The Supreme Court’s struggle for self-desegregation

“We have met the enemy and he is us” is the caption on the famous Earth Day 1970 poster by cartoonist Walt Kelly. It shows Pogo, Kelly’s anthropomorphic possum, in a forest full of junk, holding a trash-picking stick. The message was obvious: we created this mess, we should clean it up.

In December 1947, the Supreme Court found itself in a Pogo situation of a sort. In 1946, the Justices’ secretaries and law clerks had hosted a Christmas party for what Justice Felix Frankfurter tactfully described in his diary as “various offices of the Court.” The Court’s workforce was then so thoroughly stratified by race that it was possible to sort out all the Court’s employees of relatively recent African descent merely by specifying certain job categories for exclusion (for example, the Court’s messengers) or inclusion (for example, the secretaries and clerks). That is what the secretaries and clerks had done, and thus the Court hosted an all-white Christmas party in 1946. When it came time to plan the 1947 party, some clerks — apparently taking to heart recent cases such as Morgan v. Virginia and Steele v. Louisville & Nashville Railroad Co., and conscious that Shelley v. Kraemer and Sipuel v. Board of Regents would be argued after the holidays — “felt,” Frankfurter said, “strongly that at least some of the colored employees in the Court should also be asked.”

Some of the secretaries disagreed. The clerks decided to go their own way and hold a party to which messengers would be invited. But there was another impediment: Thomas Waggaman, Marshal of the Court, refused to provide a room for the clerks’ party unless ordered by Chief Justice Fred Vinson. Vinson presented the matter to the Court.

The Court proved unwilling to go like Pogo. There was some support for the clerks, but Justices Robert Jackson and Frankfurter thought no party at all was better than one that might generate controversy. Divided on the question of partial (indeed, infinitesimally incremental) desegregation of the Court itself, the Justices seem to have opted not to decide the matter at all. Practically speaking, that meant no party, given Waggaman’s stance.

It was a puzzling failure by a Court in the midst of building a legacy of courageous opposition to segregation.

There was an aftermath. In 1959 the Court finally hosted a desegregated Christmas party. Only the New York Times reported the event, characterizing it as the Court’s first, with no mention of the events of 1946-47. And so there are more puzzlers. Why did the Times miss or fail to report the earlier party problems? Why did no one who knew what had happened in 1946-47 correct the Times or prompt it to self-correct? What part did announcement of the 1959 party in the Court’s just-launched employee newsletter, The Docket Sheet, play in the Times’s coverage? What might disclosure in 1959 of the events of 1946-47 have meant for the Court’s place in the civil rights revolution at that time? And so on.

The available evidence is sparse and equivocal. Some of it (including a few Docket Sheets) is here.