Question: What civil rights activist was the first black student to attend law school at the University of Texas?
Answer: Heman Sweatt. Born in Houston in 1912, he graduated from Wiley College before working as a teacher and a postal worker. He became interested in the law while fighting discrimination in the Postal Service, and he applied to UT’s school of law in 1946. After he was denied admission on the basis of his race, he sued on the grounds that there weren’t any comparable black law schools. In 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in his favor, and he was admitted to UT’s law school.
Sweatt’s case laid the groundwork for the court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which held that the separate but equal framework established in Plessy v. Ferguson was unconstitutional.
