You would have to watch those Progressive Supreme Court rulings during the 1870s. It would be easy to create what that era would call Dred Scott decisions and what we would call Roe v Wade or Bush v Gore decsions. Supreme Court decisions that deviate far from what the public will tolerate have two problems:
1. They create a lot of resentment against the "activist" Supreme Court.
and more importantly
2. As we saw in both Roe v Wade (which Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently commented on to this effect) and Bush v Gore (which Sandra Day O'Connor just commented on in I believe Salon, it does the country no favors when the Supreme Court "rescues" the country from traveling the "hard yards" of the political debate that actually changes people's minds. The country would have been better served to fight it's abortion battles state by state during the 1970s and CREATE a consensus around abortion then to have Justice Blackmun write an opinion that was crafted essentially to protect doctors and refused even to attempt to answer the question of when during the course of pregnancy independent human life begins. Actually read the text of Roe v Wade sometime.
In doing so, the Supreme Court, Dred Scott style, left plenty of room for absolutists on both sides to carve out political space and polarize the country on the issue, making it a hot button issue that could blind working class Americans to their own rational class interests. On one hand, many Americans were driven to support conservative candidates they might not have otherwise with images of aborted fetuses in bottles indistinguishable from babies being saved on prenatal units. On the other hand, women voters found themselves overlooking "New Democrat" Senators, Congresspeople and Presidents and presidential candidates who took contributions from big business and made concessions that took away hard won gains in areas from collective bargaining to bankruptcy protection for medical and credit card and student loan debtors to welfare "reform" --as long as the candidate in question upheld the Roe v Wade formula for women's abortion rights. All because the Supreme Court stepped in and legislated from the bench.
So no, I do not see a Supreme Court changing anything, just creating insurgency if they try. The only way to force the South to change would have been to decide from the outset that the former Confederacy was going to be administered as US Territories with no Congressional Representation for the next 99 years --until the last slaveowners were dead and long in their graves. After reading Katzelson's work "Fear Itself", I am convinced that only that way could the New Deal have truly run it's course to bring the US to the democratic rights Europeans take for granted.