Test Case

One cold February morning in 1946, a slender, bespectacled young man walked into the University of Texas registrar's office and applied for admission to the law school. Heman Marion Sweatt, 33, a Houston mailman who had graduated from a small Southern college, was qualified in every respect but one: he was a Negro. He was the first who ever tried to enter the University. He was turned down flat.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People seized upon the Houston mailman for a test case. Its argument: the U.S. Supreme Court decided in the Gaines Case (1938) that Negroes must be admitted to white schools, unless "equal facilities" are provided for them by the state. Texas' only state-supported Negro college, Prairie View, was nothing but an overgrown trade school, offered no law course at all. The Texas Attorney General argued right back: race segregation was a part of the state constitution and could not be changed.

For a year, the battle raged in & out of courtrooms, in the press, at public meetings. When Sweatt filed a petition for a court order to force the University to admit him, a cautious judge deferred decision for six months, in December turned down the petition. Sweatt appealed the case. This time, he and the N.A.A.C.P. left no doubt as to what they were really after. Fed up with half-measures and delays, they were demanding, not "equal facilities," but the abolition of segregation. "The requirements of the 14th Amendment," they insisted, "can only [thus] be met."

Sudden Action. The state legislature acted quickly. A bill appropriating two million dollars for a Negro university at Houston and for an "interim" Negro law school at Austin was hastily introduced. One Senator shrilled a warning: "If we don't do something quickly, the United States Supreme Court will rule that your child and my child will have to attend school with Negroes." The bill passed.

Early one morning last week, the Texas University registrar opened the doors of the new interim "law school," stalked in to await students. A steady stream of University officials marched in after him, and a group of curious Texans clustered in the corridor to see what would happen. Only one prospective student showed up, and he did not register.

Neither Heman Sweatt nor the N.A.A.

C.P. was yet satisfied. Said Sweatt: "Assume I go to the interim law school for a year, then I transfer to the new university. How do I know what will be at Houston? The suit," he added, "goes on."

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