1946, Heman Sweatt, an Intelligent Essay

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Ferguson required that the decision of the lower court be affirmed. The Court agreed with Mr. Sweatt. While the University of Texas School of Law "may properly be considered one of the nation's ranking law schools," Justice Vinson wrote for the Court, such could not be said for either version of the law school for African-American students (Id. At 633). "In terms of number of the faculty, variety of courses and opportunity for specialization, size of the student body, scope of the library, availability of law review and similar activities, the University of Texas Law School is superior, " noted the Court (Id. At 633-634). Moreover, Justice Vinson continued, in no way could the new institution compare with the University of Texas School of law in terms of more intangible measures, either (Id. At 634).

Although the decision in Sweatt was a vitally important step in the creation of justice in the United States, it is imperative to take note of what it did not do: By finding that the competing law schools at issue in the case were not equal on their face, the Court was able to avoid until another day the bigger question whether separate, in and of itself, also meant unequal. Thus, Plessy v. Ferguson, and its noxious separate but equal doctrine, was able to survive a while longer. However, with his landmark victory in Sweatt in hand, Thurgood Marshall was able to set his sights squarely on his ultimate goal, the destruction of Plessy. He would soon attain this goal with his transcendent victory in the collected cases that, together formed Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) in Brown, of course, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court overruled the 1896 decision and found that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," (Id. At 495), and, in so doing sent a death knell to segregation in the schools of the United States.

Rather unsurprisingly, the Brown decision was met with a maelstrom of criticism, and generated widespread controversy, particularly in the South. In Virginia, for example, Senator Harry Byrd, issued the so called "Southern Manifesto, " in which he called for "massive resistance" to integration of the schools (102 Cong. Rec. 4515-16, 1956) This document, which was the brainstorm of South Carolina Senator, Strom Thurmond, was subsequently signed by 19 Senators and 82 Representatives from across the South (Id.

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). Interestingly, in an expression used frequently today among members of the republican party, the signatories hoped, among other things, to 'reaffirm [their] reliance on the Constitution as the fundamental law of the land." (Id.)

The upheaval wrought by the Brown decision, however, was not confined to the political arena. Many members at the vanguard of Southern business banded together with citizen leaders across the South to form chapters of a new organization named the White Citizen Councils (Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. (n.d.) Timeline. Retrieved May8, 2010 from http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis54.htm#1954wccf). Among other tactics, this white supremacist group, in yet another move reminiscent of the scare tactics used by some in response to the recent health care legislation, attempted to conjure up fear by painting particularly specious effects of integration (Id.).

It was amid this turmoil that the U.S. Supreme Court then issued its decision in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, 377 U.S. 218 (1964), or, as the case is colloquially known, Brown II. Faced with the problems and impediments to integration created by Senator Byrd's "massive resistance" campaign in Virginia, the Court made it the responsibility of the U.S. District Courts to implement school desegregation and ordered that they do so "with all deliberate speed." (Id. At 234).

Few today can argue the correctness of the Court's decision in Brown v. Board, or the case that came before it, and upon which it so heavily relied, Sweatt v. Painter. Few cases exist, moreover, that were of greater importance, and so directly affected the lives of so many.

Ultimately, the State did open the Texas State University for Negroes in Houston with "a faculty of five full-time professors; a student body of 23; a library of some 16,500 volumes serviced by a full-time staff; a….....

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