The Southern Case for School SegregationKilpatrick, James Jackson
History
The Southern Case for School Segregation
Kilpatrick, James Jackson
African Americans -- Segregation; Segregation -- Southern States
To this we may add that, when seventeen States and the Congress of
the United States have for more than three-quarters of a century
required segregation of the races in the public schools, and when
this has received the approval of the leading appellate courts
of the country including the unanimous approval of the Supreme
Court of the United States at a time when that Court included
Chief Justice Taft and Justices Stone, Holmes and Brandeis,
it is a late day to say that such segregation is violative of
fundamental constitutional rights. It is hardly reasonable
to suppose that legislative bodies over so wide a territory,
including the Congress of the United States, and great judges of
high courts have knowingly defied the Constitution for so long a
period or that they have acted in ignorance of the meaning of its
provisions. The constitutional principle is the same now that it
has been throughout this period; and if conditions have changed
so that segregation is no longer wise, this is a matter for the
legislatures and not for the courts. _The members of the judiciary
have no more right to read their ideas of sociology into the
Constitution than their ideas of economics._ [Emphasis supplied.]
In the course of time, to be sure, the Warren court was to do
precisely what Judge Parker said judges ought never to do, but
nearly three years were to elapse before that famous decree would
descend upon the South. Meanwhile, the other three cases, in Kansas,
Virginia, and Delaware, were still to be tried. They followed the
Clarendon pattern rather closely. In Topeka, counsel for the Negro
plaintiffs made little effort to show physical inequalities in the
city’s white and Negro schools. The city was then operating eighteen
white schools and four Negro schools, under a State law permitting,
but not compelling, racial separation. The trial court found as a
fact (98 F. Supp. 797) that the facilities were substantially equal:
“It is obvious that absolute equality of physical facilities is
impossible of attainment.” The broader question presented by the
plaintiffs “poses a question not free from difficulty,” but Judge
Walter A. Huxman and his colleagues in Kansas was no more disposed
than Judge Parker and Judge Timmerman in South Carolina to upset
long-established precedents. The three-judge court unanimously upheld
segregation in the Topeka schools.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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