Baker v. Carr was a landmark Supreme Court decision in the early 1960s that aided the breakdown of segregation and discrimination in the South and furthered the role of the federal government in helping to advance the Civil Rights movement.
In March 1962, the Supreme Court, under the direction of Chief Justice Earl Warren, ruled in favor of Charles Baker, a Tennessee voter, that his state was electing members of the state legislature based on district boundaries that were too old to represent accurately the distribution of the population. As a result, the sparse rural population of the state maintained its grip on the state government, while the growing urban population possessed but a muted voice.
With this ruling, the Warren Court determined that legislative apportionment by the states was now subject to
The scrutiny of the federal courts. The final decision was six-to-two. Justices Hugo L. Black, William J. Brennan, Tom C. Clark, William O. Douglas, and Potter Stewart joined Warren in support of the ruling, while Justices Felix Frankfurter and John Marshal Harlan dissented. This final margin, however, did not reveal the considerable internal debate and dissension within the Court that made this final tally closer than it appeared. One justice, Charles E. Whittaker, was forced to abstain from casting his vote due to his hospitalization. Had he been able to vote, Whittaker made it clear that he would have been a dissenting voice. Similarly, Clark had initially opposed the ruling. He was, in fact, originally chosen by Frankfurter to write the dissent. Clark, however, decided to switch his vote after preparing a draft of his statement. During this process he came to the conclusion that the federal courts were the only recourse open to the people of Tennessee to enact apportionment reform, the state legislature having proved itself unwilling to implement change. In Tennessee, the last time the district lines had been redrawn was 1900.
Warren asked Brennan to write the momentous opinion. Brennan did so, keeping in mind the tenuous support of a number of justices. Stewart, in fact, only backed the ruling on the grounds that it indicated the Court’s willingness to hear cases about the apportionment of state legislatures. Brennan wrote his opinion to reflect Stewart’s concern. Once drafted, it did little more than rule that Baker’s complaint was now within the federal court’s jurisdiction. Still to be decided were questions of enforcement and apportionment standards as required by the Constitution. Despite these limitations, Baker v. Carr was momentous in its own right. It chipped away at state’s rights by overriding the Court’s previous stand that state apportionment was a political question, one to be considered by the legislative branch only and not the judicial branch of the state or federal government. This was a reversal of the view of the Court reached in an earlier decision, that of Colegrove v. Green (1946).
Primarily for this reason, Warren considered Baker v. Carr “the most important case of my tenure on the Court.” His statement contains much validity. Following this ruling, judicial activism was more the norm, and political activists, religious dissenters, and civil rights workers could expect new forms of legal protection. Additionally, and predictably, in the politically charged 1960s, this ruling rapidly became a racial one. Since blacks populated many southern cities in great numbers, they were effectively stymied by whites from flexing their true voting power under the old system of election that ignored population centers in favor of rural areas. With Baker v. Carr, this inequity was dismantled.
Consequently, this ruling heralded the Supreme Court’s lead in the civil rights crusade. This was a great surprise considering that Warren, the three-time governor of California, had supported the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and, after this conflict, had attacked the administration of Harry S. Truman for “coddling” communists. The Warren court, however, proved more liberal than conservative, prompting DwiGHT D. Eisenhower to remark that appointing Warren to the Supreme Court was the “biggest damn fool mistake I ever made.”
Not surprisingly, Baker v. Carr had to endure a number of legal challenges. Foremost among these were efforts undertaken in the House of Representatives, which passed a bill to deny federal court jurisdiction over state apportionment. But the Senate refused to concur and the bill failed. Meanwhile, in 1964, in Wesberry v. Sanders, the Supreme Court reaffirmed and encouraged the implementation of Baker v. Carr, underscoring the principle of equal representation, according to a system of “one man, one vote.” In the same year, with Reynolds v. Sims, the Court again extended its ruling, declaring that both houses of a legislature had to be apportioned on the basis of population, the sole exception being the U. S. Senate. These guidelines had to be followed even if the people of a state had approved a different system of representation.
Further reading: Bernard Schwartz, Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court—A Judicial Biography (New York: New York University Press, 1983).
