Let Them Be Judged: The Judicial Integration of the Deep South

The purpose of this work is to examine the role of the inferior federal courts of the Deep South which implemented the desegregation mandate of Brown. The work of the United States Courts of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit provides the focal point. Supervising all federal judicial activity in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, the Fifth Circuit shepherded independent federal district judges of widely varying abilities and persuasions through the nation's Second Reconstruction. After handing down its Brown decision, the supreme Court - -contrary to the belief of many citizens--played only a minimal role in the supervision and guidance of its lower federal courts. Left to its Court of Appeals was the task of translating a vague but revolutionary constitutional command into concrete orders for school boards and federal district courts. In that process the Fifth Circuit was the trail blazer, becoming the nation's greatest civil rights tribunal. The story of the evo