[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 71 (Monday, May 17, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E987-E988]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page E987]]
                           JOHN MINOR WISDOM

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. THOMAS E. PETRI

                              of wisconsin

                    in the house of representatives

                          Monday, May 17, 1999

  Mr. PETRI. Mr. Speaker, John Minor Wisdom, an outstanding American, 
Judge, son of the South, and Republican passed on this weekend. I 
submit the following review of his eventful legal and political career 
which appeared in the New York Times today, to be entered in the Record 
at this point.

                [From the New York Times, May 17, 1999]

John Minor Wisdom, Appeals Court Judge Who Helped end Segregation, Dies 
                                 at 93

                             (By Jack Bass)

       Judge John Minor Wisdom, the New Orleans legal scholar who 
     wrote opinion after opinion that desegregated courthouses 
     throughout the Deep South and put blacks on juries, in the 
     voting booth, in state legislatures and in integrated 
     classrooms, died on Saturday in New Orleans. He would have 
     turned 94 today.
       He had remained active in the 1990's, saying he had no 
     interest in retirement.
       Judge Wisdom wrote the opinion that allowed James Meredith 
     to attend the University of Mississippi, the first black 
     student to do so. In 1967 he wrote the majority opinion in 
     United States v. Jefferson County, the case that, as he 
     recalled, ``really started affirmative action.''
       His wide-ranging judicial opinions over more than four 
     decades kept public schools open in Louisiana when officials 
     tried to close them rather than integrate, ordered Florida to 
     desegregate even its reformatories and told sports 
     authorities to desegregate the boxing ring.
       He accomplished this after President Dwight D. Eisenhower 
     named him in 1957 to the United States Court of Appeals for 
     the Fifth Circuit, a jurisdiction that then including six 
     states of the old Confederacy--Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, 
     Mississippi, Texas and Georgia.
       It was four judges of the Fifth Circuit whose opinions 
     helped shape the civil rights laws of the 1950's and 60's, 
     changing forever the Deep South. Judge Wisdom was the last 
     survivor of the men who came to be called ``the Four,'' a 
     term used in a dissenting opinion by a fellow judge from 
     Mississippi who saw them as destroyers of the Old South that 
     he cherished. The others were Elbert P. Tuttle of Georgia, 
     John R. Brown of Texas and Richard T. Rives of Alabama. All 
     but Judge Rives were Republicans.
       The judges of the Fifth Circuit amplified the mandate of 
     Brown v. Board of Education, the epochal Supreme Court 
     decision of May 17, 1954, that nullified state laws and state 
     constitutional provisions allowing or requiring the 
     segregation of black and white students in public schools 
     because of their race. Among the Four's trail-blazing 
     decisions of the 1960's, most of them written by Judge 
     Wisdom, were the following:
       In 1961, the judges struck down Louisiana's school-closing 
     law, after St. Helena Parish voted to close its public 
     schools rather than submit to desegregation.
       In 1962, they agreed that James H. Meredith had been turned 
     down for admission to the University of Mississippi because 
     of his race, and ordered Ole Miss to admit him. In the 
     court's opinion, Judge Wisdom wrote that university officials 
     had ``engaged in a carefully calculated campaign of delay, 
     harassment and masterly inactivity.'' Mr. Meredith became the 
     first black to go to public school with white students in 
     accordance with the Brown decision.
       In 1963, the judges ordered the desegregation of all public 
     parks, playgrounds and community and cultural centers in New 
     Orleans.
       In 1964, they struck down the jury-selection system in 
     Orleans Parish in Louisiana because, as Judge Wisdom wrote, 
     it ``operated to exclude all but a token number of Negroes'' 
     from jury lists. He noted that ``no black ever sat on a grand 
     jury or a trial jury panel in Orleans Parish.''
       In 1965, they ruled that Louisiana's voter-registration 
     law, because of its written test on the Constitution, 
     discriminated against poorly educated back voters. Judge 
     Wisdom wrote: ``A wall stands in Louisiana between registered 
     voters and unregistered eligible Negro voters. The wall is 
     the state constitutional requirement that an applicant for 
     registration `understand and give a reasonable interpretation 
     of any section' of the Constitution of Louisiana or of the 
     United States.'' It is, he wrote ``the highest, best-guarded, 
     most effective barrier to Negro voting in Louisiana.''
       He concluded that ``this wall, built to bar Negroes from 
     access to the franchise, must come down.''
       In 1966, the judges ordered Florida to desegregate its 
     reformatories and declared no state could legally maintain 
     segregation in any school, whatever its mission.
       In 1967, they affirmed that the six states within their 
     jurisdiction had to integrate their public schools from 
     kindergarten on.
       In 1968, Judge Wisdom made what he regarded as the most 
     important opinion of his career, in United States v. 
     Jefferson, in which the court overturned the so-called Briggs 
     dictum. This was the belief, widely held by conservative 
     judges in the South, that the Constitution did not require 
     integration but merely forbade discrimination.
       Judge Wisdom expressed his ``nagging feeling that it is not 
     how far blacks have come that is important but how far they 
     will have to go.'' He advocated ``the planned organized 
     undoing of the effects of past segregation'' and set in 
     motion the philosophical framework for what would come to be 
     known as affirmative action. He wrote: ``To avoid conflict 
     with the equal protection clause, a classification that 
     denies a benefit, cause harm or imposes a burden must not be 
     based on race. In that sense, the Constitution is color 
     blind. But the Constitution is color conscious to prevent 
     discrimination being perpetuated and to undo the effects of 
     past discrimination. The criterion is the relevancy of color 
     to a legitimate government purpose.''


