The family of Heman Sweatt, the plaintiff in the landmark case, Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950), emphasized legal and social history. In Sweatt, the Court ordered the admission of the plaintiff, a black man qualified for admission to UT's Law School but denied entry on account of race, on grounds that his exclusion violated the Equal Protection Clause. (Heman Sweat can be seen on the right, on the cover of Gary Lavergne's Before Brown, noted earlier here and here).
The Sweatt family's brief begins:
Amici curiae are the daughter and nephews of Heman Marion Sweatt, who in 1946 was denied admission to The University of Texas Law School for one reason: “the fact that he is a negro.” Texas law forbade UT from considering any of his other qualities: not his intelligence, not his determination, not the grit he gained living under and fighting Jim Crow. ...
Today, UT honors the legacy of Heman Sweatt in many ways, none more important than its commit-ment to creating a genuinely diverse student body. It does so through an admissions policy that considers (to the extent allowed by the Texas Top Ten Percent Law, which depends on secondary-school segregation to increase minority enrollment) all aspects of an applicant’s character – including, in part, how that character has been shaped by race.
The Sweatt Family submits this brief to recount Heman Sweatt’s story in the context of Texas’s long and continuing history of segregation in education and to support UT’s use of a holistic admissions policy as a narrowly tailored means of fulfilling its mission to prepare students to engage and lead Texas’s diverse society.
The Sweatts' brief is available here.
Another brief, which I authored, along with my colleague, Lani Guinier, places the constitutional issues in Fisher in historical context. The brief begins:
Fisher v. Texas is unlike any affirmative action case this Court has ever confronted. For the very first time in history, the U.S. Supreme Court is asked to rule on the constitutionality of an admissions program designed to increase racial diversity at a university located in a southern state—Texas.
The history of Texas and of the University of Texas (“UT”) distinguishes the present case from DeFunis v. Odegaard, 416 U.S. 312 (1974), Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978), and Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). The aforementioned cases all involved universities located in the North or West that lacked a history of state-mandated segregation. Fisher arises out of a profoundly different context.This brief, field on behalf of our client, the Advancement Project, can be found here. (All briefs in the case are available here). For those interested in my views on historians as amicus filers, see my earlier post, "Say Something Historical." My expertise in legal history is not the sole influence on my take on Fisher, however. I also teach and write in the areas of constitutional and education law; my views about Fisher and willingness to represent a client in the case also are informed by my work in those two areas. In fact, at the invitation of the Vanderbilt Law Review, I wrote a Supreme Court preview essay about Fisher. That essay, available here, does not mention history at all; instead, it focuses on constitutional law and education policy.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Fisher in its upcoming term.
