Champion of Civil Rights

Judge John Minor Wisdom

Joel William Friedman

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807149157
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

One of the least publicly recognized heroes of the civil rights movement in the United States, John Minor Wisdom served as a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit from 1957 until his death in 1999 and wrote many of the landmark decisions instrumental in desegregating the American South. In this revealing biography, law professor Joel William Friedman explores Judge Wisdom's substantial legal contributions and political work at a critical time in the history of the South.
In 1957, President Eisenhower appointed Wisdom to the Fifth Circuit, which included some of the most deeply segregated southern states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. In the tumultuous two decades following its decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court issued only a few civil rights decisions, preferring instead to affirm Fifth Circuit Court opinions or let them stand without hearing an appeal. Judge Wisdom, therefore, authored many of the decisions that transformed the South and broke down barriers of all kinds for African Americans, including the desegregation of public schools.
In preparing this first full-length biography of Judge Wisdom, Friedman had unrestricted access to Wisdom's voluminous repository of personal and professional papers. In addition, he draws on personal interviews with law clerks who served under Judge Wisdom, resulting in a unique, behind-the-scenes account of some of the nation's most important legal decisions: the admission of the first black student to the University of Mississippi, the initiation of contempt proceedings against Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, and the destruction of obstacles that had previously kept black Americans from voting. Friedman also explores Wisdom's political life prior to joining the federal bench, including his pivotal role in resurrecting the Louisiana Republican Party and in securing the Republican presidential nomination for Eisenhower.
A compelling account of how a child of privilege from one of America's most socially and racially stratified cities came to serve as the driving force behind the legal effort to end segregation, Champion of Civil Rights offers judicial biography at its best.

1

A PRIVILEGED SON OF THE SOUTH

Wisdom. Could any judge hope for a more felicitous patronymic? Even more than Learned Hand, this name appears to predestine its owner for the contemplative, justice-dispensing life of a jurist. Yet aside from his surname, little in John Minor Wisdom’s background or family history foreshadowed the path-breaking contributions he would make to the development of American law. From an early age, this gregarious, self-effacing, and scrupulously fair-minded man also displayed the characteristics of knowledge, judgment, and insight that Webster proclaims to be the benchmarks of wisdom. But his upbringing made Wisdom an unlikely candidate for the role of civil rights champion. Who could have anticipated that this scion of southern society would become not only the prime architect of a revitalized Republican Party in Louisiana, but, more important, the universally acclaimed author of tradition-shattering and precedent-making judicial opinions that would forever reshape the contours of civil liberties in the United States? How and why this son of a New Orleans cotton broker came to play such a critical role in the modern American civil rights revolution is as essential a part of his story as the accomplishments themselves.

Family history is perhaps more important in the South than in any other region in the country. Many southerners view lineage as a prominent index of social status and a reliable predictor of vocation and character. They tend to reject Ralph Waldo Emerson’s claim that “men resemble their contemporaries even more than their progenitors.”¹ Yet occasionally an individual will confound this stereotype by ignoring settled expectations and carving his own unique path.

John Minor Wisdom was one of those individuals. A descendant of the Minors of Virginia, a venerable line composed primarily of members of the landed aristocracy, he emerged as one of the most progressive and influential federal judges of the twentieth century. Over his forty-two-year career as a member of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, he wrote scores of opinions that powerfully changed the landscape of American jurisprudence. Rulings that he authored in school desegregation and voting rights cases opened the doors of equal opportunity to women and members of racial minority groups that had been shut for decades. By insisting that all individuals, regardless of circumstance of birth or condition of existence, were entitled to a fair shake by their government and their neighbors, Wisdom gave meaning to the theretofore unrealized promise of equal rights contained in the U.S. Constitution. And although he is properly recognized most widely for his role in promoting the cause of civil rights, his influence extends far beyond that realm, into such diverse areas as criminal, tax, trust, railroad reorganization, and maritime law.

To begin to understand how far the seed fell from its ancestral tree, however, to appreciate the distance traveled by this son of the Old South, a man born of privilege and steeped in the genteel traditions of an intricate and deeply rooted social order, one must return to the mid-seventeenth century, when Wisdom’s ancestors first planted their roots in American soil.

Until the English Parliament passed the Navigation Acts of the 1650s and 1660s and confined the export of colonial American goods to England, shippers from several European nations carried on a substantial amount of commerce with the colonies.² One of these adventurous merchants was Maindort Doodes, a wealthy ship owner from Holland who left his homeland on a Dutch sailing ship in the 1650s and settled in Norfolk, Virginia. Doodes and his wife, Mary, arrived with their son and daughter, who were also named Maindort and Mary.