—Matthew Flynn
Baldwin, James (1924-1987) writer
James Baldwin was an African-American novelist, essayist,
Playwright, and poet, whose passion and eloquence on the
Subject of sexual identity and race relations in the United
States made him a leading spokesperson of the Civil Rights
Movement.
Baldwin was born on August 2, 1924, into poverty in Harlem, in New York City, where he was raised by his mother and stepfather, David Baldwin, a Pentecostal minister. He began writing as a child, but at 14 his literary interests were put on hold when he became a junior minister in a Harlem storefront church. Although Baldwin left the ministry and Christianity three years later, his writings reflected biblical cadences and imagery throughout his career.
In 1943, Baldwin’s literary career began in earnest when the death of his stepfather and the outbreak of the Harlem riots within a 24-hour period spurred him to concentrate on his writing. During the winter of 1944-45, Baldwin met Native Son author Richard Wright, who became a mentor and helped him to win the 1945 Eugene Saxton Fellowship to allow him to write. Baldwin was soon publishing essays and reviews in the Nation, New Leader, Commentary, and
James Baldwin, 1955 (Library of Congress)
Partisan Review. In 1948, Baldwin won a Rosenwald Fellowship, which he used to travel to Paris, where he hoped to escape the racial and sexual prejudices that prevailed in the United States. Baldwin denied that he was an expatriate, referring to himself in his later years as a “transatlantic commuter,” but he maintained his residency in France for the rest of his life.
In his early career, Baldwin saw himself primarily as a novelist, but his fiction’s forthright portrayals of homosexuality disturbed many critics. In 1953, he published his first novel, Go Tell it on the Mountain, a partly autobiographical account of his teenage years that received widespread praise. But his later works of fiction received mixed reviews. In particular, the novels Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962), whose protagonists struggled to define sexual, racial, and national identities
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Amidst frank depictions of homosexual relationships, drew criticism from inside and outside the Civil Rights movement. The latter work prompted a famous response from Black Panthers leader Eldridge Cleaver, who declared that the novel exposed Baldwin’s “agonizing, total hatred of black people.”
Baldwin’s essays, however, which focused for the most part on race relations, won him critical acclaim as an astute and prophetic commentator on racial discrimination and identity. Pieces such as “Everybody’s Protest Novel” (1949) and “Many Thousands Gone” (1951) established him as an important voice in the Civil Rights movement, though the criticism of Wright contained in the essays produced a lasting break between the two writers. Baldwin’s most important collections of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963), were published as the Civil Rights movement exploded across the American South. As one critic explained, they “won Baldwin a popularity and acclaim as the ‘conscience of the nation,’” whose “knife-edged criticism of the failed promises of American democracy, and the consequent social injustices, is unrelenting and demonstrates a piercing understanding of the function of blacks in the white racial imagination.”
In 1957, Baldwin returned to the United States to take part directly in the Civil Rights movement, organizing protests, lecturing, and speaking out at forums while continuing to write. In America, the slow pace of change tempered his initial optimism. In his earlier essays, Baldwin called for reconciliation between whites and blacks, attributing racial prejudice to the insecurities of whites, who made scapegoats of African Americans to assuage their own feelings of powerlessness. In The Fire Next Time, however, Baldwin argued prophetically that American race relations were in danger of erupting into violence. Still, he concluded the essay with a note of optimism, suggesting that “if we [blacks and whites] do not falter in our duty now, we may be able. . . to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.”
Despite increasing criticism from more radical, separatist civil rights leaders and a general lessening of interest in his work, Baldwin continued to write until his death. His other works included the plays The Amen Corner (1955) and Blues for Mr Charlie (1964); the short story collection Going to Meet the Man (1965); the essay collections No Name in the Street (1972), The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), and The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 (1985); and the novels Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979). When Baldwin died of stomach cancer in France, he was working on a play and a biography of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Further reading: James Campbell, Talking at the Gates: A Life of James Baldwin (New York: Viking, 1991); David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: H. Holt, 1995).
—Kevin D. Smith
World History
