Carnegie Mims Jr. ’71 was destined to be a pioneer.
Born in New Orleans in 1944 but raised in Austin, Mims came of age in an era when radical change was blooming everywhere, in every sector of society. “Carnegie always met any challenge,” recalls his widow, Sherbert Mims ’76. “I think it made him stronger because he knew he had to fight against the odds.”
Carnegie, who died in 2009, was part of a group of students who integrated Stephen F. Austin High School. He then came to the Forty Acres in 1962 as one of very few Black students on campus, arriving in the decade after the integration of the university by Heman Sweatt and Virgil Lott ’53 at the law school, and the group known as “the Precursors” on the main campus. Mims was a history major at a time when his mere presence on campus was itself history-making.
It was during his sophomore year that the Civil Rights Act was enacted, and during his senior year that Barbara Jordan became the first Black woman elected to the Texas legislature. Mims graduated as a wave of desegregation was taking hold at colleges and universities across the state.
And then he made his mark on Texas Law.
Strength in Numbers
As one of just six Black students at Texas Law in his first year, Mims found himself feeling isolated. He worried that he might fall behind due to the rigorous demands of law school. He watched classmates form study groups, which he wasn’t invited to join. He yearned for camaraderie and connection, as well as the study tools and discussion of cases and sharing of ideas with law school peers that he knew were essential to academic success.
“He felt that the African American students didn’t have a voice,” says Sherbert. She also says that he believed that those few African American students didn’t have good opportunities to cohere as a group.
But an opportunity for change started to present itself in Mims’s 2L year.
For starters, Mims was thrilled to see a dozen new Black 1Ls, double the number of his own class. He decided he’d approach each one and float the idea of establishing some sort of supportive group for Black students at the law school. Already, Mims had befriended Bobby Taylor ’71, who was having similar thoughts about a pressing need for a Black students group.
Taylor came to Texas Law from the University of Texas at Arlington, where his school mascot had been a Confederate soldier known as “Johnny Reb.” Relative to that experience, the law school community had a larger minority presence. For example, the day Taylor moved into his housing two blocks from the law school, he was surprised to find his three roommates were all Black.
Taylor and Mims soon bumped into each other one day in a law school hallway and started talking.
“Carnegie was a very self-motivated individual,” Taylor says. “He helped us gel together and to realize that, if you’re not with somebody, you’re going to be a lonely soul. We knew that to survive law school, we needed to be in a group where we could exchange ideas and theories and help each other through the system.” Taylor, too, felt the added pressure of wanting to do well academically and socially to pave the wave for future Black students.
“We realized we needed to unite,” says Taylor.
So, in the fall of 1970, Mims and Taylor, along with Bill Mahomes ’71, Judge Richard Scott ’71, and Judge Sam Biscoe ’70, among others, began meeting informally in each other’s apartments and dorm rooms. The students discussed coursework, which classes to take, their impressions of professors, and the general experience of being on campus in that time. “We all just helped each other,” Scott says now. “It gave me confidence.”
The group quickly decided to turn their regular gatherings into something more formal.
Getting the Name Right
A top priority was choosing a name for their new collective. An obvious choice, in their view, was to make some use of the name of Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first African American Supreme Court justice and a pioneer who already had a crucial, if indirect, connection to the university and the law school. It had been Marshall who, in 1950, had argued Sweatt v. Painter in federal courts alongside attorney Robert Carter and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The case set a precedent for future school desegregation cases, including Brown v. Board of Education.
Taylor and a small group of his fellow student leaders gathered to call Marshall’s chambers at the Supreme Court. They soon had the justice’s clerk on the line.
“We asked about the possibility of using his name for the purposes of us being a recognized organization,” Taylor says. After a short, nerve-wracking wait, the answer came. “We were given the okay!”
With Taylor as its inaugural president, the Thurgood Marshall Legal Society was born.
Five Decades of Impact
Fifty-five years later, the group Taylor, Mims, Mahomes, Biscoe, Scott and a half-dozen others founded is thriving. As an official chapter of the National Black Law Students Association, TMLS, as it is informally known, has supported thousands of Texas Law students academically, professionally, and socially. In any given year, active membership might be more than 10 times what it was in that first year of its founding in 1970. The group is one of Texas Law’s oldest—and busiest—student organizations.
It is also award-winning. Just last year, NBLSA honored TMLS as a national chapter of the year.
That kind of success is no surprise to TMLS alumni from across the years.
“Its strongest mission has always been helping, supporting, and making sure that everybody has a path to success,” says Arleas Upton Kea ’82, a past member of TMLS. Kea, who stays active in the university in a variety of leadership roles—a former president of the law school’s alumni association, she is the president-elect of the Texas Exes as well as a trustee of the Law School Foundation’s executive board—credits the organization with helping her and others achieve great things as students, sometimes in the face of meaningful adversity.
“The group could be like a cocoon,” she says. “It helped you to avoid stumbling and falling, and it provided that informal networking and mentoring. I cannot imagine I would have had the degree of success that I did after law school if it weren’t for TMLS.”
Creating a Legacy
Another beneficiary of the efforts of Carnegie Mims and his classmates was his wife.
Sherbert had her own childhood dream of becoming an attorney and, not content merely to live vicariously through her husband, she enrolled at the school a few years after Carnegie’s graduation. She was immediately grateful for the then-new student society. “TMLS really played a big part in helping me to get through law school,” she says.
She has especially fond memories of the TMLS meeting area. She recalls how the organization shared a large room with the student group now called CHLLSA, the Chicano Hispanic Latino Law Students Association. During regular get-togethers in that space, whether formal membership meetings or informal and impromptu gatherings, 3Ls would impart lessons learned to their 1L and 2L peers.