                Undoing the Years of `Ingenious Devices'

       The Fifth Circuit made these rulings at a time when die-
     hard segregationists were using everything from violence to 
     subtle evasion to resist change.
       ``Our court rapidly desegregated every place that could be 
     desegregated: buses, hotels, restaurants, parks, barrooms and 
     athletic contests,'' Judge Wisdom recalled in 1982.
       ''Our court had strong opposition from six state 
     legislatures and state governors, year in and year out.''
       ``Senators, Congressmen, governors and local politicians 
     eventually changed their attitude toward minorities,'' he 
     continued. ``This not attributable to a change of heart but 
     to the Voting Rights Act of 1965,'' which, he noted, 
     enfranchised blacks ``previously disenfranchised by many 
     ingenious devices.''
       President Clinton, in awarding him the Presidential Medal 
     of Freedom in 1993, said that his opinions ``advanced civil 
     rights and economic justice, and his inspired words echo 
     throughout many of this century's most significant Supreme 
     Court opinions.''


                 Son of the South Who Loved Literature

       John Minor Wisdom was born in New Orleans on May 17, 1905, 
     the son of Mortimer M. Wisdom and Adelaide Labatt Wisdom. His 
     father was a member of the city's elite and proudly 
     remembered marching in the funeral procession of Robert E. 
     Lee in 1870. In 1925 the son received his bachelor's degree 
     from Washington and Lee University, where he had an interest 
     in literature. He studied literature for a year as a graduate 
     student at Harvard University, but then entered the law 
     school at Tulane University, where he graduated first in his 
     class.
       He formed the law firm of Wisdom and Stone with a 
     classmate, Saul Stone, practicing law in New Orleans in the 
     1930's. He joined the Army Air Forces in World War II, 
     serving in the Office of Legal Procurement.
       Some of his early legal work dealt with business law. He 
     opposed so-called fair-trade laws, legislation that permitted 
     manufacturers to set the retail prices of products, 
     ostensibly to protect small retailers from competition from 
     big discounters. He told those attending the American Fair 
     Trade Council meeting in New York in 1953 that they could 
     ``never sell the American citizen on the justice or logic'' 
     of fair trade.
       Mr. Wisdom, a long-time Republican loyalist who served in 
     the 1950's as a national committeeman from Louisiana, worked 
     hard to open doors to the party in the South. In 1952 he 
     broke with the more traditional Southern Republicans, who 
     strongly supported the candidacy of the conservative Senator 
     Robert Taft of Ohio for President.
       Earlier that year, Mr. Wisdom and Elbert P. Tuttle, a 
     lawyer in Atlanta, met at the request of Herbert Brownell, 
     General Eisenhower's campaign manager, to organize a campaign 
     in the South to support General Eisenhower for the Republican 
     nomination against Senator Taft. Mr. Wisdom and Mr. Tuttle 
     became co-chairmen of the Southern Conference for 
     Eisenhower.
       As Attorney General in the Eisenhower Administration, Mr. 
     Brownell became an important figure in selecting Federal 
     judges, and both Mr. Tuttle and Mr. Wisdom were eventually 
     put on the Federal bench.
       One of the earliest civil rights cases Judge Wisdom 
     received after his appointment came in 1959, when the Fifth 
     Circuit voided a Louisiana ban on boxing matches between 
     blacks and whites. The court's decision was upheld by the 
     United States Supreme Court.
       In 1964 he dissented from the Fifth Circuit's majority 
     opinion, which upheld the tradition of revealing the race of 
     all candidates for public office on the ballot. The Supreme 
     Court ultimately repudiated the majority decision and upheld 
     his position.
       Though most of the Fifth Circuit's ground-breaking 
     decisions concerning discrimination were made in the 1960's, 
     there were many significant cases in the 1970's. Among them 
     was a 1972 decision striking down a Louisiana law barring 
     biracial adoptions. ``It's obvious,'' Judge Wisdom wrote in 
     the decision, ``that the Louisiana statute making race a 
     decisive factor in adoption subordinates a child's best 
     interest in some circumstances to racial discrimination.''
       Judge Wisdom wrote several landmark opinions in employment 
     discrimination cases. In 1979, the Supreme Court adopted the 
     basic reasoning of his dissent in Weber v. Kaiser Aluminum 
     and Chemical Corporation to uphold a hiring plan intended to 
     overcome the effects of past discrimination.
       Not all his major decisions concerned race. In 1974, he 
     wrote an opinion that found that psychiatric patients as a 
     class had a Federal constitutional right to adequate 
     treatment when such patients were committed against their 
     will to state institutions.

