The School Desegregation Era

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick Bell
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Law School ◽  
General Counsel ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Warren Court ◽  
Brown Decision

Yale Law School Professor Alexander Bickel was a major consti­tutional scholar of his time. When, in 1970, he questioned the long-term viability of the Brown decision in a highly praised book, civil rights lawyers and liberal scholars were annoyed. Few of us at that time had any doubts that we would eventually prevail in eradicating segrega­tion “root and branch” from the public schools. Now, more than three decades later, Professor Bickel’s prediction, heavily criticized at the time, has become an unhappy but all too accurate reality. In this chapter I will examine the resistance by whites and the rigidity by civil rights lawyers and leaders that combined to transform Bickel’s prediction into prophesy. Even the optimists among us had continuing reasons to regret the “all deliberate speed” standard for implementing Brown I. The Supreme Court insisted in Brown II that its unique-compliance formula was intended to do no more than allow time for the necessary adminis­trative changes that transformation to a desegregated school system required. After a decade of experience with the standard, Judge Robert L. Carter, former NAACP General Counsel, surmised that the formula actually permitted movement toward compliance on terms that the white South could accept.1 Until Brown II, Carter said, constitutional rights had been defined as personal and present, but under the guise of judicial statesmanship, “the Warren Court sacri­ficed individual and immediate vindication of the newly discovered right of blacks to a desegregated education in favor of a remedy more palatable to whites.” Carter suggests that the Court failed to realize the depth or nature of the problem, and by attempting to regulate the pace of desegrega­tion so as to convey a show of compassion and understanding for the white South, it not only failed to develop a willingness to comply, but instead aroused the hope that resistance to the constitutional imper­ative would succeed. As had happened so frequently before, southern politicians began waving the Confederate flag and equating the Brown decision with a Supreme Court-led attack on states’ rights. Highway billboards called for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren, and candidates were elected to office on campaigns based on little more than shouting “Never.”

The Warren Court and the Administration of Criminal Justice

1972 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-58
Author(s):  
Donal E.J. Macnamara ◽  
Edward Sagarin
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Warren Court ◽  
American Society

Three important changes in American society were given impetus by decisions of the Supreme Court under Earl Warren. These were in the issues of desegregation; one-man, one-vote; and the administration of criminal justice. The accusation against the Warren Court that it was coddling criminals and handcuffing police, belied by statistics, may have been incited by hostility that the Court had aroused because of its decisions on integration and electoral apportionment. Analysis of impor tant decisions in the years before Warren reveals a hesitant and ambiguous Court, taking both forward and backward steps in defense of the constitutional rights of the accused. Some of the Warren decisions on issues of criminal justice were unani mous, and others were made by a split court. A study of the voting records of Warren's colleagues leads to the belief that the major thrust of that court will not be reversed by its successor, unless under the pressure of a precipitate change in America's social atmosphere.

The Public Employment Relationship and the Supreme Court in the 1980S

1988 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Rosenbloom
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Employment Relationship ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Public Employees ◽  
Public Employment ◽  
The Public ◽  
Supreme Court Decisions

During the 1980s, Supreme Court decisions on the public employment relationship tended to constitutionalize public personnel administration further and to promote adjudicatory processes within it. The Court has been highly divided on issues involving the public employment relationship and, for the most part, has not developed broad general doctrines that comprehensively define the scope of public employees' constitutional rights. Rather, it has opted frequently for balancing approaches that promote a case-by-case jurisprudence that may fail to afford public personnelists adequate guidance. This article reviews Supreme Court decisions in the areas of public employees' substantive constitutional rights, their constitutional rights to procedural due process and equal protection, and their qualified immunity/liability for breaches of others' constitutional and/or federally protected statutory civil rights.

Epilogue

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
Law School ◽  
Alma Mater ◽  
Education Fund ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Limited Basis ◽  
Legal Defense

The epilogue examines the legacy of the efforts by Julius Chambers and his firm through the mid-1970s. In 1984, Chambers, widely acknowledged as an exceptionally skilled civil rights litigator and legal strategist, succeeded Jack Greenberg as director-counsel of Legal Defense and Education Fund. From that post Chambers coordinated the legal struggle for civil rights for nine years, mostly attempting to fend off the increasingly reactionary policies of the Reagan administration and of the legal positions on race advanced by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. In 1993, Chambers resigned as LDF director-counsel and returned to North Carolina, where he was installed as chancellor of his undergraduate alma mater, now North Carolina Central University, in Durham. Chambers retired in 2001and, after an absence of nearly twenty years, returned to Charlotte where he rejoined the firm on a limited basis. He meanwhile served the inaugural director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, housed within the UNC Law School. Chambers, whose efforts advanced federal civil rights law to its apogee in the early to mid-1970s and who thus stands out as the most important African American civil rights attorney in the generation following Thurgood Marshall, died on August 2, 2013.

