Integrating the 40 Acres: The Fifty-Year Struggle for Racial Equality at the University of Texas

1. African Americans at the School of Law

A negro, Heman Sweatt, of Houston, Texas, has applied for admission as a student in the law school of the University of Texas, claiming that the University is the only state institution of higher learning in this State furnishing facilities and instruction for the proper training in the profession of law. The applicant, who is a citizen of Texas, is scholastically qualified for admission. . . . It is also noted that it has not been the policy of the University to admit negroes as students and this is probably the first instance in which a negro has presented himself for registration as a student. —Texas Attorney General Grover Sellers to UT President Theophilus Painter, February 28, 1946 1African Americans at the School of Law When the University of Texas School of Law opened in 1881, there was little need for a discussion about whether African Americans would be allowed to attend the school: southerners’ insistence on strict racial segregation made it a moot point. The University of Texas would remain a school for white Texans and white professors such as W. S. Simkins, who had served as a first sergeant in the Confederate Army and gone on to become a judge, founder of the Peregrinus (the School of Law yearbook), a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and professor of law at the University of Texas from 1899 until his death in 1929. ColonelSimkins(ashewasknownaroundthelawschool)wasquitepopularwith law students. Each year on the first day of class, he addressed the first-year law students on the ideals of the profession, telling them “of the great importance of aspiration and inspiration.” After his wife died, Simkins became known around theuniversityas“quitealady’sman,”paying“formalcallsseveraltimesamonth” tothesororities,“fornootherapparentreasonthantogettokisstheyoungladies goodbye when he [left].”1 Although no evidence indicates that Colonel Simkins sought the continued African Americans at the School of Law 15 exclusion of African American students from the law school, in either 1914 or 1916 he delivered a speech, “Why the Ku Klux Klan,” to students at a campus Dixie Day celebration. In his speech, later published in the 1916 Commencement edition of the Alcalde (the University of Texas alumni magazine), Simkins explained why he had helped found a Florida branch of the KKK during Reconstruction :theKlanandothersecretorganizations“sprangoutofagreatnecessity for readjusting social conditions . . . at a time when Southern men were face to face with negro domination thrust upon them by federal law harshly executed by hated emissaries from other states.” Not wanting to sit idly by while the Florida legislature passed bills that insisted on equal rights—and therefore social equality, these whites reasoned—Simkins and his cohorts did the only thing they could: they formed a chapter of the Klan.2 That Simkins delivered this speech on the grounds of the University of Texas and that the speech was reprinted in the alumni magazine clearly suggest that the time—as well as the University of Texas—belonged to people like Simkins. Thus, it is no surprise that it took a lawsuit to force the admittance of African Americans to his law school. On February 26, 1946, Heman Marion Sweatt, an African American postal worker with, as he said, “a yen to become a lawyer,” applied for admission to the University of Texas Law School. Because the state constitution required segregated educational facilities for its black and white students, University of Texas President Theophilus Painter explained to Sweatt that the state would establish a “separate but equal” law school for African Americans. The team of lawyers from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) who represented Sweatt filed a suit to force the University of Texas to admit him. When the Supreme Court decided in 1950 that Sweatt had a “personal and present” right to a “legal education equivalent to that offered by the State to students of other races,” desegregation had come to the University of Texas.3 This chapter will discuss Sweatt’s lawsuit, explore the experiences of the first African Americans at the University of Texas’s law and graduate schools, and examine the ways in which the Board of Regents worked with university administrators to keep African Americans from fully participating in campus life. The Stage Is Set The first attempt to integrate the University of Texas began not in 1946 with Heman Sweatt but in 1885, when an African American student applied for admission. The school denied him admission based solely on his skin color. 16...