After the family moved westward along the mouth of the James River to what later became Nansemond County, Doodes changed his prename to Minor, reversed the order of his names, and began to refer to himself as Doodes Minor. Over the next eight generations, the Minors of Virginia would become extremely wealthy landholders who lived comfortably among the social elite of rural Virginia. But not every member of those early generations of Minors was content to maintain his or her traditional, privileged plantation existence, or to remain steadfast to the existing political, social, and economic order. A few, like their twentieth-century descendant, were bent on charting a different course.

For example, nearly a century before John Wisdom would dismantle a racially discriminatory voting scheme in Louisiana with the power of his reason and the stroke of his pen, Virginia Louisa Minor, one of the sixth generation of U.S.-born Minors and a great-granddaughter of the Minor who had amassed the family’s vast real estate holdings in Virginia, founded the women’s suffrage movement in Missouri in 1867. Seven years later, the Supreme Court unanimously denied her request to be permitted to vote in Virginia, rejecting her claim that women enjoyed a constitutional right to the franchise, a ruling that remained undisturbed until the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.³ Reflecting that same uncommon rejection of many core values held dear by their social peers, Virginia’s cousin, University of Virginia professor John Barbee Minor, the author of Minor’s Institutes of Common and Statute Law, a multivolume treatise on contemporary jurisprudence, founded and supervised an antebellum Sunday school for slave children.⁴ Seven decades later, the owners of a thirty-thousand-acre plantation in Mathews, Louisiana, built one of the first schools for black children in that state on their property. Their daughter, Bonnie, subsequently moved to New Orleans, where she met and married the great-great-grandson of Virginia Minor’s cousin Thomas—John Minor Wisdom.

In 1675, less than four years after Maindort Doodes had immigrated to Virginia, Abner Wisdom was born in England near the Welsh border. When his sons immigrated to America, settling in Kentucky, they and their offspring, like the Minors, prospered mightily in their new homeland. One of Abner’s grandsons, Tavner Wisdom, became one of the South’s largest tobacco and cotton dealers. And his son, John Buford Wisdom, continued to grow the family business when he moved to Spotsylvania County, Virginia. His son, in turn, the first John Minor Wisdom, initially followed his grandfather and father into the cotton and tobacco commission business, but thereafter decided to seek his fortune in the larger markets of New Orleans. He had not been in the Crescent City more than a few months before he joined Hewett-Norton&Co., the largest cotton and tobacco commission house in the South. On February 11, 1854, he and his wife, Maria, celebrated the birth of their first child, Mortimer, whose second-born son was John Minor Wisdom.⁵

At the age of fourteen, too young to fight in the Civil War, Mortimer Wisdom became one of the youngest students at Washington College. A glass-framed certificate that Mortimer received for being the top student in history and political economics was displayed prominently in his son’s judicial chambers. Among his most prized possessions, John Wisdom took great satisfaction in pointing out to visitors the faded signature of the then-president of Washington College, General Robert E. Lee, a man Mortimer Wisdom, and his son, admired and deeply respected.⁶

John Wisdom’s mother was Mortimer Wisdom’s third wife. Mortimer’s first wife, Rebecca de Mendez Kruttschnitt, was the daughter of the German consul at New Orleans and the sister of Ernest Benjamin Kruttschnitt, a chairman of the Louisiana State Democratic Central Committee and president of the Constitutional Convention that framed the Louisiana Constitution of 1898. She also was the niece of famed attorney, scholar, statesman, and “Brains of the Confederacy” Judah P. Benjamin.⁷ Tragically, less than a year after their marriage, Rebecca died in childbirth along with their baby. Two years later, Mortimer married Martha (“ Mattie”) Somerville Noble, the daughter of a New York merchant. But for the second time, Mortimer’s marriage was cut short by his wife’s premature death. Mattie died in 1889, only ten years after the marriage, leaving Mortimer with three young children.

At the age of forty-four, Mortimer took his third wife, a thirty-year-old attorney’s daughter named Adelaide Labatt. The couple had three sons, the second of whom they named after Mortimer’s father, John Minor Wisdom. Like her husband, Adelaide Labatt came from a family with deep roots in the American terrain. She too could trace her lineage back to the Revolutionary era. But part of the heritage that she brought to this marriage was of a distinctly different flavor than that contributed by Mortimer Wisdom.

