Texas Southern University is a public historically black university in Houston, Texas. The university is one of the largest and most comprehensive historically black college or universities in the United States with nearly 8,000 students enrolled and over 100 academic programs. The university is a member school of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and it is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity".

Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950), was a U.S. Supreme Court case that successfully challenged the "separate but equal" doctrine of racial segregation established by the 1896 case Plessy v. Ferguson. The case was influential in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education four years later.