Out of 268 first-year students enrolled at the law school of the University of California at Berkeley, only on is African American. Out of 468 at the University of Texas School of Law, only four are. Embedded in these cold facts is a personal story of how, forty-seven years ago, I witnessed the birth of racial justice in the Supreme court and how now, after forty-five years as a lawyer, judge, and law professor, I sometimes feel as if I am watching justice die.

In 1946, when Heman Marion Sweatt, an African American, was denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law, the state set up a makeshift, unaccredited "law school for Negroes." In 1950, toward the end of my first year at Yale Law School, I watched Thurgood Marshall argue Heman Sweatt's case before the Supreme Court. With controlled outrage, Marshall eloquently asserted the constitutional promise of equality for sweatt, for all African Americans and, it seemed, for me personally.

In a unanimous opinion, the Supreme Court held that Sweatt had to be admitted to the Whites-only school, but as a federal judge later noted, he eventually dropped out "after being subjected to racial slurs from students and professors, cross burning, and tire slashings." Indeed, there were some years between 1950 and 1971 when the school's entering classes did not have a single african American Throughout the 1960s, Latino students were officially excluded from university organizations. African Americans were forbidded to live in or even visit White residence halls. As recently as 1080, the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare concluded that Texas's higher education system remained segregated, in violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Gradually this situation began to improve. From the 1970s to 1992, the law school adopted various affirmative action programs for minority students who could compete successfully. Ultimately, about 10 percent of each entering class tended to be Mexican American and 5 percent African American. And from the 1970s on, the school produced nearly 2,000 minority lawyers. Many of these alumni assumed leadership positions, among them Ron Kirk, the mayor of Dallas, and Federico Pena, the U.S. secretary of energy.