In sharp contrast to the Episcopalian traditions shared by the Virginia-bred Minors and the planters and merchants of the Wisdom clan, the Labatts were part of one of the oldest Jewish families in the South. The branches of their family tree contained, among others, Judah P. Benjamin, perhaps the most influential Jewish southerner of the Civil War era; Henry Hyams, the first Jewish lieutenant governor in American history; Abraham Cohen Labatt, co-founder, in Charleston, of the first Reform synagogue in the United States and of the first synagogue on the West Coast; and his son David Cohen Labatt, recipient of the first diploma in law conferred by the forerunner of what is now the Tulane Law School who gained widespread recognition for his groundbreaking work in lawsuits filed on behalf of ex-slaves against their former masters.⁸

Although Article 1 of Louisiana’s Black Code (Code Noir) of 1724 mandated the expulsion of all Jews from the colony, by the post–Civil War period, the more than two thousand Jewish citizens of New Orleans were more integrated into the city’s political, social, and civic scenes than they were in most other major American cities of that era.⁹ Social prestige in the Creole and Yankee societies in pre-twentieth-century New Orleans was much more attuned to affluence or longevity in the community than to religion. Even the city’s most prestigious social clubs admitted Jewish members. And though both of these organizations subsequently adopted a tacit policy of excluding Jews from member ship (including the years in which John Minor Wisdom was an active member), David Labatt and Judah Benjamin were among the many Jewish members of the Boston Club. Jews also participated in the whirl of New Orleans society. In 1877, David Labatt’s sister Caroline reigned as the Queen of Carnival and Louis J. Salomon was, in 1872, the city’s first Rex, King of Carnival.¹⁰

When David Labatt married Elizabeth House, an Episcopalian from Philadelphia, the couple decided to expose some of their eight offspring to his Jewish heritage and others to her Christian faith. One of their four daughters, Adelaide, was among the children who accompanied their mother to church and who were raised as Episcopalians. So when Adelaide married Mortimer Wisdom, their three sons, William, John Minor, and Norton, were neither exposed to nor influenced by their Jewish heritage. And though he chose to build a law firm with a law school classmate who happened to be Jewish, Wisdom traveled throughout his adult life in a social circle that was composed nearly exclusively of non-Jews. In fact, his Jewish lineage was surely unknown to most of his acquaintances. And though he never sought to hide or disguise this aspect of his background, he rarely discussed it simply because it was a matter of no interest or consequence to him. Since neither of his parents had been raised in the Jewish faith, this aspect of the family history played no role in his upbringing and had no impact in shaping his beliefs or value system.

Adelaide and Mortimer Wisdom’s first son, William, was born at the turn of the century. On May 17, 1905, Adelaide gave birth to the couple’s second son, John Minor, and he was followed, two years later, by Norton. Though each of the boys eventually pursued different career paths, they were the products of a shared heritage. They had been born into a family that had enjoyed financial prosperity and social position in the United States for more than two centuries. More than that, they were the product of three distinct branches of a deeply rooted family tree. They were the tenth generation of a Dutch family whose progeny, the Minors, had built a fortune cultivating their fertile Virginia lands. The brothers also were the seventh generation of a British merchant family, the Wisdoms, whose descendants had prospered in the cotton trade. And they were the sixth-generation descendants of Western European Jews who produced a line of successful merchants and lawyers.

Yet despite their divergent backgrounds, the members of the Minor, Wisdom, and Labatt families shared a common bond. They all had achieved positions of economic security and social prominence in their respective communities. As a result, the three sons of Mortimer and Adelaide Wisdom, the twentieth-century heirs to this combined legacy, were in the fortunate position of being able to make their own assault on the incipient century as members of their city’s socially elite, privileged class. And being a member of a “good” family was particularly important in a city such as New Orleans, where social position dictated so many of life’s opportunities.

One reasonably could expect a product of this advantaged environment to be content to enjoy the fruits of his predecessors’ labors and to embrace the social order that fostered the attainment of that bounty. That certainly had been the case with most of John Minor Wisdom’s ancestors. With a few notable exceptions, generations of his predecessors had subscribed to the conservative ideology adopted by most other wealthy, landowning members of the southern aristocracy whose privileged existence depended upon the preservation of the status quo.

