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.
Legal Sanctions to Enforce Desegregation in the Public Schools: The Contempt Power and the Civil Rights Acts