Elbert Parr Tuttle: Chief Jurist of the Civil Rights Revolution

Preface

xiii preface The hard truth of our cultural and constitutional history is that nowhere was it written that the civil rights revolution led by Martin Luther King Jr. would succeed. The movement cost its members more sacrifice and caused more terror than we care to remember. Dr. King’s commitment to nonviolence held long enough and firmly enough to give the movement a moral imperative that resonated throughout the country, but its hold was not complete and was always fragile. Without the support of the federal courts of the Fifth Circuit, it is entirely possible that the promise of Brown would have gone unrealized, that the back of Jim Crow would remain unbroken. Without the leadership of Elbert Tuttle and the moral authority he commanded , the courts of the Fifth Circuit might not have met the challenge. In December 1960, in a remarkable and fortuitous accident of history, Elbert Tuttle became the chief judge of the federal court with jurisdiction over most of the Deep South. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit covered six states—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Ordinarily, the men who sat on the Fifth Circuit were men of the region, steeped in its peculiar and pernicious history. Elbert Tuttle was not. With his wife and infant son, he had moved to Atlanta in 1923 at the age of twenty-five, a young lawyer who had fallen in love with a strong-willed Georgia girl and followed her home. One lesson of Tuttle’s life is that exposure to diversity matters. Born in California, he lived in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Nogales, Arizona, on the border with Mexico before moving to Hawaii at the age of ten. In Hawaii the Tuttles lived on Oahu, where Elbert and his older brother, Malcolm, enrolled in the Punahou School. Unlike perhaps any other American school of that era, Punahou was racially and ethnically integrated; Tuttle studied and played alongside native Hawaiians as well as schoolmates of Chinese, Japanese, Philippine, and Portuguese ancestry. From his earliest days in Georgia, Tuttle saw Jim Crow segregation as the unjust, oppressive apartheid it was. He had harbored political ambitions since his high school years, but in 1920s Georgia there was only one xiv « preface political party—the white Democratic Party, segregated by law as well as by custom. He would not join. Rather, he devoted considerable energy to building a viable Republican Party. Meanwhile, he and his brother-in-law Bill Sutherland, who had served as a law clerk to Justice Brandeis, built a highly regarded law firm. Though they specialized in corporate tax matters and were members of Atlanta’s social elite, Sutherland and Tuttle did not hesitate to step forward when a nineteen-year-old black leftist, Angelo Herndon, was sentenced to twenty years on the chain gang for handing out leaflets calling for a demonstration to protest the loss of relief benefits . Their work on his behalf led to the landmark First Amendment opinion Herndon v. Lowry, decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1937. Another lesson of Tuttle’s life is that character matters. Elbert Tuttle never shirked responsibility, no matter the cost. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for overseas service at age fortyfour . In 1944 and 1945 Elbert Tuttle commanded a field artillery battalion that participated in the Guam campaign and the battle for Leyte in the Philippines before joining the massive amphibious assault that began the battle for Okinawa. In mid-April 1945 his company braved gunfire from defending Japanese soldiers and landed on Ie Shima; on April 18 he was wounded in hand-to-hand combat with the Japanese. Two weeks later, Tuttle was joined in Hawaii by his son. A bomber pilot, Elbert Tuttle Jr. had finished his tour of duty on Iwo Jima in February 1945. Unwilling to go home while his father was fighting on nearby islands, he stayed on. When word came of his father’s medical discharge, Buddy was promptly released. Father and son came back to Georgia together, arriving home on July 4, 1945. Tuttle returned to Atlanta with a renewed commitment to civic affairs. His work with the Republican Party in Georgia kept him in contact with the state’s leading black citizens, and his victory in a credentials committee battle proved instrumental to Eisenhower’s ability to defeat Taft at the 1952 Republican Convention. After Eisenhower won the presidency, he selected Tuttle as general counsel to...