"FROM SLAVERY TO THE SUPREME COURT"

 “FROM SLAVERY TO THE SUPREME COURT”

In the spring of 1951, two Black lawyers were driving from Richmond to Roanoke to investigate and seek to adjudicate complaints about civil rights violations.  On the way they decided to stop in the small Virginia town of Farmville to engage the Black students of Robert Moton High School there.  They had heard that a 16 year old student named Barbara Johns had led a walkout and boycott of their segregated, rundown school until the white school board built another school for them.  The two lawyers were Spottswood Robinson III and Oliver Hill, and they were in charge of Virginia for the NAACP. They felt that the possibilities of taking the case in Farmville were slim and none, because Prince Edward County was known as the most racist place in Virginia.  

Robinson and Hill had just come back from a briefing on the Briggs case in Clarendon County, South Carolina, where the initial complaint was for Black students to get school buses that were equal to those used by white students.  Thurgood Marshall and Robinson were lead attorneys on that case, because Spottswood Robinson III was Marshall’s most valued assistant.  In Farmville, Robinson planned to tell the kids to knock it off, go back to school and to get ready for the legal action in the South Carolina case.  However, Robinson had never met a student like Barbara Johns.  

    He remembered the conversation in this way: “We were going to tell the kids about the Briggs suit, which was about to begin, but a strike in Prince Edward County was something else again. Only these kids turned out to be so well organized, and their morale was so high, we just didn’t have the heart to tell ‘em to break it up.”  That conversation led to many more, and the students agreed to give up their demands for an equal but separate school – they adopted the NAACP approach of seeking to end legal segregation itself.  Spottswood Robinson III would become the lead attorney in this case, and he argued it in front of the US Supreme Court as one of the five cases that became Brown V. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas – the case that ended legal segregation in the USA but not neo-slavery.

    Robinson was born in Richmond in 1916, son of a lawyer and a homemaker.  His grandfather Spottswood Robinson had been held as a slave in rural Virginia, but fled slavery and set up shop in Richmond.  Spottswood would be named after him, as Spottswood William Robinson III.  He graduated from Virginia Union University and went to Howard University Law School, where he would study under the visionary Charles Hamilton Houston and be classmates with Thurgood Marshall.  He graduated from there in 1939, being first in his class with the highest scholastic average in the history of the school.  He became a leading strategist of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and he traveled all around the South to see the oppressive conditions that neo-slavery and legal segregation imposed upon people.  Thurgood Marshall talked him into coming on the staff of the NAACP, with the promise being that Hamilton and Marshall were assembling a team that would seek to take down legal segregation and thus end neo-slavery.

    Robinson was a tireless worker in this cause, traveling many places, facing arrest and other dangers in the South, as he and his colleagues built the cases to take down neo-slavery.  In the summer of 1944, Irene Morgan, a resident of Baltimore, asked Robinson and the NAACP to defend her after she was arrested in Saluda, Virginia, on July 16. Contrary to state law, she had refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Greyhound bus trip she had taken across state line from Gloucester County to Baltimore. If it could be shown that forcing black passengers to change seats as they traveled into the South interfered with interstate commerce, then a blow might be struck. Adopting the strategy, Robinson defended Morgan both in the local court and in the Virginia Supreme Court, losing as expected in both venues.  SCOTUS took up the case in 1946, and in June they ruled that Virginia’s law was unconstitutional.  It opened the door to the Brown case eight years later.

    Spottswood Robinson III is one of the unheralded heroes of the civil rights movement.  He later was appointed to be a federal judge in DC by President Lyndon Johnson, and in 1966 Johnson appointed him to the Federal Court of Appeals for the DC circuit, the same court that recently ruled unanimously that Donald Trump’s claims of presidential immunity were hogwash.  Robinson served as chief judge of that Appeals Court until his retirement in 1986.  He was the first Black person to serve on that court and also to serve as its chief judge.  He died in 1998, and his life is a powerful example of the dynamic of equality in American life.  That idea is now once again under attack – may we find the resolve and courage of Spottswood Robinson III, so that we can be witnesses in our time.