Tony Mauro has an interesting article in Legal Times about the Supreme Court argument in the Seattle and Louisville cases. (HatTip, again, to Howard Bashman)
The headline — “Race-Based Programs May Face Final Curtain in Supreme Court” — and sub-head — “Civil rights pioneers fear they’re witnessing the dismantling of a half-century of jurisprudence” — suggest, accurately, that the article will cover the debate largely from the point of view of those who fear the dismantling, rather than fulfillment, of Brown v. Board of Education. One of those fearful pioneers was William Coleman Jr.
In 1954, William Coleman Jr. sat next to Thurgood Marshall as he argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court.
In the same chamber on Dec. 4, Coleman, now 86, watched as the arc of the landmark Brown decision took a stunning turn. He heard the Brown decision being invoked as a possible reason for striking down modern-day efforts to keep public schools integrated.
“I was shocked,” said Coleman, now senior counselor at O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, D.C. “It’s the most ridiculous thing in the world.”
….
“The difference between Brown and these cases is night and day,” said Coleman. Speaking of the Court in general, he added, “They don’t live in the United States that I live in.”
….
“I was disturbed that in a case involving the rights of black people to get an education, nobody was representing black people,” said Coleman, who, in 1948, was the first black law clerk at the Supreme Court. “None of them had the training and background in this area. It was the most poorly argued case I’ve ever seen.” Coleman added wistfully that the prospects for saving the race-conscious programs might have been better “if Thurgood Marshall had been there, or Jack Greenberg, or myself….”
Coleman was a fine lawyer in his day, and may still be, but these cases were not about “the rights of black people to get an education.” They were about whether the right to be free from state-imposed racial discrimination should be sacrificed to produce varying amounts of “racial balance” in the schools.
Notably, in these two cities blacks were probably as likely as whites to be victims of that discrimination, since their choice of a neighborhood school that, in the view of school district officials, had too many blacks could be denied, forcing them to attend a distant school.
