A Century of Dishonor (The Petitioners: The Story of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Negro, by Loren Miller)

...One cannot really understand the last dozen years' decisions without an appreciation of their place in the segment of "Negro His tory" that has unfolded at the bar of the Court...

...talk of the "racial situation" as a "telling example of the Court's function as a forum for those without a political voice...

...The Yankee from Olympus voted wrong in the very first race relations case that came before him, displaying "the chilly and detached, almost cynical, manner that would be his trademark whenever civil rights were considered during his long service on the Court," as Judge Miller sums it up...

...It is important to remember that Berea College wanted to remain integrated in 1905 (its 1854 Charter began "God hath made of one blood all the nations that dwell upon the face of the earth"): when Kentucky forbade the free association of the students, the Court, including Holmes, voted for Kentucky...

...and the book pointedly produces precedent for the current fashion of quietly ignoring or emasculating laws two or ninety-two years old, while going through the motions of asking for new laws...

...It should comfort the intellectuals who were energized to protest by the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and then transferred their energies to build the Scottsboro case into a cause cel^bre, to have Judge Miller's appraisal that the shift in the Court's attitude began with the rulings which saved those Negro defendants...

...The fruit of an opinion that Judge Miller shows to have been "composed in varying parts of suspect law, garbled history, and shoddy sociology" was the denial of citizenship even to free Negroes...

...The Negro has been the only American who has constantly made an issue of democracy," wrote Philip Berrigan, S. J. last year...

...Wars have generally been followed by treaty settlements, negotiated or imposed, that record the terms on which the late foes will co-exist...

...Apart from the threat of force or reprisal, only the "national honor" can evoke a national commitment...

...The current President and Attorney General have left unexercised (like all their predecessors since the eighties) the authority to prosecute criminally the many state officials who excluded Negroes from juries, an authority that survived the depredations of the postReconstruction Court...

...This antidemocratic barrier, whatever its original motivation, had been color blind...

...The answer one is obliged to suggest is that Americans do not know who they are and how they got that way"—to quote Lerone Bennett's terse statement of the full potential of the movement inadequately described by the phrase "Negro History...

...That he did not overstate his case by very much was shown by the Court's decision obliterating the last vestiges of the poll tax...

...The great lesson to be learned is that the Court first helped to still that political voice, by suppressing the rights that make a political voice meaningful— that the Court has been giving nothing new to the Negro: it is guiltily giving back bits and pieces of what it took away...

...its outcome is the fruit of decades of struggle initiated by Negroes and supported by whites interested in interracial justice...

...The Petitioners properly refrains from attributing sole guilt to the Court for the heritage with which we entered the 1930's...

...What was pervasively to affect the course of our history was not the protection of slavery in the territories...

...New York: Pantheon...

...It is incidental but enlightening that the Court was tampered with— and that President Buchanan already knew what the Court's decision would be when he asked the nation to abide by it...

...Its treaty settlement was evolved in the Congressional action and national debate that produced the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments...

...Historians say the Dred Scott decision's principal significance lay in Justice Taney's reaching out to strike down the Missouri Compromise and deny Congress the power to outlaw slavery in the territories...

...All who united to fight for Sacco and Vanzetti and then regrouped to fight and win for the Scottsboro boys are entitled to share the credit— even if someone were to write a book tomorrow to prove that those Southern gals were raped...

...The Petitioners illuminates the background of the case, not only as an epsiode in our national political history, but also as the genesis of a judicial style that marked the adjudication of race relations cases up to our day...

...It is a work that has long been needed...

...The agreement on freedom, equality, and suffrage was in a sense tri-lateral: the Negroes of the South had qualities of nationhood, and through their spokesmen, such as Frederick Douglass, and their advocates, such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, they were able to convince the moderates of the justice and the necessity of the terms on which the three nations were to be welded into one...

...THE PETITIONERS: THE STORY OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES AND THE NEGRO, by Loren Miller...

...The American Civil War has not infrequently been described as one between two nations, in the sense that North and South had developed, during the fifties, characteristics of separate nationality...

...Supposed experts such as Anthony Lewis Jr...

...I reserve the right to disagree with his discounting of the contribution of the demonstrations at American consulates and embassies...

...The spirit of the Scott decision, declaring the Constitution to be a white man's document, was to hover over the conference room during six decades of cruel decision-making by judges oblivious to the amendments intended to erase Taney's doctrines...

...Its clarity and readability make it possible for the lay reader to pierce the veil of double-speak that the Court and its white historians have drawn over the racist and anti-constitutional line of decisions that justified old Louis B. Boudin's 1932 phrase, "the most disgraceful chapter in the judicial history of the country...

...Those words were written just as the tide began to turn...

...But the ruling that will benefit poor whites of the tidewater and the hill country was won by Negro plaintiffs...

...it was the injection into the Constitution of the racism that was the fruit of pro-slavery apologetics...

...This guaranty of protection and justice was repeatedly dishonored in the decades that saw the demolition of the really impressive civil rights laws bequeathed by the Reconstruction Congresses...

...When we read the history of the post-Civil War decisions with the benefit of the insights offered here, we see that the doctrinal aspects of the decision were devastating...

...Why, one must ask, in the lamentations that followed the death of the 1966 bill, was there no voice raised to demand enforcement of the old law that already covered the same ground as one of the dead bill's principal provisions...

...I prefer to think that, after almost a century of dishonor, Parisian taxi-drivers and London dockers and German Socialists helped to bring about the beginning of the restoration of the Fourteenth Amend ment as a guaranty of interracial jus tice, of fair trial for the poor of all colors...

...That honor was pledged to the War Amendments: as one black regiment's Colonel said, while mustering out his men a century ago: "Soldiers: You have done your duty and acquitted yourselves as men . . . The nation guarantees to you full protection and justice...

...For the remedial education of those whose schooling was marred by the bleached product offered as Social Studies, The Petitioners is a fine starting point...

...The picture that emerges teaches us that neither we, nor our Court, have done so much for the Negro in the past decade...

...Judge Loren Miller's The Petitioners was published on the eve of the final poll tax decision...