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Editor's Note: Heman Marion Sweatt, a 33-year-old postal worker, was a most unlikely prospect for mounting a challenge to the University of Texas 'policy of racial segregation. Five feet six inches tall, balding, and weighing only 135 pounds, nevertheless Sweatt was equal to the challenge. He withstood a grueling legal battle, racial taunts, and a visit from the Ku Klux Klan when he arrived on campus.
WHEN THE UNIVERSITY of Texas School of Law opened in 1881, there was little need for a discussion about whether African Americans would be allowed to attend the school: southerners' insistence on strict racial segregation made it a moot point. The University of Texas would remain a school for white Texans and white professors such as W.S. Simkins, who had served as a first sergeant in the Confederate Army and gone on to become a judge, founder of the Peregrinus (the School of Law yearbook), a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and professor of law at the University of Texas from 1899 until his death in 1929. Colonel Simkins (as he was known around the law school) was quite popular with law students. Each year on the first day of class, he addressed the first-year law students on the ideals of the profession, telling them "of the great importance of aspiration and inspiration." After his wife died, Simkins became known around the university as "quite a lady's man," paying "formal calls several times a month" to the sororities, "for no other apparent reason than to get to kiss the young ladies goodbye when he [left]."
Although no evidence indicates that Colonel Simkins sought the continued exclusion of African-American students from the law school, in either 1914 or 1916 he delivered a speech, "Why the Ku Klux Klan," to students at a campus Dixie Day celebration. In his speech, later published in the 1916 Commencement edition of the Alcalde (the University of Texas alumni magazine), Simkins explained why he had helped found a Florida branch of the KKK during Reconstruction: the Klan and other secret organizations "sprang out of a great necessity for readjusting social conditions . . . at a time when Southern men were face to face with negro domination thrust upon them by federal law harshly...