Judges: Interpreter in the Front Line

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cases, the country's lowest-ranking federal judges can overrule the highest state judges. In 1908, district judges acquired wide-ranging power over cases in which state laws and actions are challenged as unconstitutional. If they so choose, federal judges can sometimes make litigants go to state courts first—a handy delaying technique for segregationist Southern judges.

Senatorial Courtesy. Indeed, the whole selection system may produce judges more attuned to local prejudice than to national principle. By law and by custom, the President appoints federal judges with the Senate's advice and consent. But if one of the state's Senators protests that the judicial nominee is "personally objectionable" to him, the whole Senate usually honors his veto. A lawyer's best route to the bench, therefore, is electioneering for Senators and the President. As chairman of the Judiciary Committee, the chief enforcer of "senatorial courtesy" is Mississippi Segregationist James O. Eastland. If he disapproves, a President's nominee may never make it unless he is "traded out" for one of Eastland's own favorite candidates for another judgeship.

In this situation, Southern Democratic Senators have managed to load the Southern bench with segregationists. Having no Southern Republican Senators to contend with, President Eisenhower managed to appoint some first-rate Southern Republican judges—notably, Elbert Tuttle and John Minor Wisdom of the trail-blazing U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which has often kept the Constitution alive in the South. But Ike also had to trade with Eastland for several segregationists, and John Kennedy recoiled from offending Southern Democrats whose Senate votes he needed. Of Kennedy's eight Deep South appointees, four verge on racism.

Among the Kennedy appointees entrenched for life in Southern district courts: Mississippi's Judge W. Harold Cox, 65, who once called Negro would-be voters "chimpanzees"; Louisiana's Judge E. Gordon West, 52, who called the Supreme Court's 1954 school ruling "one of the truly regrettable decisions of all time"; and Georgia's Judge J. Robert Elliott, 57, who once said: "I don't want these pinks, radicals and black voters to outvote those who are trying to preserve our segregation laws and traditions." Little can be done about such Jim CroMagnons short of impeachment—a tactic used successfully only four times since 1789.

Shotgun in Bed. In the interests of constitutional government, other judges have stood fast against angry Negroes, Northern militants, Southern thugs, canny state lawyers and waves of state laws designed to perpetuate segregation. Many judges have been ostracized by old friends, abused by nocturnal phone callers, wiretapped by state agents, threatened with death. So hounded was South Carolina's Judge J. Waties Waring in the early 1950s that he retired and moved to New York. Refused local police protection in 1955, Alabama's Judge Hobart Grooms slept with a shotgun for months. But slowly, because of such dogged constitutionalists, the pall of segregation is being lifted from the South—from the schoolhouse to the bus station, from the jury box to the ballot box.

Boldly facing down the entire state legislature, Louisiana's Judge J. Skelly Wright