Texas Southern traces its roots to Houston Colored Junior College, founded in 1927, but the university in its present form was created by the Legislature in 1947 as a segregated alternative after Heman Sweatt sued to enter the University of Texas law school. Instead of disappearing when the courts struck down that arrangement, the school grew into one of the country's largest historically Black universities and a center of Houston's civil rights movement; its students staged the city's first lunch-counter sit-in in 1960. TSU is also known for an art program in which students paint murals across campus walls. This walk follows the Tiger Walk past the first campus building, the mural-filled Hannah Hall, and the schools named for Thurgood Marshall and Barbara Jordan.
Texas Southern University
Texas campuses and the stories they hold.
Texas Southern University is a public college or university in Houston, Harris County. It is one of 22 degree-granting colleges and universities TexasRoam maps in Harris County.
The site sits at 29.7249, -95.3425 near Houston. The nearest cataloged historic site is KUHT-TV, Channel 8 (historical marker), about 0.2 miles away. Others within a short drive include University of Houston, Barbara Charline Jordan, and Greater Zion Missionary Baptist Church.
Texas Southern began in 1927, when the Houston school board opened Houston Colored Junior College for Black students, holding evening classes at Jack Yates High School. It became a four-year school in the mid-1930s under the name Houston College for Negroes, and in 1946 it moved onto a 53-acre tract in the Third Ward donated by oilman Hugh Roy Cullen. The state took it over the following year, when Senate Bill 140, passed March 3, 1947, created Texas State University for Negroes, largely as Texas's attempt to avoid admitting Heman Sweatt to the University of Texas law school, a strategy the U.S. Supreme Court rejected in Sweatt v. Painter in 1950. Raphael O'Hara Lanier became the new university's first president in 1948. Students petitioned to drop "for Negroes" from the name, and the school became Texas Southern University on June 1, 1951. On March 4, 1960, TSU students sat in at the Weingarten's lunch counter on Almeda Road, launching the protests that desegregated many Houston public places; a state historical marker now recalls the event. In 1973 the Legislature designated TSU a special-purpose institution for urban programming, and its library holds the papers of alumna and congresswoman Barbara Jordan and Congressman Mickey Leland. Today TSU remains a cultural anchor of the Third Ward and is home to the Thurgood Marshall School of Law and the Ocean of Soul marching band.
Sources: tshaonline.orgen.wikipedia.org
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