[[Page E988]]

       But to the end he felt that no opinion drew more fully on 
     his intellect and imagination than U.S. v. Jefferson. By 
     requiring ``the organized undoing of the effects of past 
     desegregation,'' he placed an affirmative duty on school 
     boards to develop desegregation plans. Including a model 
     desegregation order, he served notice that ``the only school 
     desegregation plan that meets constitutional standards is one 
     that works.''
       Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson of the Fourth Circuit Court of 
     Appeals wrote in a 1979 book, ``The Supreme Court wrote from 
     Brown to Bakke,'' that Judge Wisdom in Jefferson and related 
     cases ``transformed the face of school desegregation law.''


               A Scuttled Candidacy For the Supreme Court

       Despite the storms that attended his civil rights 
     decisions, the stature he attained was such that in 1969, he 
     was mentioned as a leading candidate for the Supreme Court. 
     Moderate Republicans advanced his name after the Senate 
     rejected President Richard M. Nixon's nomination of Judge 
     Clement F. Haynsworth, whom Judge Wisdom opposed.
       But Mr. Nixon's Attorney General, John Mitchell, scuttled 
     the idea, reportedly complaining that Judge Wisdom was 
     nothing more than a ``damn left-winger'' who, if he ever got 
     on the Supreme Court, would ``be as bad as Earl Warren.''
       The judge once told a reporter that when the Fifth Circuit 
     was issuing its most contentious rulings, his dogs were 
     poisoned and a rattlesnake was thrown in his backyard.
       But despite the liberal views about race and civil rights 
     he espoused throughout his judicial career, he maintained 
     memberships in private clubs that discriminated against 
     blacks and Jews.
       ``The people I see in these clubs are the guys I went to 
     school with and have known all my life,'' he said. ``I would 
     not resign from any such club.'' He said, ``They know how I 
     stand on these matters'' and ``I certainly wouldn't change 
     their views by getting out of the club.''
       He is survived by his wife, Bonnie Mathews Wisdom, and two 
     daughters, Kathleen Mathews Wisdom and Penelope Stewart 
     Wisdom Tose. A son, John Minor Jr., died.
       His former law clerks recalled that the judge was capable 
     of spending an afternoon playing bridge for high stakes, 
     following it with drinks with lifelong friends, discussing 
     and reciting obscure Elizabethan poetry, and after cocktails 
     and dinner at home, staying up well past midnight working on 
     one of the many drafts his major opinions went through before 
     he was satisfied.

     

                          ____________________