Work record

Sweatt v. Painter

Supreme Court of the United States

1950 · Postwar Contemporary · Court Decision · English

Public domainRead full text Download EPUB Five-minute digest

Abstract

Written: Argued 4 April 1950; decided 5 June 1950
Setting: The postwar years, 1946-1950; Austin and Houston, Texas, and the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.
Author: Supreme Court of the United States (opinion by Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson)
Country: United States
Language: English
Genre: Supreme Court opinion (constitutional law)
Form: Unanimous opinion of the Court by Chief Justice Vinson; no separate opinions were filed
Recommended: Grades 9–12

Question Presented. Did Texas meet its duty under the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection guarantee by offering a Black applicant a newly created law school of its own instead of admitting him to the flagship university in Austin?

Arguments. Counsel for the applicant contended that the substitute school trailed the university in professors, books, courses and standing, and that training lawyers apart from most of the bar and bench could never be equal; they also urged the justices to abandon the 1896 Plessy rule. The state maintained that Plessy still governed, that it had moved quickly and honestly to build a comparable school, and that higher education belonged to state discretion.

Holding. Nine justices agreed that the substitute school did not provide substantial equality. The Chief Justice weighed both countable resources and harder-to-measure goods such as faculty reputation, alumni influence and tradition, and found that a law student cut off from 85 percent of the state's people lacked an equal opportunity. Sweatt was entitled to enter the university at once.

Significance. Without overruling Plessy, the ruling made separate graduate and professional programs very hard to defend, and NAACP lawyers built on its reasoning in the school cases decided in 1954.

Text. The library reproduces the Chief Justice's opinion in full, apart from its notes.

Key figures

Heman Marion Sweatt: Houston letter carrier refused a place at the state university's law school
Theophilus S. Painter: University of Texas president and first-named respondent
Fred M. Vinson: Chief Justice who compared the two Texas law schools for a unanimous bench
Thurgood Marshall: NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney for Sweatt
Price Daniel: Texas attorney general defending the separate school

Portrait of Fred M. Vinson. Source · Public domain

Summary

In February 1946 Heman Marion Sweatt, a Houston mail carrier and a graduate of Wiley College, applied to the University of Texas Law School in Austin. The university's president, Theophilus S. Painter, refused him admission because state law reserved the university for white students, and at that time no law school in Texas admitted Black applicants. Sweatt sued in state court for a writ of mandamus ordering his admission. The trial judge agreed that Texas owed him a legal education but gave the state six months to provide one; Texas responded by authorizing a separate law school, first in rented rooms in Austin and later at the new Texas State University for Negroes in Houston. Sweatt declined to enroll, the Texas courts held the new school substantially equivalent, and the Court granted certiorari in 1949. The question was whether a state that offered Black students a separate law school had satisfied the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Sweatt's lawyers, led by Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, argued that the new school was unequal in every measurable respect and that separation itself made equality impossible in professional training; they also asked the Court to reconsider Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Texas, represented by Attorney General Price Daniel, answered that Plessy permitted separate facilities so long as they were substantially equal, that the state had acted promptly and in good faith, and that education was a matter for state policy. On 5 June 1950 the Court ruled unanimously for Sweatt. Chief Justice Vinson compared the two schools in faculty, courses, library, law review and student body and found the university superior. He gave still greater weight to qualities that cannot be counted, such as the reputation of the faculty, the standing of the alumni, tradition and prestige. Because law is a practical profession learned in exchange with others, a school that admitted none of the groups making up most of the state's lawyers, judges and jurors could not offer an equal education. Relying on Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) and Sipuel v. Board of Regents (1948), he held that Sweatt's right was personal and present and ordered his admission. The Court expressly declined to decide whether Plessy should be reexamined. The library text gives Vinson's opinion as printed in the U.S. Reports, with its notes left out. Sweatt enrolled at the law school in September 1950 but left without a degree; he later earned a master's degree at Atlanta University and worked for the National Urban League. The Texas school that grew from the case became the law school of Texas Southern University, later named for Thurgood Marshall. Four years after Sweatt, Brown v. Board of Education (1954) cited it, together with McLaurin, in holding that separate public schools are inherently unequal.

Virtues in this work

Justice: The Court insists that Sweatt is owed, as an individual and without delay, the same legal education Texas offered other applicants.
Prudence: Vinson deliberately decides only what the case requires, leaving the broader question of Plessy for a later day.
Fortitude: Sweatt pressed his claim through four years of hearings and appeals rather than accept the separate school.

