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6. The New Judge in the Southern District of Mississippi
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Z 53 Z chapter 6 The new Judge In The sOuThern dIsTrICT Of MIssIssIPPI Just who was Judge Cox? How did he get there? For answers we must first turn to a meeting in the spring of 1961 between Robert Kennedy and WilZ liam Harold Cox. The meeting took place in the U.S. attorney general’s massive office beZ tween Constitution and Pennsylvania Avenues. Robert Kennedy, brash and intense, the harasser of corrupt labor leader Jimmy Hoffa, was the camZ paign manager who had gotten his older brother elected president. Now Robert Kennedy was thirtyZsix years old. He was attorney general of the United States. William Harold Cox (no relation to Luther Cox) was about as different from Robert Kennedy as he could be. Cox was deeply rooted in Mississippi, the son of the twoZtime sheriff of Sunflower County in the Delta. More important, Cox was a longtime friend and supporter of the powerful chairZ man of the Senate Judiciary Committee, James Eastland.1 Cox was rated “exceptionally well qualified” to become a federal judge by the American Bar Association. But Cox was a racist. Robert Kennedy and Harold Cox both spoke the English language, though Kennedy’s clipped accent was a world away from Cox’s slow drawl. Kennedy recalled the meeting: I said that the great reservation that I had was whether he’d enforce the law and whether he’d live up to the Constitution, and the laws, and the interpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court . . . He assured me that he would. He was really, I think, the only judge whom I’ve had that kind of conversation with. He was very gracious. He said that there wouldn’t be any problem about that, that he felt he The new Judge in the southern district Z 54 Z could accomplish a great deal, and that this would not be a problem to him.2 They heard each other, but never was there a greater absence of understanding. The Kennedys were often criticized by northerners, sometimes corZ rectly, as excessively cautious in moving ahead on civil rights. Yet most white southerners viewed the brothers as arrogant, aggressive enemies, using every tool in the federal arsenal to bring down the southern way of life. Robert Kennedy’s laws and Constitution were radically different from Harold Cox’s. Cox, however, said all the right things. His FBI background check had turned up nothing untoward, and he had that ABA rating. Burke Marshall considered both checks “by and large worthless,” since the investigators generally spoke to lawyers who would practice before the nominee and found superlatives the tactful response. “The FBI would not normally go and interview black people . . . the black people wouldn’t talk to them . . . certainly wouldn’t talk candidly to them.”3 Yet Cox was “one of the very few lawyers in Mississippi who had not joined the White Citizens’ Council.” The Kennedys thus had no evidence against Cox except his relationship with Eastland. Neither Kennedy could tell Senator Eastland that association with Eastland was fatal to a man’s chance to become a judge. And so William Harold Cox became President Kennedy’s first judicial appointee. The victor in the 1960 election had seventyZthree judgeships to fill— judgeships created by an omnibus judiciary bill. But the presidential power to appoint was far from unfettered. The powerful tradition of senatorial courtesy meant that a state’s senior senator controlled the selection of that state’s judicial nominees when the president was of the same party. And if the senator was James Eastland, chairman of the committee that passed on every judicial nomination, senatorial courtesy was senatorial command. “The Senator no doubt had many virtues,” Marshall recalled, “but he was a very tough cookie to deal with, and so the possibility of a logjam [of KenZ nedy judicial nominees] was very real.”4 Judge Elbert Tuttle understood what happened in the attorney general’s office: They were talking different languages. When Bobby asked if he would uphold the law of the land, he was thinking about Brown v. Board [54.172.169.199] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 02:48 GMT) The new Judge in the southern district Z 55 Z of Education. When Cox said yes, he was thinking about lynching. When Cox said he believed Negroes should have the vote, he meant two Negroes.5 Liberals might get Thurgood Marshall as circuit judge for New York, Connecticut, and Vermont, but the Southern District of...