings, broadsides, ephemera, speeches, programs, notes, platforms, annual reports, printed material, magazines and artifacts relate to the Cook's involvement with the National Alliance of Postal Workers (Houston Chapter), the NAACP in Houston, service at the U.S. Post Office at Houston, the Progressive Party, the Henry Wallace presidential campaign, Leonard Sweatt, Heman Sweatt, John Butler and with unions.

The items above and other important material can be found in the University of Texas Library system at this link: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/about/librarymap/cah.html

• "Sweatt v. Painter" on Wikisource.
• Full text of the decision courtesy of Findlaw.com
• Sweatt v. Painter archive
• Info on Case Churchill site