To Do Justice

Scriptural Reflection
“and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” ~ Micah 6:8 NRSV

This weekend marks the 55th anniversary of the monumental Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka U.S. Supreme Court decision that officially ended the legal concept of “separate but equal” within public education and effectively jumpstarted the rise of the modern civil rights movement. Whereas this date should always serve as a period of thoughtful consideration and serious reflection, the commemoration of this transformative event in American history is especially noteworthy. In CNN commentator Roland Martin’s recent article, “What's a 'qualified woman or minority'?”, illustrates how the continuing obstacles to full citizenship and social equality still plague American society despite the all the hoopla surrounding the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. In response to a roundtable debate about President Obama's potential Supreme Court pick on the website Politico.com, Mr. Martin observes the absurdity of having a group of the nation’s leading scholars address whether or not the president should “feel obliged to appoint a qualified woman, African American or Hispanic to the Supreme Court.” In considering this matter, Mr. Martin poses an invaluable question, namely “why isn't the word "qualified" used often for white men?” For instance, whereas American men of European descent in this country only account for roughly 36% of the U.S. population, why are they always the first group to proclaim that everyone else (including women, who technically comprise at least 50% of the population) are “minorities”!?! While the question is not surprising, it is certainly regrettable in this day and time to have to even ask about such an issue.
The conversation that is going to take place about the upcoming vacancy on the Supreme Court and who will fill it is very much connected to the historic concerns surrounding the Brown decision. To make sense of this situation, we need to look at the circumstances of how one of the most essential players in the Brown decision became involved in this story. In 1952, Governor Earl Warren of California was an extremely popular candidate for the Republican nomination for U.S. President, but withdrew in support of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. A year later, President Eisenhower appointed Warren as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Typically considered a moderate Republican, Eisenhower chose Warren because he reportedly wanted a conservative justice on the bench. In light of this desire, the president commented that Warren represented “the kind of political, economic, and social thinking that I believe we need on the Supreme Court.... He has a national name for integrity, uprightness, and courage that, again, I believe we need on the Court". Warren’s conservative credentials were marked during his governorship by his support for the internment of Japanese immigrants and Americans of Japanese descent during World War II; this wartime strategy served in violation of their civil rights and civil liberties in a fashion similar to the use of Guantanamo Bay base in Cuba established by the Bush administration at the height of the so-called “War on Terror”. This tough guy stance by Warren ensured that he was hailed as a favorite son amongst the growing numbers of conservative supporters in California and elsewhere around the nation.
Ironically, despite his reputation and the expectation that he would be a right-wing ideologue, Warren arguably became the most liberal chief justice the nation has ever seen in its history. As a result, President Eisenhower once remarked that nominating Warren for the Chief Justice seat was "the biggest…mistake I ever made.” Beginning with his official baptism by fire, the act of leading the highest court in the land to a unanimous decision in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, Warren proved that God can use anyone to achieve divine justice in this world. As phenomenal as the work done by the NAACP's brilliant chief counsel, Thurgood Marshall (who was later appointed in 1967 to the U.S. Supreme Court as the first African American justice in American history) and the stellar legal team assembled to argue the amicus case we know of as Brown v. Board of Education in front of the Supreme Court for the million of school children of all backgrounds in order to transform the nation, there needed to be Supreme Court justices on the bench who were both sensible and sensitive to the fact that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted to uplift the downtrodden and liberate the oppressed. Taken another way, Thurgood Marshall established a passionate, sophisticated and morally superior legal case that made ending segregation in schools a logical effort but it required that the Supreme Court justices actually listened and thought about the arguments put before them. Even though Warren went against conventional political wisdom, he ultimately chose to make a difficult stance that was right as opposed to making a wrongful pronouncement that would have been easy. Regardless of what conservative pundits have said about “activist judges” who legislate from the bench, Americans depend on the Supreme Court justices to be authoritative in their legal expertise, neutral in their politics, focused on guaranteeing human dignity and personal freedom under the law, and absolute fairness in their reasoning abilities—that ultimately represents the most “qualified” person to occupy a seat on the high court.
Another reason this anniversary of the Brown decision is so important is because, for the first time in this nation’s history, the Obamas, as the President and First Lady of the United States, have been directly influenced and shaped by the blessings of the life in the wake of the Brown decision. Not only have Barack and Michelle Obama both received top-notch educations from Ivy League schools but also they are now raising their two beautiful Black daughters who have amazing opportunities that could never have been imagined 55 years ago. The great challenge nowadays is that we encourage our leaders in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government to ensure that future generations of Americans will be able to relish in the abundant blessings set in motion nearly half a century ago. It is our prayer that we can do this without fail.

Something to Check Out…

In a nation still reeling from decades of heated, often toxic, arguments about affirmative action, quotas, hate crimes, racial profiling, “culture wars” disputed election results, and race-based political redistricting, these three books are excellent resources to explain the interplay of race, racism, and the law in the United States. Historian, law professor, public policy analyst, and former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Berry ‘s classic study, Black Resistance / White Law, directly links federal policies to racial inequities. This landmark book shows how the American government has used the U.S. Constitution to maintain a racist status quo. Berry analyzes the reasons why African Americans whose lives have improved both socially and economically are still at risk of police abuse and largely unprotected from systemic prejudice, hate crimes and racial bias. In 1978, the late federal judge and legal scholar A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. published In the Matter of Color, that charted the racial progress and regress over the past three centuries. The sequel, Shades of Freedom, documents a history of American racial law from the 17th century to the late 20th century. This long and often unknown chronology is examined with impressive precision Much like Berry, Higginbotham’s analyses, particularly major decisions such as the Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and Brown v. Board of Education (1954) are compelling and elegant with levels of moral outrage and righteous indignation that have undeniable intensity. These books provide ample proof not only about how far America has come in overcoming so many aspects of oppression, discrimination, and inequality yet still has so far to go.