Champion of Civil Rights: Judge John Minor Wisdom

10. Implementing Brown throughout the Nation

1. 348 F.2d 729 (5th Cir.1965); 355 F.2d 865 (5th Cir.1966). 2. 372 F.2d 836 (5th Cir.1966), modified, 380 F.2d 385 (5th Cir.1967) (en banc), cert. denied, 389 U.S. 840, 88 S.Ct. 67, 19 L.Ed.2d 103 (1967). 10 Implementing Brown throughout the Nation If John Minor Wisdom’s opinion in Bush constituted the initial blueprint for the demolition of racially segregated public education in Louisiana, his pair of opinions in Singleton v. Jackson Municipal Separate School District, issued shortly before his ruling in Bossier Parish, represented the next step in his development of a comprehensive and assertive judicial response to segregation throughout all sectors of American society.1 And these two rulings, in turn, paved the way for the ambitious program he subsequently announced in U.S. v. Jefferson County, the monumental opus that nearly all observers, including Wisdom himself, regard as his single most masterful and influential decision.2 In March 1963, the Jackson, Mississippi, school board was the target of a school desegregation action. Although the ferocity and duration of the Jackson school board’s refusal to embrace Brown’s desegregation command did not begin to rival that of its New Orleans counterpart, neither was it setting any land speed records for compliance. Moreover, by 1965, Wisdom’s patience was rapidly evaporating as he became increasingly intolerant of the manifest recalcitrance displayed by most Implementing Brown throughout the Nation 201 3. John Minor Wisdom, In Memorium: One of a Kind, 71 TEX.L.REV. 913, 918 (1993). 4. 348 F.2d 729 (5th Cir.1965). southern communities in response to Brown. Near the tail end of his career, Wisdom voiced the frustration and disappointment associated with the battle to enforce the ruling in Brown. “At first we thought . . . that the Supreme Court’s mandate to desegregate schools with ‘all deliberate speed’ was a statesmanlike decision. It allowed time for the states to make the transition from segregation to integration. After a while . . . [we] realized that nothing of great importance was happening. ‘All deliberate speed’ was an excuse for delay by legislatures, school boards, and certain foot-dragging district judges.”3 The trial judge in the Jackson case, District Judge Sidney C. Mize, approved the school board’s grade-a-year segregation plan that offered freedom-of-choice assignment to students entering the first grade. Freedomof -choice plans were the favored response of school boards to judicial desegregation decrees because they put the onus of desegregation on students and their parents. Under these plans, integration occurred only when and if African American families took the initiative of seeking transfer or admission of their children to previously all-white schools. It imposed no affirmative obligation on the school authorities to take any direct action to produce integrated classes. The plaintiffs were dissatisfied with the board’s decidedly unambitious plan and so they appealed Mize’s ruling to the Fifth Circuit. On June 22, 1965, while the appeal was pending, Wisdom authored an interim ruling on behalf of a panel that included Judges Hutcheson and Brown. In what became known as Singleton I, Wisdom used the opening line of the opinion to send a resolute and unequivocal message to all of the parties to the case. “The time has come,” he announced, “for footdragging public school boards to move with celerity toward desegregation .”4 And although he had acknowledged in Bush that the desire to comply with Brown’s desegregation decree had to be tempered with an appreciation of the administrative difficulties associated with the transition to an integrated system, Wisdom now insisted that Brown’s leavening principle of “deliberate speed” never had been intended to accommodate community hostility to that transformation. He also declared, in no uncertain terms, that his court rejected the school board’s argument that Brown merely forbad mandatory segregation , and did not require school boards to take affirmative steps of their own to achieve integration. Only fourteen months after the release of 202 Champion of Civil Rights 5. 132 F.Supp. 776 (E.D.So.Car.1955). 6. 132 F.Supp. at 777. President Herbert Hoover had nominated John Parker in 1930 to a vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, the Senate refused to confirm him, in part, because of racist sentiments expressed during Parker’s campaign for governor of North Carolina. Judge Parker served on the Fourth Circuit until...