Vol. 11, No. 3, Pg. 32. One Week that Change the State.

• Author: By Jay Bender

South Carolina Lawyer

1999.

Vol. 11, No. 3, Pg. 32.

One Week that Change the State

32One Week that Change the StateBy Jay BenderIhe windows in the ornate third-floor courtroom of the federal courthouse in Columbia were open to catch what cooling breeze there might be on hot early June day.

34The presiding judge was on the bench, elevated above the floor by four feet. Near the judge sat his wife, knitting and, occasionally during the proceedings, making eye contact with the judge when he looked her way. The U-shaped spectator gallery was full. As was the custom of the day, seating was by race.

Only James M. Hinton, president of the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was sitting among the white spectators. The black spectators-officially called Negroes at the time-made up about three-quarters of the audience. Among them, in the back row, sat an undergraduate from the Colored, Normal, Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College of South Carolina. An Army veteran of the recent World War, Matthew Perry knew he wanted to be a lawyer.

The date was June 3, 1947, a Tuesday, and the beginning of a week of trials that changed forever the way South Carolinians vote and are educated in the law.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, a survey of the cases having the most impact on our state will always include Briggs v. Elliott, 95 F. Supp. 529 (E.D.S.C. 1951), the South Carolina case that became a part of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Bd. of Education, 347 U.S. 873 (1954). But before his dissent in Briggs and the adoption of his analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment by the Supreme Court in Brown, District Judge J. Waites Waring was called on to decide fundamental questions of voting and educational rights in two other cases: Elmore v. Rice and Wrighten v. Bd. of Trustees.

Both the Elmore and Wrighten cases were tried in the same week. The opinions were announced on the same day, a Saturday: July 12, 1947. The plaintiff in the first case, described in the June 4, 1947 edition of The State newspaper as "George Elmore, Columbia Negro taxi driver," had brought suit against Richland County Democratic Party officials to challenge his exclusion from the 1946 Democratic Party primary.

Two years earlier, at a special session called by Governor Olin D. Johnston, the South Carolina General Assembly had repealed every statute regulating the conduct of party nominating primaries. The state's action was in direct response to the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944), which had held that the state regulation of party nominating primaries constituted state action, thereby...