Five-minute digest

Sweatt v. Painter

Supreme Court of the United States

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.

Top 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.
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.
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.
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.