Word: claytons
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Black & White. Appointed to the federal judgeship for northern Mississippi by President Eisenhower in 1958, Lawyer Clayton, a Democrat who supported Ike, had never shown any signs of dissatisfaction with the Southern way of life. Quite the opposite. "I lived in the era when Plessy v. Ferguson, separate but equal, was the law of the land," he says now. I had no quarrel with it." Indeed, he had so little quarrel with Mississippi ways that he rose to command one of the state's National Guard divisions (which was totally segregated), ranked as a major general when...
...supremacist. In his federal courtroom, he seemed at first to be living down to his background. In one case, Negro plaintiffs sought the right to look at county voting records; a higher court had already ordered that such requests be honored as a matter of course. The course, in Clayton's court, ran four years, and was potholed by rulings like the one requiring documents to be redrawn because...
Despite such instances, Clayton built a reputation, even among his critics, for fair-mindedness. That, plus some reversals by higher courts, began to nudge him away from 19th century Southern justice. Clayton watchers agree that the balance was tipped by U.S. v. Duke in 1963, a voting-rights case in Panola County, Miss. Judge Clayton had ruled that Negroes barred from the voting rolls had not shown that they were actually qualified under Mississippi standards...
...Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision-and inferentially told off Clayton in the process. The real issue, the court indicated, was not whether Negroes qualified under the standards, but whether the standards were applied equally to both whites and Negroes...
Contemptuous. After that, Clayton's decisions developed a more progressive tone. He put a stop to the harassment of Negroes seeking to register to vote in one town; he ordered a circuit clerk in an other to stop applying stricter voting requirements for Negroes than for whites; he knocked down a third town's ordinance restricting Negro marches and demonstrations; he voided, as a member of a three-judge panel, application of the state's poll tax in state and local elections. "When you are able to show him a set of outrageous facts, then he loses...