Sweatt v. Painter

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Sweatt v. Painter, et al.
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued April 4, 1950 Decided June 5, 1950
Full case name	Heman Marion Sweatt v. Theophilus Shickel Painter
Citations	339 U.S. 629 (more) 70 S. Ct. 848; 94 L. Ed. 1114; 1950 U.S. LEXIS 1809
Case history
Prior	Cert. to the Supreme Court of Texas
Holding
Segregation as applied to the admissions processes for law school in the United States violates Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, because separate facilities in legal education are inherently unequal. Texas Supreme Court reversed.
Court membership
Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson Associate Justices Hugo Black · Stanley F. Reed Felix Frankfurter · William O. Douglas Robert H. Jackson · Harold H. Burton Tom C. Clark · Sherman Minton
Case opinion
Majority	Vinson, joined by unanimous

Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950), was a U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation established by the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. The case was influential in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education four years later.

The case involved a black man, Heman Marion Sweatt, who was refused admission to the School of Law of the University of Texas, whose president was Theophilus Painter, on the grounds that the Texas State Constitution prohibited integrated education.^[1] The Supreme Court ruled in favor of law student Sweatt, reasoning that the state's racially separate law school was in fact unequal. Nonetheless, the Court limited its ruling in finding that it was not [yet] necessary to "reach [Sweatt]'s contention that Plessy v. Ferguson should be reexamined in the light of contemporary knowledge respecting the purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment and the effects of racial segregation."^[2] The decision was delivered on the same day as another case involving similar issues, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, also decided in favor of integrated graduate education.