Heman Sweatt
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Template:TOCnestleft Heman Marion Sweatt (1912-1982), was a black postal worker from Houston who was denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law in 1946.
The NAACP legal team, led by Thurgood Marshall, carried the legal battle to the United States Supreme Court, which struck down the system of "separate but equal" graduate school education and paved the way for the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Communist Party membership
Heman Sweatt's cause was championed by several Texan activists including Communist Party USA member John Stanford.
In a 2004 profile of Stanford, the Communist Party paper Peoples Weekly World, revealed that Sweatt was a secret Party member at the time.
- Members of the Communist Party customarily don’t reveal the names of members or former members who are still alive. But Sweatt’s death has freed Stanford to declare that at the time of the suit, Sweatt, too, was a Communist Party member. Unlike Sweatt, Stanford was never closeted, even if it was because he had little choice, thanks to the Texas Legislature and the Houston police.