Civil Rights: The Apologist

After arguing before the Supreme Court last week, Jerris Leonard refused to pose for photographers with a lawyer who had supported his plea. “That is one honor I will decline,” said Leonard, who is chief of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. His reluctance was understandable. Leonard had just become the first Government lawyer ever to ask the high court for a delay in school desegregation. His unaccustomed ally was John C. Satterfield of Mississippi, the most prominent segregationist lawyer in the country.

Together, Leonard and Satterfield were fighting suits brought by the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, which asked the court to order immediate desegregation of school districts in Mississippi. Citing 15 years of evasion by the state, Defense Fund Attorney Jack Greenberg argued in his brief that such an edict was necessary “so that protracted litigation loses its attractiveness as a tactic for delaying desegregation.” By contrast, Leonard urged the Justices to affirm a lower-court order that gives the school boards until Dec. 1 to submit new desegregation plans—but sets no deadline for implementation. “Disestablishment of a dual school system is often a somewhat complicated process,” said Leonard. Although the process was supposed to begin in 1954, he insisted: “it is simply unreal to talk about instantaneous integration.”

Only last August an HEW expert, Dr. Gregory Anrig, submitted plans for each of the school districts that he described as “educationally and administratively sound both in terms of substance and in terms of timing.” Why did the Government decide to block those plans this year? Leonard says that it was because HEW needs additional time to study and perhaps refine them. Another report, by William E. Cresswell, former administrative assistant to Senator John Stennis, claims that the Nixon Administration traded a delay in desegregation for Stennis’ vote on its ABM approval (TIME, Sept. 26).

Whether or not Cresswell is right, Leonard has been forced to change his own tactics. He came to the Justice Department from Wisconsin, where he was the majority leader of the state senate and wrote the state’s open-housing law.

Leonard vowed strict enforcement of civil rights laws, and he made a creditable start. Under his direction, the Civil Rights Division has filed 33 lawsuits against segregation in public accommodations and 15 against discrimination in housing. Last week—perhaps to assuage critics on the eve of his Supreme Court appearance—the division asked a federal court in Atlanta to compel Georgia to integrate its public schools by the start of the 1970-71 year.

Political Goals. Informed observers believe that Leonard has been chosen to carry out some of the promises that Republicans made to Southern politicians during last year’s presidential campaign. Speaking for many critics, a former lawyer in Leonard’s division says: “He was made to understand that he should enforce civil rights laws, but only in a manner consistent with the Administration’s political goals.” When 65 lawyers in his division protested the delay in Mississippi desegregation last month, Leonard handled the revolt like a loyal party man. Once a decision is made in the department, he said at a news conference, the lawyers are obliged to carry it out. He fired the leader of the rebels, Gary Greenberg, who had refused to compromise his views while arguing a desegregation suit against an Arkansas school district.

Attorney General John Mitchell gave Leonard the dubious honor of arguing the Mississippi case before the Supreme Court even though the Solicitor General usually speaks for the U.S. It has been no easy job. In a friend of the court brief a respected group called the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law attacked Leonard’s assertion that the division lacked “bodies and people” to enforce desegregation throughout the South this year. The committee, which includes former Justice Department Official John Doar (a Republican who headed Leonard’s division with distinction under President Kennedy), promised to enlist enough volunteer attorneys, if need be, to finish the job for Leonard.

The Supreme Court may well rule on the Mississippi cases this week, and it is unlikely to show much patience with delays in desegregation; in recent years, it has repeatedly declared that the time for “deliberate speed” is over. Even so, the justices confront a hard choice. They may conclude that a desegregation decision in the middle of a school year would produce widespread disorder in Mississippi—and would risk a collision between the Court and the Nixon Administration.