The Supreme Court: A Southern Justice

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As it was, reaction to the Haynsworth appointment was not as outraged as might have been expected. The N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins promised to fight Senate confirmation, and was swiftly joined by the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s George Meany. Paul Jennings, president of the International Union of Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, accused Haynsworth of antilabor positions in two decisions involving the rights of Southern textile-mill workers to organize for collective bargaining. Should labor and civil rights groups succeed in blocking Haynsworth's appointment in the Senate —an unlikely possibility—the coalition would be reminiscent of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and N.A.A.C.P. campaign that kept Judge John J. Parker from the Court in 1930.

Nixonian Court. Legal opinion was divided on the auguries to be found in Haynsworth's rulings; the caution stemmed in part from the fact that the Supreme Court historically has had a way of turning conservatives into liberals, and vice versa. Yale Law School Professor Fred Rodell dismissed Haynsworth with the remark that he is a "mediocre slob," but one liberal federal judge in the South found the appointment encouraging. "The conservatives are going to be startled to death by that man," he said. "On labor matters he's quite conservative. But on civil liberties—search and seizure, arrest, right to counsel—I think he's as advanced as anyone now on the Supreme Court."

Haynsworth's record on civil rights suggests an inclination to adhere to the Supreme Court's decisions, but not to try to break any new ground. The impression is that of a reluctant and a somewhat mechanical interpreter of the high court's direction. In Green v. County School Board of New Kent County last year, Haynsworth wrote a majority opinion upholding "freedom of choice" plans for school integration—plans that are a characteristic Southern fallback position intended to circumvent Supreme Court decisions ordering desegregation. Haynsworth's essentially negative opinion was that it is enough for the court to declare segregation illegal without acting affirmatively to end it.

Thus, in Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County in 1963, Haynsworth also voted with the 2-1 majority to approve the closing of all the county's schools as one way to avoid integrating them. "When there is a total cessation of operations of an independent school system, there is no denial of equal protection of the laws," Haynsworth wrote. Yet from 1959, when the public schools closed, until 1964, when they reopened, Prince Edward's 1,700 Negro children went virtually without education, while the whites opened a "private" system for their own offspring. In both Green and Griffin, Haynsworth was later overturned by Warren's Supreme Court.