Answer:
now known as Texas Southern University. Since the University of Texas adopted a narrow interpretation of Sweatt, black undergraduate students were not admitted. Graduate students, however, were allowed to enroll in undergraduate courses when necessary for their program.
At the same time the Supreme Court considered the Sweatt case, it reviewed the policies of the University of Oklahoma in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. On January 28, 1948, a retired black professor, George McLaurin, applied to the University of Oklahoma to pursue a Doctorate in Education. University authorities were required to deny him admission because of his race under Oklahoma statutes making it a misdemeanor to maintain, operate, teach, or attend a school at which both whites and blacks were enrolled or taught. McLaurin filed a complaint to gain admission. On October 6, the Court for the Western District of Oklahoma found those parts of the Oklahoma statute that denied McLaurin admission unconstitutional, and held that the state had a constitutional duty to provide McLaurin with the education he sought as soon as it provided that education for applicants of any other group. With this ruling the University's Board of Regents voted to admit McLaurin, but on a segregated basis.
On October 13, 1948, McLaurin entered the University. He sat at a designated desk on the mezzanine level of Bizzell Library rather than in the regular reading room, at a desk in an anteroom adjoining Classroom 104 in Carnegie Hall, and ate at a separate time from the white students in the cafeteria. McLaurin once again filed suit, claiming that this segregation violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that as a result of McLaurin's segregation he was "handicapped in his pursuit of effective graduate instruction. Such restrictions impair and inhibit his ability to study, to engage in discussions and exchange views with other students, and, in general, to learn his profession."
With Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, the Supreme Court began to overturn the separate but equal doctrine in public education by requiring graduate and professional schools to admit black students.
View Case: Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950)