TEXAS SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY

public, coeducational institution of higher learning in Houston, Texas, U.S. It grants undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees within colleges of Arts and Science, Education, and Pharmacy and Health Sciences as well as schools of Business and of Technology and the Thurgood Marshall School of Law. The Robert J. Terry Library houses the Heartman Collection of African-American history as well as the archives of alumna Barbara C. Jordan, U.S. congresswoman in 197278. Research and service are conducted at the Urban Resources Center, the Research Center for Minority Institutions, and the Mickey Leland Center on World Hunger and Peace. In 1973 the university redefined its mission to include an emphasis on urban issues. Texas Southern has an enrollment of approximately 11,000 students. The state legislature established the institution in 1947 as Texas State University for Negroes, replacing Houston College for Negroes, which had been founded in 1926. In 1951 the name of the institution was changed to Texas Southern University. When Heman M. Sweatt, a black postal worker from Houston, filed suit in 1946 after being denied admission into the University of Texas School of Law, the Texas State Board of Regents responded by creating a separate but equal law school for blacks at Texas State University in 1947. The law school opened in Austin and moved to Houston after one year; in 1976 it was named for Thurgood Marshall, who, as a lawyer, successfully argued Sweatt's case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1950.