ACLU Attorney Traces History Of High Court Segregation Ruling

Although the Supreme Court actually has reversed itself on segregation and civil rights decisions, its recent ruling on school segregation is the law and the law should stand. So said Howard Whiteside, trial lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union last night in Lowell House Junior Common Room.

Mr. Whiteside, speaking in the first of a series of seminars sponsored by the Harvard Eisenhower Young Republican Club, cited an 1850 Massachusetts case in which the Supreme Court ruled for continued school segregation. He also mentioned the Plessy vs. Ferguson case (Louisiana) of 1896, concerning a mulatto who refused to ride in a separate Negro railroad car. The Supreme Court upheld public segregation laws in that case, too.

However, Mr. Whiteside observed, there have been great changes in American society since then, making such a turn against precedents desirable. Also, the fourteenth amendment now makes the Bill of Rights applicable on the state level. In 1954, in the Brown vs. Topeka School Board case, the Court ruled that segregation "materially impedes education" and in order to belie its precedent legislation gave testimony from sociologists which backed the Court's decision.

Much of the controversy over the legality of the Supreme Court's segregation ruling has been based on the uncertain place of "sociological findings," in a law court, or at least in an official statement of a court's decision.

In the discussion that followed Mr. Whiteside's talk, he declared that the Supreme Court was "extending itself into new fields." Evidence of this trend is the friction between states and the Supreme Court, over "whose ruling shall be paramount in certain areas." White-side does not think that this extension of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court is always helpful to the protection of civil liberties, however.