On March 22

On this day in ...

... 1956 (55 years ago today) an Alabama court convicted Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. of organizing African Americans in Montgomery to engage in a boycott of buses. The 27-year-old civil rights leader received a $500 fine -- converted into a 386-day jail sentence that was suspended pending appeal. The 17-week-old boycott would last till December of the same year. (image credit) It ended following the issuance in November of Browder v. Gayle, 352 U.S. 903, a Supreme Court judgment that outlawed segregation in public transportation.

(Prior March 22 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On January 7

On this day in ...
... 1891 (120 years ago today), Zora Neale Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, the 5th of 8 children whose father was a preacher-carpenter-farmer and whose mother was a schoolteacher. She grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the 1st all-African-American incorporated town. (credit for Library of Congress image of Hurston visiting Eatonville in 1935) Hurston started college at Howard University, then accepted a scholarship to Barnard College, where she was the only African-American student. After earning an anthropology degree there, she was a graduate student at Columbia. As IntLawGrrl Hope Lewis has written, Hurston became an "anthropologist of Black cultures in the southern United States, Haiti, and Jamaica." Hurston taught at what's now North Carolina Central University, and established a dramatic arts school. She also wrote, "four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays"; indeed, she was a principal writer during the Harlem Renaissance. Among her most noted works is the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). In 1955, she published a letter decrying "ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court" in Brown v. Board of Education "as insulting rather than honoring my race." Hurston died at a welfare home in 1960, and was buried in an unmarked grave.

(Prior January 7 posts are here, here, and here.)

On November 20

On this day in ...
... 1910 (100 years ago today), a daugher, Anna Pauline, was borh in Baltimore, Maryland, to William H. and Agnes Murray. In 1938, following her graduation from Hunter College, she applied to the University of North Carolina School of Law but was denied admission because of her African-American heritage. Entering, Howard University's law school, she was graduated 1st in her class in 1944. When Harvard Law refused her -- because she was a woman -- she earned an LL.M. at the University of California, Berkeley. Later, Dr. Pauli Murray (right) became: the 1st African-American person to earn a J.S.D. at Yale, a professor at Brandeis University; a strategist on Brown v. Board of Education; a founder of the 1st women's law periodical; a cofounder of the National Organization for Women; and the 1st African-American woman priest in the Episcopal Church. Murray, whose career was the subject of a recent conference panel, died from cancer in 1985.

(Prior November 20 posts are here, here, and here.)

On April 20

On this day in ...
.... 1971, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the position of the Nixon Administration and unanimously held that the Constitution permits busing of schoolchildren as a means to eliminate the vestiges of de jure segregation. (credit for photo of "the first African American to attend an integrated school in Charlotte") In an aspect of the judgment that appeared more important to The New York Times' reporter than the holding applicable to the North Carolina school district at bar, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger's decision for the Court

excluded 'de facto' segregation of the North from today's ruling by declaring, 'We do not reach in this case the question whether a showing that school segregation is a consequence of other types of state action, with out any discriminatory action by the school authorities, is a constitutional violation requiring remedial action by a school desegregation decree.'

Relying the Swann precedent in their dissents in the 2007 Seattle Schools case were Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens, the latter of whom celebrates his 90th birthday today.

(Prior April 20 posts are here, here, and here)

On February 1

On this day in ...
... 1960 (50 years ago today), 4 freshmen enrolled at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat at a lunch counter designated "whites only" at the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro. The men, all African Americans, were refused service yet stayed in their seats, an act of "passive resistance and peaceful sit-down demand helped ignite a youth-led movement to challenge racial inequality throughout the South." (photo credit) Today the building that housed the store where the sit-in movement began is being remade as the International Civil Rights Museum.

(Prior February 1 posts are here and here.)

