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Both schools began in 1927, when the Houston school board agreed to fund the creation of two junior colleges: Houston Junior College and Houston Colored Junior College.
"Things started very quickly," said Mary Manning, an archivist at UH.
By the fall of 1927, 232 students had enrolled in the white school. Seventy-five students enrolled in the black college. Just seven years later, by 1934, the student body had grown to more than 900 at the white college and 700 at the black college. The Houston school board decided to make them full four-year private universities. The Houston Colored Junior College became the Houston College for Negroes. Houston Junior College became the University of Houston.
The universities eventually moved to permanent homes, just blocks from each other. Millionaire oilman Hugh Roy Cullen donated 53 acres to the black university. He gave money to help UH begin building its campus, declaring that the school must always be a college "for working men and women and their sons and daughters." Left unsaid was that those men and women must be white.
By the 1940s, Texas was becoming a major battleground in the fight to end school segregation. The college that would become Texas Southern was at the heart of it.
In the 1940s, the University of Texas at Austin's law school denied admission to Heman Marion Sweatt of Houston because of "the fact that he is a negro." His case, argued by Thurgood Marshall, for whom TSU's law school is named, would eventually go all the way to the Supreme Court. Before it got there, Texas lawmakers got to work trying to build a case to show black students in Texas had equal - but separate - opportunities in the state. They bought the flourishing black college in Houston for $2 million in 1947 and set to work building a school that at least seemed equal to UT.
And thus, Houston's first public university was born - not as an effort to expand educational opportunities, but to keep the state from having to integrate its flagship in Austin. If state leaders could show black students had their own version of the University of Texas, then the courts, state leaders hoped, wouldn't require the white University of Texas to admit black students.
