Champion of Civil Rights: Judge John Minor Wisdom

1. A Privileged Son of the South

1 A Privileged Son of the South Wisdom. Could any judge hope for a more felicitous patronymic? Even more than Learned Hand, this name appears to predestine its owner for the contemplative, justice-dispensing life of a jurist. Yet aside from his surname, little in John Minor Wisdom’s background or family history foreshadowed the path-breaking contributions he would make to the development of American law. From an early age, this gregarious , self-effacing, and scrupulously fair-minded man also displayed the characteristics of knowledge, judgment, and insight that Webster proclaims to be the benchmarks of wisdom. But his upbringing made Wisdom an unlikely candidate for the role of civil rights champion. Who could have anticipated that this scion of southern society would become not only the prime architect of a revitalized Republican Party in Louisiana, but, more important, the universally acclaimed author of tradition-shattering and precedent-making judicial opinions that would forever reshape the contours of civil liberties in the United States? How and why this son of a New Orleans cotton broker came to play such a critical role in the modern American civil rights revolution is as essential a part of his story as the accomplishments themselves. Family history is perhaps more important in the South than in any other region in the country. Many southerners view lineage as a prominent index of social status and a reliable predictor of vocation and char- 2 Champion of Civil Rights 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Uses of Great Men,” in Representative Men (New York: 1850). 2. The Navigation Acts, a series of statutes passed by the English Parliament between 1651 and 1663, required all products from America, Asia, and Africa to be exported to England and its possessions and prohibited all foreign ships from participating in the trade between England and its colonies. acter. They tend to reject Ralph Waldo Emerson’s claim that “men resemble their contemporaries even more than their progenitors.”1 Yet occasionally an individual will confound this stereotype by ignoring settled expectations and carving his own unique path. John Minor Wisdom was one of those individuals. A descendant of the Minors of Virginia, a venerable line composed primarily of members of the landed aristocracy, he emerged as one of the most progressive and influential federal judges of the twentieth century. Over his fortytwo -year career as a member of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, he wrote scores of opinions that powerfully changed the landscape of American jurisprudence. Rulings that he authored in school desegregation and voting rights cases opened the doors of equal opportunity to women and members of racial minority groups that had been shut for decades. By insisting that all individuals, regardless of circumstance of birth or condition of existence, were entitled to a fair shake by their government and their neighbors, Wisdom gave meaning to the theretofore unrealized promise of equal rights contained in the U.S. Constitution. And although he is properly recognized most widely for his role in promoting the cause of civil rights, his influence extends far beyond that realm, into such diverse areas as criminal, tax, trust, railroad reorganization , and maritime law. To begin to understand how far the seed fell from its ancestral tree, however, to appreciate the distance traveled by this son of the Old South, a man born of privilege and steeped in the genteel traditions of an intricate and deeply rooted social order, one must return to the midseventeenth century, when Wisdom’s ancestors first planted their roots in American soil. Until the English Parliament passed the Navigation Acts of the 1650s and 1660s and confined the export of colonial American goods to England , shippers from several European nations carried on a substantial amount of commerce with the colonies.2 One of these adventurous merchants was Maindort Doodes, a wealthy ship owner from Holland who left his homeland on a Dutch sailing ship in the 1650s and settled A Privileged Son of the South 3 3. Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. (21 Wallace) 162 (1874). 4. “Necrology, John Barbee Minor,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 3 (January 1896): xiv. in Norfolk, Virginia. Doodes and his wife, Mary, arrived with their son and daughter, who were also named Maindort and Mary. After the family moved westward along the mouth of the James River to what later became Nansemond County, Doodes changed his prename to Minor, reversed the...