Mary Church Terrell, transnational foremother

As today's guest blogger at IntLawGrrls, I would like to dedicate my contribution to Mary Church Terrell (left).
Born on September 23, 1863, in Memphis, Tennessee, Terrell was a women’s rights activist, peace activist, and civil rights leader:

► In the United States she became known, among other things, for her activism and leadership in the suffrage and desegregation movements. She was the 1st president of the National Federation of Colored Women and a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (photo credit)

► Internationally, Mary Church Terrell became known around the world for raising awareness through her speeches about the situation and achievements of African Americans. She was the vice president of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, as well as a member of the American delegation to and a speaker at the International Congresses of Women in Berlin, German,y in 1904 and 1919. Mary Church Terrell was also chosen by the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom as a speaker at the 1919 Quinquennial International Peace Conference in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1937, she delivered an address before the International Assembly of the World Fellowship of Faith in London, England.

Terrell was the author of numerous articles and short stories on segregation and the disenfranchisement of African Americans in the United States and, in 1940, she wrote her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World.

She worked consistently for a better future for all. As she said in a speech before the National American Women's Suffrage Association on February 18, 1898:

With courage, born of success achieved in the past, with a keen sense of the responsibility which we shall continue to assume, we look forward to a future large with promise and hope.

Terrell died at age 90, at her home in Maryland, on July 24, 1954 -- 2 months after the U.S. Supreme Court held racial segregation of schoolchildren unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.

On January 12

On this day in ...

... 1948, on a Monday just 4 days after the conclusion of a 2-day oral argument, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a per curiam judgment declaring that Oklahoma must afford petitioner Ada Sipuel Fisher (right) -- whom the Court described as "a Negro, concededly qualified" --admission to the state law school where "many white applicants have been afforded legal education." The brief opinion in Sipuel v. Board of Regents added that Oklahoma "must provide it for her in conformity with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and provide it as soon as it does for applicants of any other group." But Oklahoma ignored the order. The Court, in Fisher v. Hurst, a decision issued the next month, refused to issue a writ of mandamus on behalf of petitioner. As I've posted, the dissent by Justice Wiley B. Rutledge was preceded by a bench memorandum from his law clerk, John Paul Stevens. Eventually, Sipuel Fisher was permitted to attend the law school, albeit under harsh conditions; she graduated in 1952 and returned to her hometown to practice law. In 1992 she was appointed to the Board of Regents of the university that once had excluded her. She died in 1995. (credit for oil portrait of Sipuel Fisher, by Mitsuno Ishii Reedy, which is on display in the rotunda at the Oklahoma State Capitol)

... 1992, in a national referendum, the people of Mali approved a new Constitution. According to the Library of Congress, the 1992 Constitution, "[l]ike its two predecessors, ... is based on the French model." (The West African country, flag at left, won independence from France in 1960.) The 1992 Constitution has been amended once, in 1999, "to incorporate some revisions of the electoral system and strengthen the judicial system"; those changes were not submitted to popular vote.

On November 13

On this day in ...
... 1956, by means of a per curiam opinion, reported at 352 U.S. 903, which comprises 1 sentence and cites to Brown v. Board of Education and 2 other precedents, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed that Alabama segregation laws that provoked the Montgomery bus boycott were unconstitutional. Among the leaders of that year-long boycott were Rosa Parks (left) the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Court's ruling in favor of the decision of a 3-judge district court in Browder v. Gayle (1956), the New York Times wrote,

was interpreted as outlawing state or municipal enactments anywhere that require separation of the races on public vehicles. It was thought to have placed a headstone at the grave of Plessy v. [F]erguson.

(credit for 1956 booking photo of Parks following her arrest for violating the segregation law)
... 2000, the 6th session of the Conference of the Parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (logo below right) convened at The Hague. Later in the month this meeting of the so-called COP6 would collapse, primarily "due to the US wanting carbon sinks as part of the agreement (as well as other provisions like nuclear energy, etc.), which received enormous criticism," and to which European Union countries refused to accede.

On October 21

On this day in ...

