Sweatt v. Painter: Gallery South

Sweatt v. Painter : Gallery

Explore the Gallery walls

Sweatt v. Painter (East Wall)

Civil Rights (South Wall)

Legal History (West Wall)

Integration at UT (North Wall)

Civil Rights (South Wall)

A complex image depicting the wall hanging on the South Wall of the Sweatt V Painter Gallery, the content of which is replicated in full below.

Aaron Douglas, Aspiration, 1936, oil on canvas (Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco)

One of four murals painted by Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas for the 1936 Texas Centennial, this piece depicts Black Americans pursuing an education. Each figure holds tools of higher learning; all are illuminated by a lodestar – the Lone Star of Texas – and reach toward the shining ‘City upon a Hill,’ representing hope for the future.

Artistic graphic representing three African American adults standing on the shoulders of enslaved people and gazing up aspirationally at a distant city on a hill

W.E.B. DuBois, who authored the exhibition program, traveled around Texas meeting with Black educators and others leading the struggle for Black higher education.

Abstract image of two African peoples' faces looking at a small log cabin superimposed over an imposing factory.

View Exhibition Program

W.E.B. DuBois, “What the Negro has done for the United States and Texas” (Washington: U.S. Government Print Office, 1936). Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas, Austin, TX.

A Vision for Civil Rights and Education

Forty African Americans in business attire pose on the steps of building festooned with a banner that reads "Welcome Marshall, Sweatt Durham, Burnett, Jones

NAACP Civil Rights Leaders, Courtesy of Michael Gillette.

Black Texan NAACP leaders worked together to end segregation in education.

Texan Civil Rights Leader Antonio Maceo Smith pushed for the Hall of Negro Life to be included in the 1936 Texas Centennial in Dallas. Smith’s effort to recognize and exhibit the achievements of Black Texans was a powerful statement against the prevailing legal and social injustice of Jim Crow racial segregation. Black Texan Civil Rights leaders and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) fought for the right to vote, quality education, fair housing, and access to public facilities to be afforded to Black Americans. This was also the movement that recruited Heman Marion Sweatt a decade later as an NAACP test case, in the hopes that what started at The University of Texas would change the entire nation.

An elderly woman in church clothes wearing a corsage writes a note on a card

Juanita Jewel Craft. Photo by LeAnn GIllette, 1974. Courtesy of LeAnn and Michael Gillette.

NAACP organizer Lulu Belle White worked closely with Juanita Craft, traveling the state and meeting with youth, fundraising, and organizing.

A man in business attire stands behind a desk with his hands folded in front of him

Photograph by R.C. Hickman, Maceo Smith at office, December 12,1952, photograph, R.C. Hickman Photographic Archive, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas, Austin, TX.

Antonio Maceo Smith and other Black Texan Civil Rights leaders and national leaders worked tirelessly to end racial segregation to realize political changes for the next generations of Black Texans and Americans. would change the entire nation.

An elderly man pins a corsage on the shoulder of an elderly woman in a banquet hall

Photograph. June 26,1956, Everet/Shutterstock (10293318a).

Thurgood Marshall pins a corsage on Houston NAACP organizer Lulu Belle White.

Biennial Appropriations for Texas Senior Colleges and Universities; According to Race, 1912 – 1942

Sociologist Henry Allen Bullock became the first Black tenured and Full UT professor in 1969. The graph is from his research documenting racial educational inequality.

Studio portrait of a middle-aged African American man with a thin mustache wearing glasses, a suit jacket, dress shirt and tie.

The Texas Standard, Volume 30, Number 3, September-October 1956, periodical, September1956, Austin, Texas, pg. 18. Available from: The Portal to Texas History: accessed October 15, 2025, University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Prairie View A&M University.

Dr. Henry Allen Bullock won the 1968 Bancroft Book Prize for his book, A History of Negro Education in the South. He taught Black History at The University of Texas.