TRAIL BLAZERS ON THE BENCH

The South's U.S. Judges Lead a Civil Rights Offensive

THE 100 whites who marched behind a coffin into the Louisiana State Capitol at Baton Rouge last week were dressed for a funeral--the women in black veils, their sons in neat dark suits. The adults were New Orleans parents; the children, pupils assigned to the city's newly integrated public schools. And in their coffin was the blackened, singed effigy of a man they have little reason to love: J. (for James) Skelly Wright, the tough-minded U.S. District judge who had ordered New Orleans schools to begin integration (TIME, Nov. 28).

New Orleans-born Judge Wright, who has been forced to accept round-the-clock police protection and to take an unlisted telephone number, is the latest addition to an honor roll without precedent in U.S. legal annals. In the wake of its desegregation decision of 1954, the Supreme Court empowered Federal District judges to set the timing of "all deliberate speed," to approve or veto school-board desegregation plans, and to use every court power to see that integration was carried out. Many of the federal judges saddled with civil rights burdens were Southerners whose personal emotions ran contrary to the law they had to implement; many acted at the sacrifice of friendships and political hopes, but collectively they launched one of the great, orderly offensives of legal history.

Notable among the civil rights trail blazers:

Ronald Norwood Davies, 55, U.S. District Court for North Dakota. One of the few Northerners to play a key role in any local segregation issue, sober-minded, Minnesota-born Ronald Davies was virtually unknown until Aug. 26, 1957, when he reported to preside in Little Rock for a session of the Eastern District Court of Arkansas. There, in Civil Case 3113, without precedent to guide him, Davies issued the injunction forbidding Governor Orval Faubus and his National Guard officers from interfering with the integration of Little Rock's Central High School. President Eisenhower had to send in federal troops to back him up, but the injunction stuck.

Walter Edward Hoffman, 53, Federal District Court of Eastern Virginia. When he took his oath of judicial office six years ago, muscular, mild-mannered "Beef" Hoffman turned to his Methodist pastor and asked for a prayer. "This procedure may be a bit unusual," he remarked, "but it is never out of place." A Republican, Hoffman was born in New Jersey, but spent his long career as a trial lawyer in Virginia. His major legal monument is a series of important decisions in 1957 and 1958 that led to token integration of Norfolk's public schools. With unfailing sympathetic words. Judge Hoffman ruled in case after case that Virginia's much-imitated pupil-placement system--a Governor-appointed state board with sweeping powers to locate students in specific schools--was an evasive effort to keep schools segregated. In February 1959, Norfolk gave up, assigned eight Negro pupils to white schools.

John Minor Wisdom, 55, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, the Canal Zone). New Orleans-born John Wisdom, a topflight corporation lawyer and an Eisenhower Republican, was appointed to the federal bench in 1957. Since then, says a New Orleans attorney, "he has disappointed a lot of his enemies and surprised many of his friends." The reactions stem from the quality of his tough decisions: alone or in tandem with fellow Fifth Circuit judges, Wisdom has outlawed a Louisiana law that forbade Negroes to participate in sports events with whites, and ruled unconstitutional another Louisiana law requiring the N.A.A.C.P. to reveal its membership lists. Last year, serving on a special three-judge federal court, Wisdom defended the legality of the Civil Rights Commission's investigative procedures, although the other two judges voted against him. The Supreme Court later upheld Wisdom's dissent.

Richard Taylor Rives, 65, presiding judge on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Rives (rhymes with Eaves) is a conservative, tradition-minded Democrat who passed the bar exam at 19 after "reading law" in the office of a family friend, won his court appointment in 1951. In his handful of segregation cases, Rives has invariably decided for liberalism, but not always without a twinge of regret: in April, he upheld a ruling of District Court Judge Frank Johnson Jr. that Montgomery could not segregate its public parks, but noted that the decision was a Pyrrhic one for the Negro plaintiffs since the city was sure to close the parks rather than obey (it did). Last year also, in the Goldsby case, Rives established the far-reaching principle that Negroes cannot be convicted of crime in counties that bar them from jury service.

Frank Minis Johnson Jr., 42, U.S. District Court for Middle Alabama. Born in Republican north Alabama hill country, which never had slaves or plantations, "Straight Edge" Johnson (a nickname inherited from Grandfather James Johnson, an oldtime Republican sheriff of rural Fayette County) was nominated for the federal bench at the age of 37 in 1955. He has probably faced more tough segregation cases than any other Southern judge. Johnson is crisply tough on lawyers, does not always side with the Government in civil rights cases. He handed down the original decisions desegregating Montgomery's parks and bus lines; last February, however, he upheld the expulsion of six Negroes from Alabama College for taking part in a racial demonstration, sharply chided them for improperly violating public order. "If you compliment me because you think it's good law, I appreciate it," he says. "If you compliment me because you like the decision, I don't appreciate it. If you criticize me because you don't like a decision. I don't care for that either. If you criticize me because you think it's bad law, that's fair criticism, and I don't resent it."

Ben Clarkson Connolly, 50, Federal District Court for Southern Texas.

Judge Connally, a liberal Democrat and the only son of Texas' stem-winding ex-Senator Tom Connally, was appointed to the bench in 1949. In 1957, facing a grandstanding, segregationist school board in Houston (some of the members vowed to go to jail rather than accept integration), he gradually started building a "climate of inevitability." He kept developments out of headlines with hearings in chamber instead of court ("I don't believe battering our problems around in the press does any good"), occasionally issued well-timed public blasts against the board's schemes for token integration. After parrying the board's repertory of stalling tactics for three years. Connally himself came up with a plan for integrating the first grade in Houston's 114 elementary schools as the first step in a twelve-year program to integrate at all grade levels. Last September Houston, the nation's largest segregated school district (173 schools, 170,000 students), took the first step with no violence. "I am thankful," said one segregationist school-board member, "that he gave us as much time as he did."

William Augustus Bootle, 58. Federal District Court for Middle Georgia. Born in Round O, S.C. (pop. 75), homespun Judge Bootle was elevated to the bench from private law practice in 1954, has since gained local renown for his firm but friendly treatment of Georgia's legions of moonshiners. In September 1959, he upheld the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for the first time in a U.S. District Court by enjoining the diehard registrars of Georgia's Terrell County from discriminating against Negroes who wanted to vote. In his model injunction, he examined every step of the voting process, firmly specified how the registrars were to treat Negro voters, i.e., they were to be allowed to keep their places in line without yielding to whites. "If a judge is happy or sad to get a case," says Bootle, "then he shouldn't get it."

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