... 2003 (5 years ago today), a politician who'd made her name opposing desegregation of Boston schools, Louise Day Hicks (right), died at age 87. She was elected to the city's Schools Committee, to its City Council, and to a term in Congress. In the words of the Boston Globe, Hicks "came within 12,000 votes of being elected mayor of Boston in 1967 and earned a national reputation as a symbol of racial divisiveness." In those of an NAACP official: "'She was a tragic figure. She became an object of hate -- and she asked for it.'" She was, as well, a feminist: an attorney, a member of the National Organization of Women, and a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.

... 1952, "following the declaration of a state of emergency in the British colony of Kenya" came the arrest of nationalist leader Jomo Kenyatta and a hundred other Kenyans. Kenyatta was "accused of leading the extremist wing of the Mau Mau and of inciting hatred and violence against Europeans"; 6 months later, he would be convicted and sentenced to 7 years' hard labor. Kenyatta resumed political activity upon his release, becoming Kenya's 1st Prime Minister in 1963 and its 1st President in 1964; today he's featured on the Kenyan bank note at left.

On October 15

On this day in ...
... 1883 (125 years ago today), in a judgment captioned The Civil Rights Cases, the U.S. Supreme Court (right) struck as unconstitutional the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had required that black persons and white persons be treated equally in sectors that, though privately owned, provided to the public services like transportation, lodging, and entertainment. Over a dissent by the 1st Justice John Marshall Harlan, 8 members of the Court ruled that the 14th Amendment governed only state action; private acts of discrimination were deemed outside the scope of that provision of the Constitution. The 13th Amendment, which banned slavery, was acknowledged applicable to private action; however, the majority of the Court reasoned, the discrimination under review was not equivalent to slavery. Congress would not pass another Civil Rights Act until 1957. (image credit)
... 1880, Dr. Marie Stopes (below left) was born in Edinburgh, to a father who was an architect and a mother who was a Shakespeare expert and the 1st woman to graduate from a Scottish university. At age 21, Stopes herself earned a bachelor's degree in botany and geology, with honors, from University College London. (photo credit) After earning doctorates in Britain and Germany, she became the 1st woman on the science faculty at the University of Manchester, and also the 1st to receive a British Royal Society grant to do research in Japan. She is best known for her many straightforward, pathbreaking publications on sex and contraception -- works that drew criticism, to which she responded by suing (unsuccessfully) for libel. She and her husband founded Britain's 1st birth control clinic. It has metamorphosed into Marie Stopes International, a "leading provider of sexual and reproductive healthcare services" -- on account of which it is now at odds with the U.S. government. Before her death in 1958 Stopes uttered many notable quotes, among them:

You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing.

On July 26

On this day in ...
... 1847, Joseph Jenkins Roberts proclaimed Liberia to be an independent republic. Roberts, an African-American man born in Virginia, had moved to Liberia in 1829. The West African land had been purchased from indigenous West Africans in 1822 and maintained as a colony by a U.S.-based group known as the American Colonization Society. The new republic's 1st Constitution was proclaimed in September 1847, and soon after Roberts became its 1st President. The Library of Congress' website observes: "Still a country today, Liberia deals with conflict between descendants of African Americans and indigenous tribes." (credit for photo of 1862 Liberian dollar)
... 1948 (60 years ago today), President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the U.S. armed forces. The Order began:

1. It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale.

On June 8

On this day in ...
... 1978 (30 years ago today), New Zealand-born Naomi James broke the record for sailing 'round-the-world solo by 2 days, arriving in Dartmouth, England, after nearly 9 months at sea. In the course of her 27,000-mile voyage James, 29, also became the 1st woman to sail solo via Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America. James would give up sailing 4 years later on account of seasickness.
... 1953 (55 years ago today), in the case of District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court held that laws passed soon after the Civil War prohibited segregation in restaurants and other places throughout Washington, D.C. An account of the citizens' campaign behind the case is here.

Look On! "Tremé" & Plessy

(Look On! takes occasional note of noteworthy films.)

'I know I am not an American citizen in the eyes of the powers that be.'

