National Affairs: TRAIL BLAZERS ON THE BENCH

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The South's U.S. Judges Lead a Civil Rights Offensive

THE 100 whites who marched behind a coffin into the Louisiana State Capitol at Baton Rouge last week were dressed for a funeral—the women in black veils, their sons in neat dark suits. The adults were New Orleans parents; the children, pupils assigned to the city's newly integrated public schools. And in their coffin was the blackened, singed effigy of a man they have little reason to love: J. (for James) Skelly Wright, the tough-minded U.S. District judge who had ordered New Orleans schools to begin integration (TIME, Nov. 28).

New Orleans-born Judge Wright, who has been forced to accept round-the-clock police protection and to take an unlisted telephone number, is the latest addition to an honor roll without precedent in U.S. legal annals. In the wake of its desegregation decision of 1954, the Supreme Court empowered Federal District judges to set the timing of "all deliberate speed," to approve or veto school-board desegregation plans, and to use every court power to see that integration was carried out. Many of the federal judges saddled with civil rights burdens were Southerners whose personal emotions ran contrary to the law they had to implement; many acted at the sacrifice of friendships and political hopes, but collectively they launched one of the great, orderly offensives of legal history.

Notable among the civil rights trail blazers:

Ronald Norwood Davies, 55, U.S. District Court for North Dakota. One of the few Northerners to play a key role in any local segregation issue, sober-minded, Minnesota-born Ronald Davies was virtually unknown until Aug. 26, 1957, when he reported to preside in Little Rock for a session of the Eastern District Court of Arkansas. There, in Civil Case 3113, without precedent to guide him, Davies issued the injunction forbidding Governor Orval Faubus and his National Guard officers from interfering with the integration of Little Rock's Central High School. President Eisenhower had to send in federal troops to back him up, but the injunction stuck.

Walter Edward Hoffman, 53, Federal District Court of Eastern Virginia. When he took his oath of judicial office six years ago, muscular, mild-mannered "Beef" Hoffman turned to his Methodist pastor and asked for a prayer. "This procedure may be a bit unusual," he remarked, "but it is never out of place." A Republican, Hoffman was born in New Jersey, but spent his long career as a trial lawyer in Virginia. His major legal monument is a series of important decisions in 1957 and 1958 that led to token integration of Norfolk's public schools. With unfailing sympathetic words. Judge Hoffman ruled in case after case that Virginia's much-imitated pupil-placement system—a Governor-appointed state board with sweeping powers to locate students in specific schools—was an evasive effort to keep schools segregated. In February 1959, Norfolk gave up, assigned eight Negro pupils to white schools.