“It was a very comforting space,” Sherbert recalls. She earned an A in both her Business Law and Constitutional Law courses, academic success she pegs to her TMLS study groups.
Those memories ring true for Kea, who says that when she joined Texas Law in 1979, “there was a color barrier that was still very visible.” She relished the informal networking and mentoring she found through TMLS, and small gestures like 2Ls and 3Ls bringing sandwiches to the library for 1Ls. “Upperclassmen were very serious about making sure that 1Ls didn’t make mistakes,” she says. “That’s what I remember most about the society from back then.”
Launchpad for Legal Careers
Connections made through TMLS have helped hundreds of Texas Law graduates launch and further their legal careers, starting with its founders. Carnegie Mims served as a briefing attorney for the Texas Supreme Court, worked for Exxon Mobil Corp., and practiced for 23 years with the late Andrew L. Jefferson, a pioneering lawyer and Texas’ first Black state district judge.
Taylor staffed and directed a legal aid group in Austin, argued civil rights cases, and his representation helped lead to essential rights reforms in Travis County. One such project included the construction of a new county jail with humane living conditions after Taylor’s advocacy led to the declaration, in 1974, that conditions in Travis County’s then-jail violated the U.S. Constitution.
Sworn into office in 1975, Scott became the first African American elected judicial official for Precinct 1 in Travis County, and he served nine consecutive four-year terms as justice of the peace before retiring.
Sherbert Mims, for her part, worked in roles including defense litigation with the City of Houston Law Department and enforcement attorney for the Long-Term Care Division of Texas’ Department of Human Services before opening her own solo practice where she does probate and estate planning law.
And Kea recently retired from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the nation’s primary watchdog of the commercial banking industry, as chief operating officer and deputy to the chairman. She was honored with the Texas Exes Distinguished Alumna Award in 2021 and the law school alumni association’s Outstanding Alumna Award in 2024.
More recent Texas Law graduates tie their professional success to TMLS as well, including Rudy Metayer ’06, an attorney at Austin’s Graves Daugherty Hearon & Moody, as well as a City of Pflugerville council member, and an adjunct professor at Texas Law. “There are so many people in the organization who want to see you succeed,” Metayer says. “TMLS is a special place with people who truly care about you.”
Today’s TMLS
In 2025, TMLS, led by 2L President Raychel Polk, boasts 53 student members. Over the years, Polk says, the society has welcomed students from a variety of educational backgrounds and walks of life. Anyone can join, so long as they are ready to participate and help the group’s programs and events.
“TMLS is a home at the law school,” says Polk. “It’s where members can find their closest friends. And when I ask people their favorite part of law school, a common denominator is always TMLS—that speaks to how strong the society is.” TMLS has taught Polk how to be adaptable, help navigate others through setbacks, and have confidence in her vision, she says.
In addition to continuing with the study sessions integral to TMLS’s founders, the society now organizes and runs symposiums every other year on contemporary issues and Blackness for all current and prospective law students, alumni, faculty, and the general public. Past symposiums have looked at Afrofuturism, the legal question of reparations, policing policy, and capital punishment.
Professional development is a huge component of TMLS. The group sponsors regular panels and skills-building workshops for its members, such as a 1L-readiness event and sessions on networking tips.
Incoming 1L members are matched with 2Ls or 3Ls who serve as guides and mentors, and they attend a TMLS welcome event before classes kick off. TMLS members spend time together socially, too, through happy hour and networking events.
“I don’t think the founders could have envisioned all of the things that we’re doing with our organization,” says 3L and former TMLS President Natalya Baptiste.
TMLS is one of the most active of the 40 student organizations at the law school, says Elizabeth Bangs, the law school’s assistant dean for students. “One of the things we know from the field of positive psychology is that a key to long-term happiness and satisfaction is a sense of belonging,” Bangs says. “TMLS leadership is focused from day one on providing a space for our students. It’s constant community building.”
Looking to the Next Generation
Throughout the year, the society’s active alumni, who number in the hundreds, participate regularly in mentoring and attend professional development, networking, and social events, including the TMLS spring banquet. Current students know alumni well, and vice versa.
“Our alumni are really an integral part of TMLS,” says Baptiste. “They’re our mentors, employers, and typically who we go to first for any sort of professional development, academic help, or any niche pathway we’re trying to take.”
The organization also recently took advantage of its annual banquet to pay tribute to the founders who made today’s success possible. In 2024, Mahomes, Taylor, and Scott were recognized along with Sherbert Mims and her son, Carnegie Mims III ’04. But those founders were not in attendance merely to be celebrated. They had an announcement of their own: the establishment of a new scholarship for Texas Law students named in the memory of Carnegie Mims.
That scholarship will soon make it possible for a new Texas Law student to take on the challenge of law school with a level of financial support that should ease their path, much as the commitment of Carnegie Mims and his fellow founders has left a legacy easing the path of law students and their professional ambitions for the past 55 years.
The night that the scholarship was announced, Sherbert was reminded once more of Carnegie’s enduring influence.
“Other founders told me, ‘I don’t know if I would have made it without Carnegie in law school,’” she says. “He was a role model and a big brother. He was a supporter of everybody, and he helped people to feel comfortable. He helped them not feel so alone.”
That spirit of generosity is even more remarkable given the state of the world Mims faced amid the social unrest that caused so much division in the 60’s and 70’s.
“That did not make him bitter,” says Sherbert. “It made him work hard to change things.”
For more information about the Carnegie H. Mims Jr. ’71 Memorial Scholarship in Law, email alumni@law.utexas.edu or visit The University of Texas Law School Foundation website.