With these words the story of an historic New Orleans neighborhood comes full circle.
It was in this neighborhood that even before the Civil War hommes de couleur libré -- free people of color -- led lives of style and culture. It was in this neighborhood that fiery journalists published periodicals calling for equal citizenship. Prompted by their calls, a man of African and European ancestry, Homère Patris Plessy (left), dared on this day in 1892 to defy a new segregation law by sitting in a "white" car. As posted here, his test case ended when the Supreme Court held 8-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) that the Constitution permitted state-mandated segregation as long as facilities were "'equal but separate.'" That decision held sway until Brown v. Board of Education (1954); Plessy's New Orleans home nonetheless continued to thrive as "the oldest black neighborhood in America, the birthplace of the Civil Rights movement in the South and the home of jazz."
Plessy's story is the story of this neighborhood, just as this neighborhood's story is Plessy's. Both are told beautifully in a just-released film that bears the neighborhood's name, "Faubourg Tremé." I saw "Tremé," subtitled "The Untold Story of Black New Orleans," at the San Francisco International Film Festival, where it won a much-deserved Golden Gate Award for Best Bay Area Documentary. The film is screening in the same city again today and elsewhere in the United States in the next months, and is available as well on DVD (right).
Producers Lucie Faulknor, Dawn Logsdon, and Lolis Eric Elie began "Tremé" well before August 29, 2005, the date that water surging in the wake of Hurricane Katrina broke levees and flooded much of New Orleans. The damage done to Tremé and its people thus forms an unsettling frame around the picture the producers initially set out to paint. In pre-Katrina footage neighbors are upbeat, proud of their home. After Katrina they are sapped of spirit. Some leave for good. The grief of those who stay is palpable. One is Louisiana Poet Laureate Brenda Marie Osbey (right). Another is is Glen David Andrews, who speaks of how music saved him from a rough life on the street. He is jubilant as he plays his trombone for the neighborhood. But that is early on. An interview with Andrews soon after Katrina shows that the government's failure to protect him and those close to him left him utterly at a loss. It is he who says:

'I know I am not an American citizen in the eyes of the powers that be.'

In Andrews' words one hears an eerie echo of how Plessy must have felt on reading the Supreme Court's ruling 112 years ago.



(Cross-posted at Slate's Convictions blog)

On October 1, ...

... 2007 (today), celebrate the International Day of Older Persons, 1st proclaimed in a 1990 resolution of the U.N. General Assembly. Among the agencies marking the date is the World Health Organization, which calls older persons "a new power for development" in "our fast ageing world."
... 1962 (45 years ago today), 2 persons were killed and at least 75 injured in Oxford, Miss., amid riots against desegregation of the University of Mississippi. Protests continued despite a televised speech in which President John F. Kennedy urged quiet in the wake of the enrollment of James Meredith, an African-American man, to the state's flagship public university. Meredith required security protection throughout his matriculation; he was graduated in 1963.

On September 28, ...

... 2005, Constance Baker Motley, Senior Judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, died at age 84 of congestive heart failure. Daughter of emigrants from the West Indies, in 1944 she became the 1st African-American woman accepted at Columbia Law School, from which she was graduated in 1946. Soon after she began to work for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. During her 16 years of practice there she "was the only woman on the legal team in the historic legal challenge to school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education," and, as depicted at left, also served as "lead counsel for James Meredith in his successful battle to gain admission to University of Mississippi." Motley won 9 of the 10 cases she argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. Eventually she entered city and state politics in New York. In 1966, she became the 1st African-American woman federal district judge; 20 years later, the 1st woman Chief Judge in New York's Southern District.

... 1961, the United Arab Republic came to an end when the military staged a coup in Damascus. The UAR had been formed on Feb. 1, 1958, as a union of Syria and Egypt; the latter country kept the name for another 10 years, then became the Arab Republic of Egypt on Sept. 2, 1971.

On September 4, ...

