Requiem for the Supreme Court

What, I asked my parents, was the Supreme Court?

It was the mid-1950s. I was a white boy in the upper South. Around me, adults could not stop talking about the Supreme Court. They spoke of it as a distant force, a threat. The Court had told the white South to change the way it lived. Most white people I knew felt intensely that the Court intervention, and the Court itself, were illegitimate. Our local newspaper, the Richmond News Leader, led a national campaign to say that Southern white people need not follow the Court’s orders. If white Southerners just resisted––delayed compliance, refused Court orders, closed all public schools if necessary––eventually the nation would see that no mere court could trump the authority of Southern white majorities.

Then, in 1957, the governor of Arkansas tried it. He blocked a Court order to desegregate Little Rock’s Central High School and sent National Guard troops to prevent desegregation. He was not bound by Brown v. Board of Education, he said.

But the Supreme. “The federal judiciary,” the Court said in the only opinion in its history signed by all nine members of the Court, “is supreme in the exposition of the law of the Constitution, and that principle has ever since been respected by this Court and the Country as a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system.”