Round Two

Last week in Texas a Negro lawyer who was once a postman tried to force the state university to admit a Negro postman who would like to be a lawyer. Baltimore-born Thurgood Marshall, counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pleaded the case of Herman Marion Sweatt against the University of Texas (TIME, March 24). The case was now clearly not just another attempt to get "equal facilities" for Negroes, but a major legal assault on educational segregation. Both sides recognized it as the test for similar laws in 17 states.

In the Jim Crow district court last week Texas officials made a show of claiming that they had provided "equal facilities" for Negroes by setting up a "law school" (with a charter but no students) in an Austin basement. But the state concentrated on defending segregation as such. Texas Dean B.F. Pittenger argued: "The attitude of Texans being what it is, the effect of abandoning segregation . . . would set back public education in Texas." Rather than let children mingle with Negroes, he said, white parents would send them to private schools.

"Equality under segregated system is a legal fiction and a judicial myth," replied Attorney Marshall. Dean Charles Thompson of Howard University testified that Texas last year spent $2.01 per capita for white higher education, only 44-c- for Negoes. The University of Chicago's Anthropologist Robert Redfield testified that Negroes and whites do not differ significantly in intellectual ability.

At week's end, Judge Roy Archer denied Sweatt's application. He based his decision on state law: "Our constitution provides for separate schools." No one thought that the last word in the case of Herman Marion Sweatt had yet been heard. Marshall plans a "showdown fight," all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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