The new Prairie View Law School was a poor excuse for equal education, even a good education. Nevertheless, the trial court found that Jim Crow Law School offered legal education equivalent to that of the University of Texas. Yet state officials realized that they were on unstable ground, that appellate courts would be more skeptical. The legislator has tried to create a more credible alternative. When an appeals court was able to hear the appeal, lawmakers had allocated $100,000 to establish a law school at the new Texas State University for Blacks in Houston. Until a new facility could be built in Houston, the new school would be located in downtown Austin, across the street from the State Capitol. It was to have three rooms, a 10,000-volume library, access to the state law library in the capital building, and three part-time faculty members. The part-time faculty members were professors from the University of Texas School of Law. As a result of these changes, the case was sent back to the trial court to determine whether the new school was the same as for whites. Many Southern and border states have developed legal barriers to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and ban black elections. These included voting taxes, literacy tests, “grandfather clauses” and “white primaries.” In 1910, Oklahoma passed a constitutional amendment stipulating that only residents whose grandfathers had voted in 1865 could vote, disqualifying descendants of slaves. In 1913, the NAACP convinced the U.S. Attorney General to question the constitutionality of the “grandfather clause.” Oklahoma appealed to the Supreme Court.
Moorfield Storey argued the case on behalf of the NAACP. In June 1915, the Supreme Court in Guinn v. The United States ruled that the “grandfather clause” violated the Fifteenth Amendment. In Crystal LaVon Mason-Hobbs v. The State of Texas, the Texas State Conference NAACP, and the League of Women Voters of Texas filed an amicus curiae brief with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to protect voter turnout in Texas. In that case, the accused, a sword on probation who did not know she was not allowed to vote, was sentenced to five years in prison for voting provisionally. She was convicted of violating the Illegal Elections Act. In that case, a Constable representative in Harris County, Texas, suffocated Jamail Amron, a 23-year-old black man, to death, and the family filed a lawsuit to hold the deputy constable accountable. The committee`s reasoning was that police officers and their deputies would be largely immune from municipal liability and could take unconstitutional actions that would be largely beyond judicial review; and plaintiffs in civil rights cases should bear the impossible burden of refuting all other immediate causes of death.
The letter argues that a police officer should be considered the county`s “final decision-maker” for policies promulgated by the constable that caused constitutional violations in a particular case. We believe that the court erred in investigating whether the general function of a deputy officer was to participate in law enforcement and whether the constable had national jurisdiction to determine whether he was the final decision-maker. Without correction, this decision could allow police officers to take unconstitutional action with impunity and make it virtually impossible to challenge such directives in court, including in injunction cases. But the court went beyond that — as did Maryland`s highest court in Murray. It examined the intangible characteristics of legal education. “More important” than measurable factors are “qualities that are not measurable, but that constitute greatness in a law school. These qualities, to name a few, include faculty reputation, administrative experience, alumni position and influence, community status, and prestige. “In terms of these factors, the University of Texas was the graduate school, and the issue,” the court said, “wasn`t even close. In addition, Texas Black State University excluded the overwhelming majority, 85 percent of the state`s population, from whom most lawyers, judges and other officials, witnesses and jurors would recruit from the state. Such an exclusion meant that education at the separate law school for blacks did not match that received by whites.
No matter how much money the state would spend on black law school, how many faculty members the state would add, what the size of the student body or the size of library holdings would be, the qualitative differences in intangible assets associated with the two schools meant it was unconstitutional to deny Heman Sweatt admission to the University of Texas. In fact, in Sweatt, the Supreme Court went far beyond Murray in saying that segregation in law schools is inherently unequal. It should be noted again that the Court examined two different law schools and that the judges were familiar with legal education. From their own experience, they could see that the two schools were clearly not the same. These facts likely contributed to influencing the court`s decision. After the “Call” was extinguished, the National Conference of Negroes was held on May 31 and June 1, 1909 at Charity Organization Hall in New York City. An interracial assembly of 300 men and women attended meetings purporting to scientifically refute popular belief in black inferiority. Among the speakers were sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, anthropologist Livingston Farrand, economist Edwin Seligman and neurologist Burt G. Wilder. The National Committee of Blacks or Committee of the Forty was formed to plan a permanent organization.
At its second annual meeting, on May 12, 1910, the committee adopted the organization`s official name, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Du Bois recommended “Colored” instead of “Negro” to signal the association`s interest in promoting the rights of all dark-skinned people. The goals of the NAACP were the elimination of segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and racial violence, particularly lynching. Charles Hamilton Houston was the chief strategist of the NAACP`s legal campaign, which culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. Born in Washington, D.C., he earned a JDS degree from Harvard in 1923, where he studied with Felix Frankfurter. As associate dean of Howard Law School, Houston trained a generation of civil rights lawyers. In 1934, the Joint Committee of the NAACP and the American Fund for Public Service commissioned Houston to conduct a legal campaign against discrimination in interstate education and transportation. Houston wrote the memorandum in which he advocated using the $10,000 to combat “the more acute problem of discrimination in education.” Houston developed a systemic attack on the doctrine of “separate but equal” using test cases focused on graduate and vocational schools. Jim Crow laws were a set of state and local laws that legalized racial segregation.
Named after a black minstrel show character, the laws, which existed for about 100 years from the post-Civil War period until 1968, aimed to marginalize African Americans through the United States. read more 1916, a year after the death of Booker T.