Unexampled Courage by Richard Gergel

Author:Richard Gergel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Judge Waring followed these emerging trends in the federal courts with great interest and began to look for opportunities to address civil rights issues on his own docket. He asked his clerk of court to monitor case filings in the Eastern District of South Carolina and to alert him whenever a civil rights case was filed. The clerk informed him in early 1947 that two significant civil rights cases had been filed in the Columbia Division. The first of these, Wrighten v. Board of Trustees of the University of South Carolina, involved a suit by a black applicant to the University of South Carolina Law School who asserted that he had been unlawfully denied admission because of his race. The second case, Elmore v. Rice, involved a challenge to South Carolina’s all-white Democratic primary. Both of these cases were assigned to Waring’s colleague Judge George Bell Timmerman because they were filed in the Columbia courthouse.

Timmerman contacted Waring to request that he accept responsibility for the law school case because he believed that his prior service on the university’s board of trustees created a conflict of interest. Aware of Timmerman’s general disdain for civil rights cases, Waring suggested that he also assume responsibility for the recently filed white primary case, on the dubious proposition that they were somehow related. Timmerman was “delighted” with Waring’s suggestion and readily agreed to transfer that case to Waring as well.18

The law school admissions case proved to be straightforward. The facts presented bore a close resemblance to Gaines v. Canada, and there was no question that the State of South Carolina had a duty to provide its black citizens with equal access to professional training programs. The parties stipulated that the applicant, John H. Wrighten, was qualified for admission but for one fact, his race, and that the state’s only law school, at the University of South Carolina, admitted only white students. Wrighten’s attorneys informed Waring that they were not challenging Plessy’s separate but equal doctrine. Consequently, Waring ruled that his decision would not reach the “justice or injustice, propriety or impropriety, of racial segregation in higher education.” Waring observed that segregation was a political question of whether a particular state wished as a matter of policy to “sustain the financial burdens of segregation.”19

Waring ruled on July 12, 1947, that Wrighten’s right to equal protection of the laws was violated by the University of South Carolina’s denial of his admission to the state’s only law school. He gave the state three options: admit Wrighten to the University of South Carolina Law School, close the university’s law school to all citizens, or establish a separate but equal law school to provide legal training for Wrighten and two other qualified black applicants. The state selected the last option, undertaking the burdensome duty of constructing a new law school on the campus of the historically black South Carolina State College. The cost to South Carolina taxpayers was $700,000 for the first year of the new law school’s operations, equivalent in today’s dollars to $9 million.

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