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chapter one The Varieties of Public School Desegregation “in the long run,” U.S. District Judge James V. Allred Jr. cautioned the plaintiffs in his Corpus Christi courtroom in 1957, “I don’t know whether you are going to be able to accomplish a great deal by lawsuits or not.”1 Allred offered this observation during one of the earliest school desegregation suits to be filed in the Southern District of Texas after the U.S. Supreme Court announced the landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education, usually known as Brown I,2 and its 1955 follow-up, Brown II.3 The judge was not seeking to discourage the parents who had sued the Driscoll Consolidated Independent School District (cisd), a rural system thirty miles west of the gulf port city of Corpus Christi. He had already indicated his willingness to enjoin the segregation that was practiced in the Driscoll school systems. Yet he doubted the Supreme Court’s wisdom in relying on federal district judges like himself to enforce by court order the far-reaching social reconstruction that would be required to implement Brown.4 Allred was not a conservative who simply resented the court’s “activism” in declaring that state-supported racial segregation in public schools denied African American students equal protection of the laws. The judge was a longtime liberal Democrat who had enjoyed a distinguished career in state politics before his appointment to the federal bench. He was born in Bowie, Texas, on 29 March 1899 and attended Bowie Commercial College before transferring to the Rice Institute in Houston. He served as a yeoman second class in the U.S. Navy during World War I. After the war Allred studied law at Cumberland University, in Lebanon, Tennessee, where he earned the LL.B. in 1921. He practiced law in Wichita Falls, entered politics, and served as the city’s district attorney from 1923 to 1925. He built support within the Democratic Party and was elected state attorney general in 1931 and then governor of Texas in 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression . Allred had been an unwavering supporter of the New Deal at a time when conservative Democrats resisted the federal government’s program of economic recovery.5 11 12 chapter one President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed the steadfast New Dealer to the newly created second seat in the Southern District in 1938. The judge resigned in 1942, however, to run in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. Allred lost against W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel. The next year, the newly elected Senator O’Daniel invoked senatorial “courtesy” and objected to the president’s proposal to nominate Allred to an open position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.6 Roosevelt yielded to the custom that reserved to senators the right to use judgeships in their own states to reward their own political supporters—or to use them to buy off rivals.7 Allred resumed private legal practice in Texas. He was offered a rare second opportunity to gain a lifetime sinecure on the federal district court in 1949, when President Harry Truman nominated Allred to another new seat. The appointment received the full support of U.S. Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who had succeeded O’Daniel. Although in later years Johnson was among the leaders of the conservative wing of the Texas Democratic Party, he had been Allred’s ally (albeit also a sometimes rival) during the New Deal.8 Allred recognized the government’s potential power to foster change. But, as he and other survivors of 1930s political battles could recall, the New Deal had to be defended against judges, not implemented by them. He now wondered aloud to the Driscoll parents “whether the courts should undertake the monumental job of trying to determine the justice [or the] injustice of the treatment of particular students.”9 He seems to have intended these comments to be general observations on the role of the judiciary, rather than specific findings on the case before him. The parents in Driscoll were not asking the judge to undertake a “monumental job” at all, because the Driscoll cisd enrolled around three hundred students. Allred invested a minimum of time and energy while presiding over the brief case: he listened to witness testimony, considered the lawyers’ arguments, and found in favor of the plaintiff parents. The judge then issued an injunction that directed the trustees of the Driscoll cisd to desegregate...

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