Before Brown: Heman Marion Sweatt, Thurgood Marshall, and the Long Road to Justice

Gary M. Lavergne

thg 8 2010 · Univ of TX + ORM

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“Like Texas’s founding fathers, Sweatt fearlessly faced evil, and made Texas a better place. His story is our story, and Gary Lavergne tells it well.” –Paul Begala, political contributor, CNN
 
Winner of the Coral Horton Tullis Prize for Best Book of Texas History by the Texas State Historical Association
 
Winner of the Carr P. Collins Award for Best Work of Non-fiction by the Texas Institute of Letters
 
On February 26, 1946, an African American from Houston applied for admission to the University of Texas School of Law. Although he met all of the school’s academic qualifications, Heman Marion Sweatt was denied admission because he was black. He challenged the university’s decision in court, and the resulting case, Sweatt v. Painter, went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Sweatt’s favor.
 
In this engrossing, well-researched book, Gary M. Lavergne tells the fascinating story of Heman Sweatt’s struggle for justice and how it became a milestone for the civil rights movement. He reveals that Sweatt was a central player in a master plan conceived by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for ending racial segregation in the United States. Lavergne masterfully describes how the NAACP used the Sweatt case to practically invalidate the “separate but equal” doctrine that had undergirded segregated education for decades. He also shows how the Sweatt case advanced the career of Thurgood Marshall, whose advocacy of Sweatt taught him valuable lessons that he used to win the Brown v. Board of Education case in 1954 and ultimately led to his becoming the first black Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

Giới thiệu tác giả

GARY M. LAVERGNE is the author of Worse Than Death: The Dallas Nightclub Murders and the Texas Multiple Murder Law, Bad Boy From Rosebud: The Murderous Life of Kenneth Allen McDuff, and A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders. He has appeared on Dateline NBC, the Today Show, the History Channel, Biography, American Justice, the Discovery Channel, and many other network and cable news programs. Currently, he serves as Director of Admissions Research for the University of Texas at Austin.