When Did Segregation End in Texas? 1969 and the Court Rulings

Texas repealed its state segregation statutes in 1969, but the end of legal segregation in Texas was not a single moment. It began with federal court rulings in the late 1940s, was forced into practice by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and continued under federal court supervision in Texas schools for more than fifty years after the repeal. One Texas school district still operates under a federal desegregation order as of early 2026.

The Short Answer: 1969

The Texas Legislature repealed the state’s remaining segregation-era laws in 1969. That included Article 492 of the Penal Code, the statute that had made interracial marriage a crime. By then, most of those laws had already been rendered unenforceable by federal court decisions and federal civil rights legislation, so the 1969 repeal cleaned up a legal code that no longer matched what the Constitution and federal statutes required.

If you want a single year to mark the end of legal segregation in Texas, 1969 is it. If you want the year segregation actually ended in practice, there isn’t one.

The Federal Laws That Made Segregation Unenforceable

Two pieces of federal legislation in the mid-1960s did more than any state action to end segregation in Texas.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed on July 2, 1964, outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Title II banned segregation in restaurants, hotels, theaters, and other public accommodations. Title VI prohibited discrimination in any program receiving federal money, which meant school districts refusing to integrate could lose federal funding. Title VII made workplace discrimination illegal and created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.¹

The threat of lost federal funding was the lever that moved Texas districts that had resisted court orders for years.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed on August 6, 1965, outlawed literacy tests, authorized federal examiners to register voters in jurisdictions with a history of discrimination, and required covered areas to get federal approval before changing voting rules.²

The poll tax, long used in Texas to suppress Black and Mexican American voters, was banned in federal elections by the 24th Amendment, ratified on January 23, 1964. Texas kept collecting it for state and local elections until the legislature finally passed a resolution abolishing it in 1966.

Court Rulings That Dismantled Segregation Before the Repeal

Several federal court decisions, many of them originating in Texas, had already stripped segregation of its legal footing by the time the state got around to repealing its statutes.

Sweatt v. Painter (1950)

Heman Marion Sweatt, a Black mail carrier, applied to the University of Texas Law School in 1946 and was rejected because of his race. Texas quickly created a separate law school for Black students, but the comparison was impossible to defend: UT’s law school had 16 full-time professors, 850 students, and a library of 65,000 volumes; the new school had five professors, 23 students, and a library a quarter the size.³

On June 5, 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the separate school was not substantially equal and ordered Sweatt admitted to UT Law. The Court pointed to factors beyond books and faculty counts, including faculty reputation and professional connections, making clear that truly equal separation in higher education was a practical impossibility.³

Hernandez v. Texas (1954)

Two weeks before Brown, the Supreme Court decided another Texas case with national reach. Pete Hernandez, a Mexican American man convicted of murder in Jackson County, challenged his conviction because Mexican Americans had been excluded from jury service in the county for at least 25 years. On May 3, 1954, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee was not limited to discrimination between white and Black Americans, recognizing Mexican Americans as a distinct class protected by the Constitution.⁴

Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. The ruling rejected the “separate but equal” doctrine that had provided legal cover for segregation since 1896, holding that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal under the Fourteenth Amendment.⁵

Texas did not comply willingly. The 1957 legislature, in a special session, voted 115 to 26 to give the governor power to immediately close any school where federal troops might be sent to enforce integration, and passed a separate bill providing school districts with legal aid to fight integration lawsuits.

Loving v. Virginia (1967)

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court struck down all state bans on interracial marriage, ruling unanimously in Loving v. Virginia that such laws violated the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court declared that “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”⁶ Texas county clerks could no longer deny marriage licenses to interracial couples, though the state did not formally repeal its anti-miscegenation statute until 1969.

Different Areas of Life Desegregated on Different Timelines

Segregation in Texas was not a single institution. Schools, public accommodations, marriage, voting, parks, and housing each ended legal segregation on their own schedule.

Public accommodations. Before 1964, restaurants, hotels, theaters, and swimming pools across Texas routinely refused service to Black and Mexican American customers. After the Civil Rights Act, Title II gave individuals and the Attorney General the power to sue businesses that continued to discriminate.¹ Some integrated quickly; others only did so under legal pressure.

State parks. Texas state parks were segregated for much of the twentieth century. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided the legal basis that ended racial exclusion from public recreational facilities.⁷

Marriage. Legally unenforceable after Loving in 1967; formally repealed in Texas statute in 1969.

Housing. This was one of the last areas where legal segregation fell. The federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing. Texas did not pass its own version until the Texas Fair Housing Act took effect on September 1, 1993, intended to provide rights and remedies substantially equivalent to federal law.⁸ The quarter-century gap between the federal and state housing laws shows how slowly Texas moved on its own.

Why School Desegregation Continued Long After 1969

The repeal of segregation laws did not automatically produce integrated schools. Making integration real in classrooms required decades of federal court supervision.

In 1970, the federal government sued the State of Texas in United States v. Texas, targeting nine all-Black school districts and the surrounding all-white districts that maintained racial separation. Chief Judge William Wayne Justice issued Civil Order 5281, a sweeping order requiring the Texas Education Agency to oversee desegregation statewide. It covered student assignments, district boundaries, faculty hiring, transportation, extracurricular activities, and curriculum.⁹

Litigation under that order continued for decades, generating appeals and sub-cases involving individual districts across the state.¹⁰

As of early 2026, the Garland Independent School District near Dallas remains the only Texas school system still operating under a federal desegregation order, originally entered in 1970. The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas has filed a motion to declare the district “unitary,” meaning it has complied in good faith with desegregation requirements and should be released from federal oversight. Garland’s school board has voted to seek that release. If the court agrees, it would close the final chapter of court-supervised school desegregation in Texas, more than 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education.

Timeline of Key Dates

1950: Sweatt v. Painter forced the University of Texas Law School to admit its first Black student.³
1954: Hernandez v. Texas recognized Mexican Americans as a protected class; Brown v. Board of Education declared school segregation unconstitutional.⁴⁵
1964: The 24th Amendment abolished poll taxes in federal elections; the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and federally funded programs.¹
1965: The Voting Rights Act banned literacy tests and other discriminatory voting practices.²
1966: Texas abolished the poll tax for state and local elections.
1967: Loving v. Virginia struck down bans on interracial marriage.⁶
1969: Texas repealed its remaining state-level segregation statutes.
1970: United States v. Texas (Order 5281) placed Texas school desegregation under statewide federal court supervision.⁹
1993: Texas passed its own Fair Housing Act, 25 years after the federal version.⁸
2026: Garland ISD remains the last Texas district under a federal desegregation order, with proceedings underway to end it.

The short answer to when segregation ended in Texas is 1969, when the state repealed its last segregation laws. The honest answer is that the federal legal machinery enforcing desegregation kept running for decades afterward, and the final federal oversight order in Texas has yet to be formally dissolved.

1
National Archives. Civil Rights Act (1964)
2
National Archives. Voting Rights Act (1965)
3
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950)
4
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Hernandez v. Texas
5
Cornell Law School. Brown v. Board of Education (1954)
6
Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Loving v. Virginia
7
Texas Parks & Wildlife Department. The History of Texas State Parks
8
State of Texas. Property Code Chapter 301 – Texas Fair Housing Act
9
Texas Education Agency. Order in United States of America, et al. v. State of Texas, et al.
10
Department of Justice. United States Court of Appeals Fifth Circuit – United States of America v. State of Texas et al.