Judge John Wisdom; Rulings Changed South

Judge John Minor Wisdom, the last survivor of the federal appeals court that forced the Deep South to give up segregation, died Saturday, a spokeswoman for the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said. He would have been 94 today.

In the 1960s, while the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was organizing marchers and forcing the nation to reckon with the rights of its black citizens, Wisdom and his fellow federal judges issued a series of rulings against segregation.

He and three fellow members of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals were called “The Four” by an outraged fellow judge who said they had destroyed the Old South.

Wisdom and the late Elbert Tuttle of Atlanta, John Brown of Houston and Richard Rives of Montgomery, Ala., handed down the rulings against the old Confederacy.

Working a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court called for school desegregation “with all deliberate speed,” the 5th Circuit judges fleshed out the Supreme Court’s mandate and expanded it beyond education. They issued landmark decisions that struck down the barriers of discrimination in voting, jury selection and employment.

“I think the 5th Circuit prevented a second civil war,” Wisdom once said. “If we hadn’t made people obey the laws of this country, I think there would have been a lot more people killed, a lot more people hurt. I think there would have been another war here.”

Four decisions, written by Wisdom in 1965-67, changed the plodding pace of desegregation by Southern school boards into a single system consisted of “not white or Negro schools--just schools.”

Wisdom considered a 1966 ruling in the case U.S. vs. Jefferson County (Ala.) Board of Education to be his most important. It provided the legal grounds for what is now known as affirmative action.

Correcting the wrongs of a century of segregation, Wisdom wrote, required “much more than allowing a few Negro children to attend formerly white schools: It calls for . . . the organized undoing of the effects of past segregation.”

In 1993, Wisdom received a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. The next year, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals building was renamed in his honor.

Wisdom was named to the 5th Circuit by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1957, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” public schools were not equal. He continued to hear cases into his 90s.