-Sweatt v. Painter is a court case addressed to the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the 1950s. The legal battle sided with the doctrine of "separate but equal", which allowed racial segregation since the time of the Plessy v case. Ferguson, dated 1896. The process was a turning point and a reference point for the later and famous Brown v. Board of Education, 1954 .
The case involved a black man, Heman Marion Sweatt, who was denied access to the Law School at the University of Texas, whose president was Theophilius Painter, due to the fact that the Texas Constitution prohibited school integration. At the time, no white universities would have accepted African-American students.
The district court in Travis County, instead of granting the plaintiffs a mandamus, continued with the case for another six months. This temporization allowed the state to create a faculty of law for black students, the Thurgood Marshall School of Law based in Houston rather than Austin.
The decision of the court did not persuade the boys who had opposed the segregation and that was how, after passing by various local courts, the case ended up in the hands of the Supreme Court, presented to it by Robert L. Carter and Thurgood Marshall and NAACP.
The Court subverted the decision taken in Texas, arguing that the segregated schools had now failed to be equal, both because there were too many differences in services and facilities.
-In the case of McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, to the plaintiff, McLaurin, an African-American person, was denied access to Oklahoma University.
After McLaurin sued the University, it accepted him but offered a segregatory treatment, providing him with separate facilities.
Again McLaurin appealed, this time before the Supreme Court. The Court established that the segregation violated the provisions of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. In this way it ordered that McLaurin be given the same treatment as any white student.
-Both rulings were pronounced the same day, and expanded the rights of African Americans, prohibiting segregation in the field of higher education.