Yet there had been occasional displays of a more independent and visionary strain in the family lineage. John Wisdom III, the brother of John Minor Wisdom’s great-great-grandfather, had been an outspoken opponent of slavery during the post-Revolutionary period and John III’s niece, Virginia Louise Minor, had spearheaded the woman’s suffrage movement shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War. Their moral compasses pointed them in a different direction than the one taken by most of their peers and relations. Adhering to traditions and conforming to the status quo was impossible for them without first scrutinizing the impact that these forces had on the disadvantaged and more vulnerable members of society. But their stories were never a part of whatever family lore Mortimer and Adelaide transmitted to their three sons. William, John, and Norton grew up in a household with parents who were firmly entrenched in New Orleans’ rigid, highly developed social network and who raised their sons to have a strong sense of their position in society and the obligations that this entailed. How, then, did a son of this socially prominent family develop such a passionate concern for the interests of those whose life experiences were so foreign to his own? The answer lies, at least in part, in the combination of lessons learned from a mother he adored and insights absorbed from the richly diverse set of books that he devoured throughout his college career.

2

FROM BIRTH TO BONNIE
TO THE BRANCH, 1905–1946

For the first fourteen years of his life, John Minor Wisdom lived in a roomy, three-story wood-frame house on Calhoun Street. Only a block and a half off one of New Orleans’ most fashionable arteries, mansion-lined St. Charles Avenue, the Wisdom home was built with New Orleans’ lengthy and sultry summers in mind.¹ And though it may not have been the largest or the most magnificent residence in this tony locale, the family’s lifestyle conformed to the standards expected of members of their social class and economic position.

Despite the setbacks caused by Mortimer’s financially disastrous decision to leave the insurance business for the cotton trade, the family was able to maintain its accustomed lifestyle until his death on May 16, 1919, the day preceding John’s fourteenth birthday. They were able to retain, for example, the cook, laundress, and butler that Mortimer initially hired during his salad days with the insurance firm.² Of all these employees, however, the one most dear to John was Sarah Murphy, the beloved Irish “nurse” who lived with the family and raised him and his two brothers.

“We called her Mammy,” Wisdom recounted, “even though she was Irish and white.” Yet despite their lifelong devotion to their Irish nurse, the Wisdom brothers, particularly John and his younger sibling, Norton, did not share her, or their parents’, religious proclivities. From his earliest days, John had little interest in religion. His parents were active members of their Episcopal church who regularly attended Sunday services and expected and insisted that their sons go to Sunday school. And although John dutifully heeded his parents’ request, he did so solely out of obedience. He would have much preferred to spend the time playing any of a variety of sports. And throughout his adult life, Wisdom harbored an indifference, if not a cynical distrust, toward organized religion. Though he recognized that others found comfort in prayer and adherence to religious dogma, faith and belief were inconsistent with his insistence on proof and verification. Moreover, his confidence in his own judgment also deterred Wisdom from conforming to any set of organizational dictates. Consequently, religion played no role in shaping any of his personal or professional decisions.

From the time that he was old enough to throw a ball, sports were a focal point of his early life. Despite always being one of the shortest, lightest, and least athletically gifted boys on the team, Wisdom relished playing football and baseball with the neighborhood kids on a vacant lot down the street from his home or climbing the fence with his cousin Charles “Pie” Dufour (who later earned fame as a local newspaper columnist and author of several books on Louisiana and New Orleans history) to sneak into Tulane football games.

But his ardor for sports never interfered with Wisdom’s two other passions—his academic pursuits and the Boy Scouts. Scouting appealed to two of his keenest interests: his love of the outdoors and his passion for learning. Developing and mastering the wide array of skills and knowledge necessary to earn merit badges was a challenge that he embraced with great enthusiasm. More important, perhaps, the fundamental moral and civic lessons he absorbed during his years as a scout came to occupy a central place in his character and clearly influenced his vision of the world and of his place in it.

Wisdom attacked scouting with the same m...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: A PRIVILEGED SON OF THE SOUTH
• 2: FROM BIRTH TO BONNIE TO THE BRANCH, 1905–1946
• 3: AT THE BAR, 1948–1953
• 4: BATTLING THE BOSSES
• 5: THE 1952 CONVENTION
• 6: ASSUMING THE BENCH
• 7: THE FIFTH CIRCUIT’S EMERGING INTELLECTUAL LEADER, 1957–1966
• 8: SHOWDOWN IN MISSISSIPPI
• 9: THE FIRST STEP IN DESEGREGATING THE SOUTH
• 10: IMPLEMENTING BROWN THROUGHOUT THE NATION
• 11: INTERNAL DISCORD THREATENS THE COURT
• 12: HONORING THE PROMISE OF THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT
• 13: A VIGILANT STEWARD OF FAIRNESS
• 14: THE CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLES OF THE 1970S AND 1980S
• 15: THE UNSUCCESSFUL CAMPAIGN TO SAVE THE FIFTH CIRCUIT
• EPILOGUE
• INDEX