Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
President Russell's two choices to nominate to the Supreme Court, both came in 1949 and would prove pivotal to the decision in Brown v. Board, albeit in different ways. First was Pat McCarran, the anti-Communist Senator from Nevada and head of the Senate Judiciary Committee - his appointment was seen as a way to prove Russell's anti-Communist credentials. The second was James P. Coleman, the Dixiecrat from Mississippi. Adding a Northerner and a Southerner to the Supreme Court was seen as a way to unify the Democratic Party and keep the North-South peace. Indeed, Russell's involvement in this nomination strategy was seen by most establishment Democrats as proof that he sought to keep the peace within the party. However, by 1953, things had changed. President Russell had just won re-election in one of the most divisive presidential elections in recent history.
Chief Justice William Douglas was solidly against school desegregation and a solid believer in issuing a statement on how quickly school desegregation had to be done. He figured if he didn't issue that second opinion, the case would simply return to the Supreme Court. However, he was a prickly person and regularly refused to allow other the justices much input onto the decision. In this way, he alienated many of those justices. This was his decision and he wanted to go down in history as the author of the opinion. That proved to be a fateful mistake. The two Southerners, Coleman and Kennon were solid nos. Robert Jackson, Felix Frankfurter, and Pat McCarran were still undecided. Douglas only had the support of Hugo Black and Pat Burton. And indeed, those would be the only justices to sign onto the Douglas opinion.
The decision in Brown v. Board would perplex lawyers as much as it would perplex the rest of the country. The
Douglas-Black opinion declared that segregation was inherently unequal and a violation of the Equal Protection Clauses and that the remedy was that states would have to immediately desegregate their schools.
The
Kennon-Coleman opinion dissented, stating that the Topeka schools were constitutional in their entirety and thus did not address the remedy.
The
Jackson-McCarran-Arnall opinion concurred in the decision with the Douglas opinion, but dissented otherwise, saying that the schools were unequal because of tangible inequality and that segregated schools had to "affirmatively prove" tangible equality between black and white schools, also tagging on a large essays about how the evils of racial inequality encourages the evils of Communism. The Jackson opinion did not address remedies.
On the question of unconstitutionality, the
Frankfurter-Reed opinion failed to address the issue entirely, saying that the nature of the argument about the 14th Amendment was unnecessary and that the case should be returned to the lower courts for further factual arguments on whether segregation is "inherently" unequal due to the psychological effects. They only ruled that when pressed, the remedy was for most schools to "desegregate with deliberate speed" if ruled against.
Legal scholars doing the math, found that there was a very slim majority for a legal proposition. Namely, 5 justices concluded that at a minimum, segregated schools with tangible inequalities were unconstitutional judges and 5 justices concluded that if found unconstitutional, the solution would be at to a minimum be to desegregated with "all deliberate speed." However, this was a shaky conclusion as those were not the same 5 justices.
The political firestorm exploded when two of those judges, both Jackson and McCarran, died shortly after issuing their opinion. The math for desegregation immediately went to 3 against, 2 for, and 2 not commenting. President Russell denounced the decision as ludicrous, overly complicated, and with no meaning legal force. With the two court vacancies, he declared that he would with or without the Senate appoint judges that would overturn a decision he called the worst in history. The Republicans saw a chance to build party unity. In response, all 49 Republican Senators (a special election in Ohio meant Republicans took back the Senate) signed onto the "American Manifesto", which declared that they would not appoint any justice selected by President Russell picked for the sole purpose of overturning Brown v. Board. In response, all 26 Southern Democrats (from the 13 former Confederate States) signed onto the Southern Manifesto, which declared their opposition and total resistance to an illegitimate "Frankenstein" opinion. The last to sign was Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed after a direct appeal from President Russell. The 21 Northern Democrats in the party sheepishly refused to comment.
Senate Majority Leader Richard Nixon made the fateful call to refuse to confirm or hear any nominee from President Russell, claiming that the "epochal question of racial equality" in America had to be settled by the 1954 midterms and that any nominee selected by Russell would be a closet segregationist at best. Northern Democrats rallied behind the party when Russell called the bluff, nominating Tom Clark, a liberal Texan known for his opposition to the KKK and segregation, as well as the Republican Earl Warren, from Richard Nixon's home state. Nixon refused to hear hearings for either, outraging Northern Democrats, who immediately argued that Nixon had no real interests in civil rights, but rather only an interest in battering the Democratic Party. Democrats abandoned the Senate, denying a quora for any other activity, as both parties abandoned DC in preparation for the nasty 1954 midterm elections, where many Congressional candidates called each other KKK members, Communist party members, crypto-Nazis, homosexuals, n*****-lovers, miscegenationists, hermaphrodites, mental invalids, possessors of abnormally shrunken organs, or any combination of the above.
However, just weeks before the end of the campaign, the death of Senator Robert Taft created a 48-48 Senate as the Democratic Governor of Ohio appointed a Democrat to replace him. This meant that the Vice-President could flip control of the chamber to the Democrats. Almost immediately, the Senate rammed through both of President Russell's Supreme Court picks, Sam Ervin, the famous and brilliant segregationist from North Carolina, as well as John Malcolm Patterson, the ferociously segregationist and KKK-endorsed Attorney General of Alabama, who was notoriously only 34. The Republicans cried foul, further poisoning the national atmosphere.
