Heman Marion Sweatt (December 11, 1912 – October 3, 1982) was an African-American civil rights activist who confronted Jim Crow laws.

He is best known for the Sweatt v. Painter lawsuit, which challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine and was one of the earliest of the events that led to the desegregation of American higher education.

[1] His father James Sweatt had attended Prairie View Normal and Industrial College and became a school teacher and principal in Beaumont before moving to Houston for better economic opportunity.

"At home, our father always stressed the value of an education, he instilled in us an idea of integration at an early age," recalled one of James Sweatt's sons.

White made to a group of Houston blacks for a volunteer to file a lawsuit, also agreed to serve as the NAACP's plaintiff if he was rejected on the basis of race.

He enrolled in a number of challenging graduate courses including bacteriology, immunology, and preventive medicine; by the end of his first academic year he had completed twelve semester hours with a B+ average.

The president, Theophilus Painter, held on to the application while he waited to hear back from the attorney general regarding the segregation laws.

[7] The Court of Civil Appeals would later write that "he possessed every essential qualification for admission, except that of race, upon which ground alone his application was denied.

[7] The case went to court, and the judge's decision was that Texas had to build an equal law school within a six-month time frame.

[7] Later, in June 1950, the Supreme Court decided that students were not offered an equal quality law education in the state of Texas, and as a result, UT would have to admit qualified black applicants.

However, as a result of the tremendous amount of stress and emotional trauma from the long drawn out court cases, Sweatt's mental and physical health had taken a turn for the worse.