25 Years to Go

To avoid sitting next to a Negro in a classroom, Texans are willing to spend $3,500,000. That fact was proved and priced last week, when Texas opened the doors of a new state university on the outskirts of Houston. The Texas State University for Negroes occupies a block-long modernistic limestone building, still under construction. More than 2,000 students are enrolled, but the man who was responsible for the whole thing is not among them.

He is Heman Marion Sweatt, a studious mail-carrier, who was refused admission to the University of Texas law school at Austin because of his race (TIME, March 11, 1946). The new Negro university has a faculty of 85, but it has no law school. Besides, Sweatt planned to continue his court fight for admission to the University of Texas. He was convinced that the new university did not meet the "equal facilities" requirement laid down by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1938. Apparently no one else thought so, either. Said Acting President Allen E. Norton, a Negro: "Institutions are not built in a day. It will take us 25 years. Too many of our own people expect a great Negro university in eight weeks."

Other news on Negroes in education:

P: In Missouri, which Jim-Crows its public schools, the Roman Catholic schools of St. Louis ignored the local color bar, seated Negro & white students side by side.

P: In Seattle, the public-school system hired its first two Negro schoolmarms.

P: San Francisco got its first Negro grade-school principal, in charge of a teaching staff and a student body of Negroes and whites.

P: In Gary, Ind., 1,300 boys & girls gave up their parent-instigated strike to keep Negro children out of their school (TIME, Sept. 15).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.