Plot or Argument

A narrow question about graduate schools
Vinson pairs the case with McLaurin and limits it to how far equal protection restricts racial distinctions in state professional and graduate education, declining the broader questions the parties had briefed.
From mandamus suit to certiorari
The opinion recounts Sweatt's 1946 application, the six-month continuance the trial court granted Texas, the hastily organized separate school, and the state courts' finding that it was substantially equivalent.
Counting faculty, books and students
Vinson sets the figures side by side: sixteen full-time professors, 850 students and over 65,000 volumes at the university against five professors, 23 students and some 16,500 volumes at the newer separate school.
What cannot be measured
The Court gives decisive weight to reputation, alumni influence, tradition and prestige, and to the isolation of a school cut off from most of the people its graduates would practice among.
Personal and present rights
Citing Gaines, Sipuel and Fisher v. Hurst, Vinson holds that Sweatt is entitled now, as an individual, to an equal legal education, that the separate school does not provide it, and that he must be admitted, leaving Plessy unexamined.

Characters

Heman Marion Sweatt, petitioner
Houston postal worker who applied to the University of Texas Law School in 1946 and refused to enroll in the separate school Texas created.
Theophilus S. Painter, respondent
Zoologist and president of the University of Texas, named first among the officials who denied Sweatt admission.
Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, author of the opinion of the Court
Wrote for a unanimous Court that the separate law school did not offer substantial equality.
Thurgood Marshall, counsel for Sweatt
Chief lawyer of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who argued that separation itself prevented equal professional training.
Price Daniel, Attorney General of Texas
Defended the separate school as a good-faith provision of substantially equal facilities under Plessy.

Lessons

Measuring equality in a law school
Vinson's opinion first compares what can be counted, such as professors, volumes and courses, and then turns to reputation, alumni and tradition. By ruling that those intangible qualities count in judging equality, the Court made it very difficult for a newly founded separate school to match an established one.
- Which measurable differences between the two Texas law schools does Vinson list?
- Why does he call the intangible qualities more important than the countable ones?
- Can an institution's tradition and prestige be shared with a newcomer, or must they be earned over time?
Learning law among the people it serves
The Court reasoned that law is learned in conversation with classmates, practitioners and the public. A school that drew from only a small part of the population would leave its students unprepared for the courtrooms and offices where they would practice, so isolation was itself a form of inequality.
- What does Vinson mean by an academic vacuum?
- Why does it matter that the excluded groups made up 85 percent of Texas's population?
- Is this argument special to law schools, or could it apply to every level of education?
Deciding no more than the case requires
Vinson opens by stating the principle that the Court decides constitutional questions only as far as necessary. Although both sides argued about Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court ordered Sweatt's admission without overruling it, a restraint that left the larger question for Brown four years later.
- Why does the Court say much of the research presented to it is unnecessary to its decision?
- What are the advantages and risks of deciding constitutional cases narrowly?
Rights that are personal and present
Following Gaines and Sipuel, the Court treated the right to equal education as belonging to Sweatt himself and as owed immediately. A promise that a separate school would someday become equal could not satisfy a student applying now.
- What does it mean that Sweatt's right was personal rather than shared by a group?
- Why did the Court reject the argument that excluding white students from the separate school was the same as excluding Sweatt from the university?
- How should a court weigh a state's good faith against an individual's claim to equal treatment now?

Context

After Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) the southern and border states maintained separate public schools and universities under the rule that separate facilities were lawful if equal. Beginning in the 1930s the NAACP, under Charles Hamilton Houston and then Thurgood Marshall, brought suits aimed first at graduate and professional schools, where the inequality of separate provision was easiest to show. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) held that a state could not send Black law students out of state, and Sipuel v. Board of Regents (1948) required Oklahoma to provide legal education promptly.

Composition

Sweatt filed suit in May 1946 in the district court of Travis County. Texas opened a provisional law school in Austin in March 1947 and the Texas State University for Negroes in Houston established its own law school soon afterward. The case was argued in Washington on 4 April 1950, and the United States filed a brief supporting Sweatt. Vinson's opinion was issued with McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents and Henderson v. United States, a railroad dining-car case.

Reception

Southern officials read the decision as requiring admission to existing graduate schools where separate ones could not be made equal, and several state universities began admitting Black graduate students. Legal Defense Fund lawyers concluded that the reasoning about intangible qualities pointed toward a direct challenge to separate public schools, which they brought in the cases decided as Brown v. Board of Education. Historians such as Mark Tushnet and Gary Lavergne have described Sweatt as a turning point in the litigation campaign.

Education Justice Law Race Slavery Power / Politics

Comparisons

plessy-v-ferguson
Texas defended its separate law school under the 1896 rule, and Vinson declined either to apply it or to reexamine it, deciding instead that the two schools were not in fact equal.
brown-v-board-of-education
Warren's 1954 opinion quoted Sweatt's attention to qualities incapable of objective measurement and carried that reasoning from law schools to public elementary and high schools.
everson-v-board-of-education
Decided three years earlier, Everson also turned on how far the Fourteenth Amendment limits a state's choices about schooling, there in transporting parochial pupils rather than in admitting graduate students.
democracy-in-america
Tocqueville described lawyers as a kind of American aristocracy formed by their training, which helps explain why the justices treated access to an elite law school as access to public life.