Monday would have been Emmett Till's 70th birthday

Monday, July 25, would have been Emmett Till's 70th birthday. Till, of course, was only 14 when he was murdered in 1955 in Money, Mississippi.

Freedom Riders honored in return to Mississippi

Freedom Riders were honored this week in their return to Mississippi, a half-century after their initial arrival in Jackson:

By 1961, Mary Jean Smith had been a part of sit-ins and received training for nonviolent protest, but she wasn't ready to challenge segregated travel in the Deep South until she sat behind two white passengers on a city bus in Tennessee.

"They had a transistor radio and were listening to reports about the Freedom Riders. One of them said, 'I hope all those niggers die.' It did something to me. I went into another world," she said Tuesday.

Smith, a Tennessee State University student, volunteered to be part of the next group of riders who would head south through civil rights battlegrounds in Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi. Along the route, they were beaten and their buses were burned. Eventually, they were arrested and thrown into the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

On Tuesday — 50 years to the day after the first wave of riders arrived at the Jackson terminal — a celebration was held for them in Mississippi's capital. They were welcomed by Gov. Haley Barbour, Myrlie Evers-Williams, widow of slain NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers, Jackson Mayor Harvey Johnson Jr. and hundreds of high school and college students, who called them heroes.

John Lewis offers thoughts on 49th anniversary of March on Washington

Students trace civil rights trail

Freedom Riders defied injustice

Freedom Riders defied injustice, changed history: MyFoxTAMPABAY.com

Ruby Bridges views her portrait at the White House

Waring dissent paved way for Brown v. Board of Education

An article in the latest issue of the National Law Journal explains how a dissent from Judge J. Waites Waring in the Briggs v. Elliott case paved the way for the U. S. Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education:

On the morning of the federal court trial, a large group of the plaintiffs and their supporters traveled by caravan from Summerton to Charleston to witness what would be one of the most important legal proceedings in American history. Hundreds lined up in the courthouse, on the stairs leading to the courtroom and onto the street for a chance to see and hear the legal attack on their second-class status. They were not disappointed. They observed the testimony of witnesses describing the profound disparities in the educational facilities and resources provided the black and white children of their community. They heard what would become the historic expert testimony of psychologist Dr. Kenneth Clark as he described his "doll studies" and opined that segregation stigmatized and injured their children. But what thrilled the plaintiffs the most was the searing cross-examination by their lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, as he questioned the defendants' star witness, ultimately forcing him to admit that, at least in part, his testimony was based on a lifelong belief in racial segregation.

But this was South Carolina, the year was 1951 and the doctrine of Plessy was deeply ingrained in the region's culture. Several weeks after the completion of the Briggs trial, in June 1951, the three-judge panel issued a predictable decision, holding that racial segregation of the schools was a matter of state legislative policy in which the federal courts were "powerless to interfere." What was not predictable was the stirring 20-page dissent by Waring, who concluded that "segregation in education can never produce equality.…Segregation is per se inequality." Waring described segregation as an "evil" that "must go and go now."

Waring's improbable journey on race began after his appointment to the federal bench in 1942. Civil rights cases on his docket slowly opened him to a view of his native city and state that he had never considered as a prosperous attorney and member of elite social societies in Charleston. He started modestly, ending segregation in his courtroom. Beginning in the mid-1940s, Waring issued a series of opinions equalizing the pay of black teachers and requiring the state to admit black students to the University of South Carolina School of Law or to open an equal law school for African-Americans. Waring crossed the racial Rubicon in 1948, when he ordered the state Demo­cratic Party to end its "white primary" and to allow black South Carolinians to vote in the only election that then mattered in the state. Waring soon found himself a social pariah in his native state. Politicians called for his impeachment, death threats were constant and crosses were burned in his yard.

Shortly after issuing his historic dissent in Briggs, Waring turned 70 and became eligible for judicial retirement. He quietly submitted his notice of retirement to the president, and he and his wife moved to New York City. There, he watched as Briggs and other school-segregation cases wound their way onto the Supreme Court's docket. In all of these cases, from Kansas, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia and South Carolina, only Waring concluded that segregation in public education, even if equalized, was incompatible with the 14th Amendment. On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court, echoing the words and reasoning of Waring's dissent, concluded in Brown that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." On the night of the Brown decision, Walter White, the president of the NAACP, and other civil rights leaders journeyed to Waring's small Upper East Side apartment to thank him personally for the courage and vision of his dissent.

Several years after the Brown decision, Waring and Chief Justice Earl Warren, who authored the Supreme Court's unanimous order, had a chance encounter. Waring told the chief justice, "I was greatly relieved when you decided that Clarendon school case. I'd been very lonely up to that time." Warren responded to the retired Southern jurist, essentially living in exile, "Well, you had to do it the hard way."

60 Minutes examines unsolved 1964 civil rights murder of Louis Allen