Herman Marion Sweatt Legislation

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The Legislation Itself After Herman Marion Sweatt had gone through the state courts unsuccessfully, he and the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall took their case to the Supreme Court. Herman Marion Sweatt was denied admission to the state supported University of Texas Law School solely because he was black and state law forbade the admission of blacks to that particular law school. He was offered, but he refused, to be admitted to a separate law school, newly established by the state, just for blacks. The “black school” had just 5 professors and 23 students while the actual University of Texas Law School had 16 professors and 850 students. The defendant claimed that the legal education that was offered to the petitioner (Herman Marion Sweatt) was not substantially equal to that which he would receive if admitted to the University of Texas Law School, and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment required that he be allowed admittance to the state law school. And then it was reversed when a Texas trial court found a newly established state school for blacks. This rose the question: to what extent does the Equal Rights Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment limit the power of a state to distinguish between students of different races in professional and graduate education in a state university? In this case, Herman Marion Sweatt brought suit against the appropriate school officials to compel his admission. At the time, there were no law schools in Texas which admitted blacks. The court said that the law school to which Texas willing to admit Sweatt excludes from it’s student body members of racial groups which number 85% of the population of the state and include most of the lawyers, witnesses, jurors, judges, and other officials with whom the petitioner will inevitably be dealing with when he becomes a member of the Texas Bar Association. With a

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