Noting southern judges who upheld <cite>Brown v. Board</cite>
Heflin draws attention to the southern judges who were relatively conservative yet upheld the Supreme Court's ruling in <cite>Brown</cite>. One judge even let George Wallace know that he would hold him in contempt of court for violating the ruling.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Howell Heflin, July 9, 1974. Interview A-0010. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
They didn't get the publicity that Johnson did. But
several judges likeLynn in Birmingham,
who's pretty conservative but still follows the
United States Supreme Court. You've got a class of federal judges that
have never been written about. But they were not the flashy. . . and
that sort of thing. But they moved to follow the Supreme Court and gave
adherence to it in a unspectacular way, but they added stability to it.
You got people like Frank Johnson. . . I mean like
Lynn in Birmingham and Hobert Greems in Birmingham and Dan Thomas who
was in Mobile. They were not spectacular with it, but they saw that the
United State Supreme Court's decisions were carried out. They followed
it. And at the same time they were able to keep the lawyers convinced
that they were not revolutionaries but that they were doing what they
thought they had to do and what was right. That element in the South has
never been written about. But the conservative federal judge who
followed the Supreme Court and gave stability to it really. . . . If you
get down to it, nobody knows. . . and this is something. . . but the
influence of Seibert Lynn had-he was a federal judge in
Birmingham on the school house door. I don't know. All mine's hearsay.
But the word out in a few circles was that he let George Wallace know
that if he did certain things that if he held him in contempt that his
contempt procedure was going to be rough. That sort of thing I've heard.
Now I don't know. . . that's all hearsay. I don't know whether it's
true. But there was a lot of conversation about that at certain
times.