Eisenhower vs. Warren: The Battle for Civil Rights and Liberties by James F. Simon

Author:James F. Simon [Simon, James F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Biographies & Memoirs, History, Lawyers & Judges, United States
ISBN: 9780871407559
Google: EWbnswEACAAJ
Amazon: 0871407558
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2018-04-03T03:00:00+00:00

ON APRIL 14, shortly after the court had heard the final reargument in Brown, Justice Frankfurter sent a memorandum to his colleagues laying out his views on an implementation decree.35 The court must exercise caution and not function as a “super-school board,” he wrote. He then posed two possible approaches. The first would be a narrow “bare bones” decree permanently barring segregation in the school districts challenged in the cases before the court. Alternatively, Frankfurter suggested, the court’s decree might be drafted in more general language that would allow the district courts to take into account local attitudes in devising a desegregation plan.35 It would also provide a set of guidelines for the lower courts “and yet not serve as the mere imposition of a distant will.”

When Chief Justice Warren convened the justices’ conference on Saturday, April 16, to discuss the implementation decision, he and his brethren possessed, in addition to Frankfurter’s memo, a lengthy advisory report that Warren had requested the previous summer from six law clerks.36 His charge to the clerks was to provide their thoughts on how the court could best accomplish desegregation. The clerks concluded, as had Frankfurter, that the court’s decree should be simple and remand the cases to the district courts with guidelines for execution. They differed, however, on the timeline for desegregation. One clerk opposed a decree allowing a “gradual” approach to desegregation, arguing that such an order would “greatly weaken the Court’s moral position.”37 But the other five clerks concluded that a court decree ordering immediate desegregation was “impractical” and likely to be ignored by the most recalcitrant school districts in the South. They offered a number of suggestions, ranging from leaving the timing entirely to the district courts to a process allowing up to twelve years for the full integration of the school districts.

Warren opened the justices’ conference by conceding that he had not reached any firm conclusion on the court’s implementation decision and was willing to extend the discussions for as long as was needed. Though he did not say it, implicit in the chief justice’s open-ended schedule for discussion was his unspoken goal of a unanimous court decision. At the outset, he emphasized that he believed the justices should give district courts great flexibility in overseeing the desegregation process, a position supported by Frankfurter’s memo as well as five of the six clerks who had sent him their advisory report. He suggested a court opinion rather than a decree that would allow lower-court judges to decide if specific segregation plans from school districts should be required and whether to set deadlines for the completion of the desegregation process. He, like Frankfurter, did not want the court to function as a “super-school board.” He also agreed with Frankfurter that the court should provide broad guidelines for the lower courts that, Warren suggested, might take into consideration financial problems and the conditions of local schools. So long as school districts were acting in good faith and progress was being made toward

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