Heman Sweatt Campus

The University of Texas at Austin's historic Little Campus was renamed the Heman Sweatt Campus on August 13, 1987, by action of the University of Texas System Board of Regents in honor of Heman Marion Sweatt, a civil rights pioneer. A graduate of Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, Sweatt also attended the University of Michigan and applied for admission to the University of Texas School of Law in 1946. Denied admission because of his race, he brought legal action against the University. In Sweatt vs. Painter, the United States Supreme Court ruled that separate law school facilities could not provide legal education equal in quality to that available at the University of Texas School of Law, one of the nation's ranking law schools. That ruling established an important precedent for the desegregation of graduate and professional schools. Challenging the separate but equal doctrine, the Court affirmed Sweatt's right to equal education opportunity, and in 1950 he entered the University of Texas School of Law. Subsequently he earned the M.A. degree in Social Work from Atlanta University and served as an official of the NAACP and the Urban League in Atlanta.

Austin, Texas · United States