Julius Chambers

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard A. Rosen ◽  
Joseph Mosnier
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
High Water ◽  
Law School ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Legal Defense

Born in the hamlet of Mount Gilead, North Carolina, Julius Chambers (1936–2013) escaped the fetters of the Jim Crow South to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s as the nation’s leading African American civil rights attorney. After blazing a unique path through the world of higher education, including becoming the first black student ever to be editor-in-chief of the law review at a historically white southern law school, Chambers was selected as the initial intern for NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund’s civil rights internship program. Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Chambers worked closely with LDF in forwarding the strategic litigation campaign for civil rights, with Chambers arguing and ultimately winning landmark school and employment desegregation cases at the U.S. Supreme Court. Aided by a small group of white and black attorneys and support staff which he gathered together in a truly integrated law firm, and undaunted by the dynamiting of his home and the arson that destroyed the offices of his law practice, Chambers pushed federal civil rights law to its high-water mark. This book connects the details of Chambers’s life to the wider struggle to secure racial equality through the development of modern civil rights law. Tracing his path from a dilapidated black elementary school to counsel’s lectern at the Supreme Court and beyond, the authors reveal Chambers’s singular influence on the evolution of federal civil rights law after 1964.

Brown Reconceived: An Alternative Scenario

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick Bell
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Effective Schooling ◽  
Public Expectations ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The Face ◽  
University Professor ◽  
Constitutional Conventions ◽  
Opening Up

Having Read An Early Draft Of This Manuscript, longtime friend and Harvard University professor Frank Michelman asked: “Was there any way that they, as a Court acting subject to certain public expectations about the differences among courts, legislatures, and constitutional conventions, could have framed their intervention differ­ently from, and better than, the way they actually chose?” I think the answer is yes. Despite decades of efforts to reverse Plessy v. Ferguson and the NAACP lawyers’ well-researched legal arguments supported by reams of social science testimony, the Supreme Court might have determined to adhere to existing precedents. Suppose that, while expressing sympathy for the Negroes’ plight, the Court had decided that Plessy v. Ferguson was still the law of the land? Suppose, moreover, they understood then what is so much clearer now: namely, that the edifice of segregation was built not simply on a troubling judi­cial precedent, but on an unspoken covenant committing the nation to guaranteeing whites a superior status to blacks? On this understanding, could the Court have written a decision that disappointed the hopes of most civil rights lawyers and those they represented while opening up opportunities for effective schooling capable of turning constitutional defeat into a major educational victory? Again, I think the answer is yes. And I have imagined such an alternative. Today we uphold our six decades old decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896). We do so with some reluctance and in the face of the argu­ments by the petitioners that segregation in the public schools is unconstitutional and a manifestation of the desire for dominance whose depths and pervasiveness this Court can neither ignore nor easily divine. Giving full weight to these arguments, a decision overturning Plessy, while it might be viewed as a triumph by Negro petitioners and the class they represent, will be condemned by many whites. Their predictable outraged resistance could undermine and eventually negate even the most committed judicial enforcement efforts.

Pluralism, Autonomy and Resistance: A Canadian Perspective on Resolving Conflicts between Freedom of Religion and lgbtq Rights

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Diana Ginn ◽  
Kevin Kindred
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Law School ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Freedom Of Religion ◽  
Sexual Intimacy ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
Post Secondary ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Fundamental Rights And Freedoms

Trinity Western University (twu), an evangelical post-secondary institution in Canada, has litigated against three provincial law societies who refused to accredit twu’s proposed law school because of a mandatory University Covenant that prohibits sexual intimacy outside of marriage ‘between one man and one woman’. Leave has been granted to appeal this matter to the Supreme Court of Canada. This litigation involves a conflict between constitutional rights: freedom of religion and lgbtq equality rights. The Supreme Court of Canada mandates a non-hierarchical approach to resolving such conflicts, aimed at ensuring constitutional rights and freedoms do not depend on majoritarian support. Balancing competing fundamental rights and freedoms must be done contextually, with a weighing of harms and benefits on each side. Despite strong moral and theological objections to twu’s stance on same-sex relationships, the authors argue that, in this instance the balancing of harms and benefits weighs in favour of freedom of religion.

Introduction

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick Bell
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Federal District ◽  
District Court ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Law Firm ◽  
Yale University ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
American Law

Graduation Day At Yale University in late May 2002 was blessed with warm, clear weather. It is the hope for such a beautiful morning that enables outdoor commencements to survive the rain-soaked disappointment of those hopes on far too many better-forgotten occasions. Yale’s Old Campus was filled with faculty, administrators, soon-to-be graduates, and their well-dressed families and friends. Under the canopy-covered stage, there were ten individuals designated to receive honorary degrees because of their significant achievements. I was there at the invitation of one of those honorees, Robert L. Carter, my mentor and friend for more than forty years. Then eighty-five, a senior judge on the federal district court with thirty years of service, Carter had previously enjoyed a long and distinguished career as an NAACP civil rights attorney and, for a few years, a partner in a large law firm. All of these accomplishments would be worthy of the praise and warm applause that other candidates received. When, though, Yale University president Richard Levin announced that Judge Carter was an important member of the legal team that planned the strategies and argued the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education , noting that the decision was only two years short of its fiftieth anniver­sary, the audience leaped to its feet and, with great enthusiasm, applauded and cheered. On that happy day, Judge Carter was the recipient of the audience’s appreciation for his work in helping litigate a case in which the Supreme Court had held racial segregation in the public schools unconstitutional. The mainly white audience that had assembled for the commencement exercises at one of the nation’s premier universities was not unsophisticated. For them, and so many others regardless or status or race, Brown v. Board of Education evoked awe and respect. I fasked, most would have agreed that the decision was the finest hour of American law. In their view, this long-awaited and now much-appreciated decision had erased the contradiction between the freedom and justice for all that America proclaimed, and the subordination by race permitted by our highest law.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document