We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of the University of Georgia

Notes

Notes One. More than a Matter of Segregation 1. See Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom; Bartley and Graham, Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction. 2. Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944). 3. Morgan v. Virginia, 328 U.S. 373 (1946). Justice Jackson did not participate in this case. At President Truman’s request, Jackson was in Nuremberg serving as chief prosecutor in the Nazi war-crimes trial. 4. Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948). Only six justices participated in this case, presumably because the other three—Justices Reed, Jackson, and Rutledge—owned or occupied premises covered by restrictive covenants and excused themselves from sitting on the case. See Kluger, Simple Justice, 239–55; Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law, 81–115; and Hine, Black Victory. 5. In 1926, in Corrigan v. Buckley, the Supreme Court held that although restrictive covenants were discriminatory, they were a form of private, not state, action, and therefore legal. The Court’s ruling in 1948 did not overturn Corrigan—which would have had the effect of nullifying all existing restrictive covenants. Instead, the burden of challenging these covenants now fell on the plaintiffs. Most of the barriers to equal housing were not removed until the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The Morgan ruling in 1946 outlawed segregated interstate travel only on buses and trains; it did not apply to stations and terminals, where “Colored” and “White Only” waiting rooms were still the law in much of the South. A Supreme Court decision in December 1960 made segregated waiting rooms illegal, but southern authorities refused to comply, prompting the 1961 “Freedom Rides” by the Congress of Racial Equality (core) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (sncc). Eventually, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued an order banning all forms of segregation in interstate travel. As for voting, the poll tax remained a major barrier until it was abolished for federal elections with the adoption of the Twenty-fourth Amendment in 1964. Most of the remaining obstacles to voting were removed with passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 6. For a more detailed account of Houston’s early life and legal training see McNeil, Groundwork; see also Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law, 6–9. 161 Notes to Pages 3–5 7. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). 8. For a detailed analysis of the naacp’s legal strategy as it related to school desegregation cases, see Tushnet, The naacp’s Legal Strategy. 9. Transcript of the oral argument, naacp Papers, Box I-D-94, file: Cases Supported —University of Maryland, Briefs; Pearson v. Murray, 169 Md. 478, 182 A. 590 (1936), quoted in Tushnet, Making Civil Rights Law, 11–15. 10. Lincoln University in Missouri should not be confused with Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the black college that Thurgood Marshall attended. 11. Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938). Although the Supreme Court had reaffirmed its position regarding a state’s obligation to all its citizens, not all in the black community were pleased with the Gaines ruling because it permitted the state to establish a separate black law school without addressing the issue of equality . The naacp was preparing a case in which the equality of the facilities would be examined, but the plaintiff, Lloyd Gaines, had suddenly disappeared. After earning a graduate degree in economics from the University of Michigan he had apparently gone to Chicago, but naacp attorneys were unable to locate him in time for him to appear in court for a pretrial examination. Thus, the naacp was unable to pursue the case any further. Missouri’s legislature eventually appropriated $200,000 to expand graduate education at Lincoln, and its law school—with three faculty members and a librarian, and located in a building with a hotel and a movie theater—opened in the fall of 1939, less than a year after the Supreme Court’s decision, with thirty students enrolled. But Gaines was not among them. 12. In late 1945, before Sweatt applied to law school at Texas, Ada Lois Sipuel asked the naacp to help her gain admission to the University of Oklahoma’s law school. Her suit was filed a month before Sweatt’s. Her attorneys sought an order admitting her to Oklahoma’s all-white law school, although other parts of the complaint suggested that Sipuel would also accept admission to a segregated law school within the state, if there were one. The...