Tag: Thurgood Marshall

Ernest Frederick “Fritz” Hollings is born in Charleston, the son of Adolph and Wilhelmine Hollings. Immediately receives a commission and joins the U.S. Army to take part in World War II. He received the Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons. Elected to the S.C. General Assembly as a Democratic representative from Charleston. Elected governor, serving from 1959 to 1963. At 37, he was South Carolina’s youngest governor of the 20th century. Wins special election to the U.S. Senate to complete the unexpired term of Johnston, who died in office. Four years later she became the senator’s second wife. Hollings announces bid for Democratic nomination for president. He retires from the Senate after 38 years.

Neal Devins and Lawrence Baum’s new book, The Company They Keep, seeks to explain why every member of the contemporary Supreme Court plays in the partisan politics league. Courts were not so partisan through much of the twentieth century because most elites played in the same moderate liberal league. Both elite Republicans and elite Democrats during the New Deal and Great Society era favored racial equality, free speech, and secularism. The partisan Roberts Court differs from the bipartisan Warren Court because elite Democrats and Republicans now differ on the crucial constitutional issues facing the nation. The Company They Keep breaks from the literature on Supreme Court decisionmaking by describing judicial partisanship as a social phenomenon—a consequence, in part, of justices wanting approval from their elite peers. Supreme Court justices are no different. If people particularly want to be liked by their peers, then Supreme Court justices will be “particularly interested in being held in esteem by the elite communities they are a part of.” Supreme Court justices are not simply individuals, but members of teams that play in partisan political leagues. That the majority on the Roberts Court plays for the conservative Federalist Society team may explain the direction of constitutional law far more than a mere desire for approval. Team members provide the justices with cues as to what constitutes a conservative position. Members of the contemporary Federalist Society team, by comparison, play with people who are certain that murderers ought to be punished by death.

On March 27, the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) honored the late Dr. Ronald Walters, who was a Black political scholar, at the Thurgood Marshall Center in the District of Columbia. “This is a special time to honor Dr. Walters,” Dr. Elsie Scott, the director of Howard’s Ronald Walters Center. “His spirit is in this room. In 1958, he led other young Blacks in a successful sit-in protest of the Dockum Drug Store in Wichita for refusing to serve African Americans and this took place two years before the more highly publicized Greensboro, N.C. sit-ins. He came to Howard University in 1971 and became chairman of the political science department before leaving it in 1996 to become the head of the Afro-American studies department at the University of Maryland, College Park. “Ronald Walters was a scholar and intellectual,” Brazile said. “Ron believed that Black people should work within the political system to change it.” Winbush said that Walters was a firm believer in Black liberation and was a proponent of reparations. “He believed Black people were due for the centuries of work put into this country without compensation.” Madison said he first met Walters at the 1972 Black Political convention that took place in Gary, Ind., and was impressed by him then. We had a private meeting where he told me how to register voters to help Jackson without getting in trouble with the NAACP.” Madison echoed the sentiments of Scott when he said that Walters would go to the Black media first with news. “When Ron wanted to say something, he went to the Black media first,” Madison said.