Sweatt v. Painter

In 1945, Heman Marion Sweatt (plaintiff) applied for admission to the University of Texas School of Law (the university), a public university operated by the state of Texas. State law restricted attendance at the university to only White students. Sweatt’s application was rejected because he was Black. Sweatt sued the university’s president, Theophilus Painter (defendant), in state court, alleging that the state’s denial violated Sweatt’s rights under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The trial court ruled that under current United States Supreme Court precedent, the state could provide separate-but-equal schools for Black students, but because the state did not offer any law schools for Black students, it was committing a potential equal-protection violation. The state agreed to create a separate law school for Black students, and the trial court found that this was enough to satisfy equal protection. The state created a new, segregated law school that used three rooms in the basement of a public building, used the capitol building’s public law library as its library, borrowed four faculty members from the university’s law school on a part-time basis, and was not accredited. The university’s law school had: 16 full-time and three part-time professors, some of whom were nationally recognized authorities in their fields; a law review; moot-court facilities; scholarship funds; and a library containing over 65,000 volumes. Sweatt appealed, arguing that the new school was not equal to the university’s law school. The appellate court ordered the trial court to evaluate whether the two law schools were equal. The trial court ruled that the new school offered Sweatt educational opportunities substantially equivalent to those offered to White students and, therefore, that the state had not violated the Equal Protection Clause. The state appellate and supreme courts affirmed the ruling. The United States Supreme Court granted certiorari. By that point, the new school had five full-time professors, had its own library with 16,500 volumes, and was in the process of receiving accreditation. Among other arguments, Sweatt asked the Supreme Court to overturn the rule in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), that official racial segregation did not violate the Equal Protection Clause if the government provided separate-but-equal facilities for Blacks and Whites.