Lonely Judges

...In 1956, when a few Southern schools were about to open fonthe first time on an integrated basis and segregationists were organizing student boycotts, a reporter asked the President if he would care to use his 'tremendous reservoir of good will among the young people' and give them some advice on how they should conduct themselves...

...Statements from and off the bench, acts in and out of court, are recorded...

...The circuit judges serve a larger area and enjoy a relative detachment from local litigation, as well as less elbow-rubbing with clients and lawyers, which have contributed to their greater freedom in the discharge of their duties...

...The judges were confronted, therefore, not merely with opposition from the rank and file, but by incitements to rebellion coming from on high...

...The author preserves a careful balance...

...Thus the judges write their own epitaphs...

...The Supreme Court decision in the celebrated case of Brown vs...

...Reviewed by Marion A. Wright J. WATIES WARING and George Bell Timmerman are both native South Carolinians of approximately the same age and background...

...The good and the bad, the sordid and the noble, the brutal and the humane, are all compressed within the covers of this single volume...

...As Justice Cardozo wrote in The Nature of the Judicial Process: "If there is anything of reality in my analysis of the judicial process, [the judges] do not stand aloof on chill and distant heights...

...J. W. Peltason, in Fifty-eight Lonely Men, has put in one significant volume the stories of Southern Federal judges, district and circuit, and the way in which they performed their judicial function under the stresses generated by the problem of desegregation...

...He said: '. . . There are very strong emotions on the other side, people that,see a picture of mongrehzation of the race, they call it.' "Eisenhower insisted that the refusal to obey the Federal courts could not be dealt with by law enforcement, but only by moral conversion, yet he made little attempt to lead the people toward this conversion...

...From surveying those words and deeds, the reader decides for himself, with no prompting from the author, the quality of the individual...

...This book is studded with such revelations...

...This book is more than a recital of the tribulations of judges...

...From a consideration of all the cases there emerges the conviction that the personality of the judge, his stock of biases and predilections, and his philosophy and social outlook, effect, if they do not control, his judicial conclusions...

...The judges are shown in action in Clinton, in Little Rock, in Nashville, in Dollarway, in Houston, and in the scores of other towns and cities where Negro litigants confronted the awesome power of their native states...

...They are shown in a distillation of more than 200 judicial hearings within a six year period...

...The easy assumption that the judge is a mechanism that automatically records a conclusion from certain facts receives a brutal battering...

...It is a study of a region in transition...

...Here is what the President said: 'Well, I can say what I have said so often: it is difficult through law and through force to change a man's heart...

...On March 12, 1956, ninety-six United States Congressmen from the South issued their notorious "manifesto...

...Timmerman, if embalmed in history, will be noted chiefly for his futile efforts to preserve the South's caste system...

...Superficially, at least, they were molded and shaped by the same forces and social pressures...

...Judge Wilson Warlick of North Carolina has said: "I'm a states' rights individual and I always have been...

...So far as I am a\vare, this book is unique...

...Such incitements, issued from plush offices, bore their ultimate fruit in women who snarled and spat at Negro children on their way to school and in men who wielded clubs and touched off sticks of dynamite...

...He develops his characters merely by recording their words and deeds...

...He criticized 'extremists,' and then proceeded to equate the NAACP with the citizens councils, depicting the conflict as being between two equally legitimate groups, those working for compliance with the Constitution, ana those working for its defiance...

...As Peltason points out: "President Eisenhower refused to provide moral leadership or to use his power as Chief Executive in support of the Supreme Court decision...

...But their decisions on such issues were poles apart...

...Waring became, and will historically remain, One of the nation's great liberal jurists...

...This book is a clinical study of the manner in which these blackrobed figures went about their tasks...

...they reveal it...

...And Judge Glenn Terrell of Florida struck the religious note: "When God created man he allotted each race to his own continent according to color, Europe to the white man, Asia to the yellow man, Africa to the black man, and America to the red man...

...Board of Education placed upon Southern Federal judges, whether wisely or not, the burden of seeing that Southern public schools moved toward desegregation...

...We must all . . . help to bring about a change in spirit so that extremists on both side do not defeat what we know is a reasonable, logical conclusion to this whole affair, which is recognition of equality of men.' " The President seemed to regard as equally culpable "extremists on both sides"—those who were trying to close the public schools and those who were trying to keep them open...

...I would close every school from the highest to the lowest before I would go to school with colored people...

...In all fairness, it must be said that there are many fine expressions from wise and conscientious Southern judges which relieve the picture...

...More specifically, such judges, with no familiar landmarks to guide them, had to determine in each case what constituted "with all deliberate speed...

...The good writer of fiction is sparing of adjectives in describing the individuals about whom he writes...

...Nowhere else is to be found so carefully documented a study of the reaction of judges to the mass pressures of the times...

...Peltason has used this formula...

...Logically, their interpretations should have exhibited striking similarity...

...The loneliness of the judges was further accentuated by other examples in high places...

...The point is clearly made that the circuit judges, who constitute the appellate tribunals which normally hear appeals from district courts, have uniformly been more forthright and courageous than the district judges...

...Crises do not make character...

...It is not necessary to shout that this is a good or bad, or a wise or stupid man...

...Throughout the South, in the last decade, the Waring and Timmerman story has had dozens of counterparts...

...The fifty-eight lonely men were lonely in part because they lacked the full and vigorous support of the executive branch of the government...

...As judges, they interpreted the same Constitution and statutes, passing judgment on many civil rights issues...

...The chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court (not a Federal official), J. Edwin Livingston, thus expressed his conviction: "I'm for segregation in every phase of life and I don't care who knows it...

...If I had anything to do with schools in North Carolina, I wouldn't let the Federal government have any part of it...

...Waring was, and Timmerman still is, a U.S...

...South Carolina's Judge Timmerman, writing of a statute disqualifying teachers who were members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said: "The statute is designed to protect young minds from the poisonous effects of NAACP propaganda," which the judge considered an entirely proper purpose since that organization "disturbs the peace and tranquility which has long existed between the white and Negro races...

...Virginia's Judge Armistead Dobie once referred to Gunnar Myrdal, a distinguished Swedish social scientist, as "a foreign Communistic anthropologist...

...Except for his momentary intervention in Little Rock, which he did not follow up, he refused to take any part in this, the most important domestic crisis of postwar America...

...The great tides and currents which engulf the rest of men, do not turn aside in their course, and pass the judges by...

...From them lesser leaders took their cue...

...At a time when they were performing delicate and arduous duties, President Eisenhower was silent or, at best, inarticulate...

...District Judge...

...Influential men, such as Byrd, Russell, and Byrnes, were urging policies of open defiance...

...and we shall not help the cause of truth by acting and speaking as if they do...

...In the labors of fifty-eight Southern judges in the last decade Justice Cardozo would have found massive support for his thesis...

...Here is what the man said and did...