Once a Runner by Parker John L

Author:Parker, John L [Parker, John L]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2009-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

THREE DAYS LATER, a befuddled Coach Cornwall called Cassidy into his office and told him that due to circumstances over which he, as track coach, had no control, Quenton Cassidy would be henceforth suspended from participation in intercollegiate athletics.

21.

Steven C. Prigman

SOUTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY President Steven C. Prigman had once sat on the Florida Supreme Court bench and during his seven-year tenure had taken part in several illustrious decisions that stood as landmarks of jurisprudential comedy.

The most famous of these much-read cases involved a young black man who had the audacity to request admission to Southeastern University’s law school. He wasn’t exactly turned down, but they did lose his application. The third time they lost it, he filed suit and was quickly hooted out of state circuit court. From there he took his appeal to the august tribunal upon which sat His Honor Justice Prigman and six of his toadies. Taking scant time to deliberate after oral arguments, they came down with a decision that said, in so many words, that if God Almighty had wanted all races to go to white law schools, Negroes would have been born with perfect LSAT scores and calfskin briefcases. Some months later, the United States Supreme Court, ignoring entirely the interesting logic used to arrive at the lower-court decision, overturned the case at the same time it issued its Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and sent it back to Justice Prigman and company without so much as a “nice try.”

At this point the justices showed some real imagination. Declaring that the U.S. Supreme Court had made its determination on “constitutional grounds” alone, they decided that if there were other considerations for keeping the black man out, then the decision wouldn’t apply. Therefore, they decided to appoint a local circuit judge to be a “special master” to make a study of the situation and find out what would happen were a black man to enter the law school. The “special master” quickly found out that all hell would, of course, break loose; this would take the form of mass student withdrawals and attendant financial collapse. There would be great pandemonium in the school itself: riots, vandalism, even food fights. The “special master” was able to intuit these dire consequences by the tried-and-true interview method (“Are you going to riot?” “Of course!” “Okay.”).

And so it was that the Honorable Florida Supreme Court was able, in all good conscience, to blatantly disobey a direct mandate of the United States Supreme Court by saying that their new ruling denied admission to the student not on constitutional grounds, but on the inherent police power of the government to prevent violence. That the said violence would be caused by law-breaking (and perhaps imaginary) whites, concerned them not a whit. The young black man, out of money and patience, disgustedly threw in the towel and went north to procure his degree.

Steven C. Prigman had always been a charter member of the Florida Panhandle good old boy network. Sipping fifteen-year-old bourbon, his handsome ruddy face aglow with good humor, he could charm the fangs off water moccasins.

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