Texas Southern University Campus Tour

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's story is one of the most powerful in Texas, and this walk through Houston's Third Ward lets you trace it on foot. The state created the university in 1947 as a segregated alternative after Heman Sweatt sued to enter the University of Texas law school. Instead of fading away when the courts struck down that scheme, TSU grew into one of the nation'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.

The artistic heart of the tour is Hannah Hall. Students began painting murals almost as soon as the art department opened in 1950, and under founding chair John Biggers the murals became a deliberate project to celebrate Black heritage and identity. Today the university counts more than a hundred student murals on its walls, and the Tiger Walk, the main path through campus, is the natural place to see the tradition in the open.

The route also honors giants of American law and public life. The Thurgood Marshall School of Law grew from the 1947 law school at the center of Sweatt v. Painter and bears the name of the lawyer who argued that case before becoming the first Black Supreme Court justice. A marker recalls Barbara Jordan, a TSU graduate who became the first Black woman from the South elected to Congress.

It's a moving, art-filled walk that connects Houston's civil rights history with a campus that is still making history.