... 1957 (50 years ago today), Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus ordered the state's National Guard to surround Central High School and forbid entry to African-American teenagers -- 5 young women and 4 young men known as the "Little Rock 9" -- due to be enrolled pursuant to a school board integration plan in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's holding in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that the Constitution forbids segregation of schoolchildren on the basis of race. The crisis continued for weeks, and on September 25, President Dwight Eisenhower sent the U.S. Army to Little Rock to escort the children to and from school. The school board's bid to halt desegregation the following year prompted Cooper v. Aaron, in which the Supreme Court, meeting in a special summer session, unanimously reaffirmed Brown and asserted judicial supremacy in interpretation of the Constitution. (Legal History Blog's roundup of books on the Little Rock crisis is here.)
... 1957 (50 years ago today), following a 3-year inquiry, a government-sponsored commission headed by Sir John Wolfenden issued a 155-page "Report on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution," which concluded that "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults should no longer be a criminal offence." Supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury as well as health and law enforcement professionals, the recommendations paved the way for England's decriminalization of sodomy in 1967. Disregard of these events in 1986 became one basis on which the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, held that the U.S. Constitution forbids criminalization of same-sex sodomy.
... 1962 (45 years ago today), U.S. President John F. Kennedy issued a statement warning Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that the placement in Cuba of "long-range missiles would raise the gravest issues," as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (at left, conferring with the President that same year), wrote in his 1978 biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times (ch. 22). The statement derived from an August 29 memorandum on national self-defense in international law, prepared by Assistant Attorney General Norbert Schlei. The Presidential statement proved a precursor of the Cuban Missile Crisis of the following month, about which more later this anniversary year. For now, consider Schlesinger's account of the President's response when Schlei invoked the 1823 Monroe Doctrine as a basis for U.S. claims to "special rights" in the Western Hemisphere:

John Kennedy snapped: 'The Monroe Doctrine. What the hell is that?' -- meaning: what the hell standing did it have in international law? The answer was, of course, none; and Kennedy, who knew how much Latin Americans resented unilateral declarations from Washington, never mentioned the doctrine throughout the subsequent crisis.

On June 7, ...

... 1929, the Holy See attained sovereign status when the Italian Foreign Minister and an envoy of Pope Pius XI, meeting in Rome, exchanged copies of the Lateran Treaty that had been ratified earlier in the year.
... 1892 (115 years ago today), at Press Street railway station in New Orleans, an American man of African and European ancestry, born Homère Patris Plessy fewer than 3 months after the Emancipation Proclamation, boarded the "White Only" car of a train headed for Covington, Louisiana. A detective dragged him out and arrested him for violating the Separate Car Act of 1890, which authorized imprisonment for defying the requirement that railroads in Louisiana segregate passengers by race. Plessy (pictured at left) and the Citizens Committee that had recruited him pressed his civil disobedience challenge all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In its 1896 judgment in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court sustained the maintenance of "separate but equal" facilities by a vote of 7 to 1. The Court reversed itself in 1954, to join the view of Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter in Plessy, that such de jure segregation violates the Constitution.

On May 17, ...

...1954, in Bolling v. Sharpe and Brown v. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Constitution's 5th and 14th Amendments forbid segregation of public schoolchildren on account of their racial heritage. NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, who'd argued 1 of the consolidated cases, predicted to the New York Times "that the people of the South, the region most heavily affected, were law-abiding and would not 'resist the Supreme Court.'" Although some schools, like this one in Washington, D.C., did integrate quickly, Marshall's prediction proved overly optimistic. (1955 photo by Thomas J. O'Halloran of Washington's Barnard School courtesy of Library of Congress.)
...2005, U.S. Army Spc. Sabrina Harman, who appeared on some of the photographs taken of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, was sentenced to 6 months in prison the day after a she was found guilty on 6 of 7 charges. She apologized at her sentencing hearing: "'My actions potentially caused an increased hatred and insurgency towards the United States, putting soldiers and civilians at greater risk. ... I take full responsibility for my actions.' "