Sweatt v. Painter

Marshall, who would himself later become a Supreme Court justice, realized that Sweatt left the Court with an easy way out. They could hand Heman Sweatt a hollow victory by declaring that Texas's all-black law school was not equal, while at the same time declining to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson. Plessy, which had been the law of the land since 1896, held that "separate but equal" treatment of the races was constitutionally permissible. In the 1940s, the NAACP had begun a vigorous campaign to overturn Plessy, and although Sweatt brought the organization nearer to its goal, Marshall had accurately predicted how the Court would rule. Writing for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice Vinson concluded:

[Sweatt] may claim his full constitutional right; legal education equivalent to that offered by the State to students of other races. Such education is not available to him in a separate law school as offered by the State. We cannot, therefore, agree with respondents that the doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson . . . requires affirmance of the judgment [of the state court]. Nor need we reach petitioner'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.

In another case decided the same day, McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education (1950), the Court edged somewhat closer to overturning Plessy. George McLaurin, an African American citizen of Oklahoma, had been admitted into an all-white graduate school, but he was obliged to remain segregated from his fellow students. In ruling that this treatment handicapped McLaurin, the Court in effect held that once blacks are admitted to white schools, there can be no racial discrimination within the institution. It would be four more years before the Supreme Court overturned Plessy in the watershed case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). After the Court decided Brown and the cases that grew out of it, there could be no more officially sanctioned segregation in public education--or in any public institutions.