Yesterday at the Travis County Courthouse, I met a bête noir — Michael Gillette, Executive Director of the Texas Commission for the Humanities — who acted ill at ease in meeting me. Justice Rose Spector knew Gillette and said, "Let me introduce you." When I said my name, Dr. Gillette (history, UT-Austin) said, "I've read your stuff." And I replied, "Yeah, I've read your stuff, too." Gillette started climbing the greasy pole of success as a staffer at the LBJ Presidential Library; he earned his degree while working at the Library. There is an incestuous connection between the Library and the University. Gillette came to my attention when he published an article out of his dissertation on the NAACP in TX (1937-1954). Ironically, neither he nor I published our dissertations. The reason he was sheepish was that he had entitled his article in the Southwest Historical Quarterly (organ of the Texas State Historical Association): "The Rise of the NAACP in Texas." My finding over the same events was the opposite of triumphalist history. The "rise" of the NAACP was short-lived because the Sweatt case produced internecine warfare among TX civil rights advocates and the national NAACP office. Thurgood Marshall and his college roommate — Carter Wesley of Houston — broke a longtime friendship over the proper strategy during the Sweatt case. They never spoke again, to my knowledge. On top of that, Gillette never cited my dissertation (or even mentioned it to dismiss it). "I read your stuff," indeed. A while later, I was invited by Robert V. Haynes of the University of Houston to submit an article to the Houston Review. My article was entitled "The Fall of the NAACP in Texas." I mounted a revisionist attack on Gillette's story with the happy ending. The NAACP in TX never recovered from the internal strife that took place in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In fact, the national office of the NAACP left Texas and moved on to Topeka, KS to mount the final assault on school segregation. Prior to Sweatt, the NAACP had used TX plaintiffs to attack the white primary and succeeded in Smith v. Allwright (1944). In that decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the white primary.
Gillette holds his current position because he became a favorite of Mrs. LBJ (Lady Bird) while he was at the LBJ Library. More power to Dr. Gillette for being the leading authority on the NAACP in TX. His article in the Handbook of Texas on the NAACP doesn't mention my work in the bibliography and my article on the Texas Council of Negro Organizations in the Handbook doesn't mention his work in the bibliography. If this is (fair & balanced) academic pettiness, so be it.
[x Austin Fishwrap]
A civil rights soldier is remembered in bronze
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz
When Hemella Sweatt was a child, she would look at the night sky with her father, Heman Sweatt, and they would pick out the Little Dipper and other constellations and talk about the distance to the sun. In this way and others, he taught her to shoot for the stars.It wasn't until she was in college that she began to fully understand her father's singular achievement: As a young man in 1946, he applied for admission to the University of Texas School of Law but was promptly rejected. The reason: He was black, and state law barred the admission of blacks to UT. Sweat sued and lost — until the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case on appeal. In 1950, a unanimous court ordered his admission.A plaque showing the bespectacled Sweatt in bronze relief was dedicated Monday at the Travis County Courthouse in the same room where Sweatt lost his first legal round, the 126th District Court.
Gone is the balcony to which blacks were relegated.When it was her turn to speak, Hemella Sweatt, 40, said her father rarely discussed the case, and when he did, it was in stern tones, typically ending with these words of advice: The door has been opened. It's up to you to walk through." She went on to become a physician.The Supreme Court's decision in the case is not as widely known as its later one in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the court ruled that separate educational facilities for blacks and whites were "inherently unequal."
But the Sweatt case helped build the foundation for that more sweeping pronouncement.In the Sweatt case, the court found that the legal education offered to black students in Texas was inferior to that afforded white students and that the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause therefore required he be admitted to UT. After Sweatt sued, the state had established a law school for black students in the basement of a building on East 13th Street, but it fell short in library resources, faculty, prestige and other factors, the court said.
Emotional and physical exhaustion, failing grades and marital tensions took their toll, and Sweatt left UT Law School, later earning a master's degree in Atlanta. He worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League for many years. He died in 1982.
Wallace Jefferson, chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court and the first African American justice on that court, said he and others owe a debt of gratitude to Sweatt for serving as a soldier in the civil rights battle. Jefferson is a graduate of UT Law School, which has become a national standout in graduating blacks and Hispanics."Without Sweatt," he said, "there would be no Chief Justice Jefferson."
One of Sweatt's opponents in his lawsuit, Joe Greenhill, also spoke at the dedication. Greenhill was first assistant to State Attorney General Price Daniel and argued the case before the Supreme Court. Greenhill later became the state's chief justice. He was not a segregationist, but he was a fierce advocate for the state's position.On Monday, Greenhill sounded like that rare lawyer pleased to have lost a case before the nation's highest court. He recalled that four years later, he and his wife were vacationing in Washington with their 6-year-old son Bill. They went to the Supreme Court and ran into Thurgood Marshall, who had been Sweatt's lawyer and who had also filed the Brown case. At Marshall's invitation, they sat with him as the court announced its decision in Brown."I was the first to shake hands and congratulate him," Greenhill said. A little later, Marshall put young Bill on his shoulders and ran down the corridors in celebration.
Copyright © 2005 Austin American-Statesman
