TALLAHASSEE - May 17, 1954, was a day that changed countless lives, none more so than those of Joseph W. Hatchett, Leander Shaw and Peggy A. Quince.
Hatchett and Shaw, now retired, would become the first and second African-American justices of the Florida Supreme Court. Quince, still serving, is the third. That day began the long revolution that would lead them there.
On Monday, they will participate with the court in ceremonies marking the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared racial segregation in American public schools to be unconstitutional.
Quince was in first grade in a segregated Norfolk, Va., school when her father told her the news; it meant, he said, that she could attend any school she wanted to. But Norfolk schools were still segregated when she graduated 12 years later.
Hatchett recalled recently how the news that May 17 "electrified" the campus of Florida A & M University here, where he was a senior about to graduate. But it never crossed his mind that he or any other black Floridian could become a judge. "They would have put me in a straitjacket," he said.
Compliance came slowly to Florida. Its determination to keep its universities segregated gave civil rights lawyers what one called "our first brush with massive resistance." In 1960, when Hatchett and Shaw, both graduates of Howard University's law school in Washington, took the Florida Bar examination together, the manager of the Miami hotel where the test was given would not let them stay there or eat lunch with the white candidates.
On May 17, 1954, the Florida Supreme Court was no place for anyone to suggest that black people would someday wear its black robes. It is doubtful that any institution in the South was more resolutely racist. No Southern court fought desegregation longer or harder.
The senior justice was Glenn Terrell. Appointed in 1923, he would serve until 1964, the longest tenure ever. Campaigning successfully for the state Senate in 1914, he had advocated "eliminating the Negro as a political factor." That had already been accomplished through the device of Democratic primaries restricted to whites. Nonetheless, Terrell sponsored a constitutional amendment requiring literacy and property tests. Though a "grandfather" clause would exempt most whites, even they voted against it.
Sharing the Supreme Court bench with Terrell was another of Florida's legendary racists, John E. Mathews Sr., who as a state senator in 1947 had ranted for two hours in unsuccessful support of his bill to preserve the white primary by repealing all state laws concerning primaries.
A 1954 bond validation case gave the court the opportunity to denounce Brown. Writing for himself, Chief Justice B.K. Roberts and three others, Terrell approved the bonds despite their intended use to build segregated schools. Calling Brown "a great mistake," Terrell warned that it would be "a tragedy to attempt to enforce it" before Southern attitudes changed. "To homogenize Topsy, Little Red Riding Hood and Mary who carried her little lamb to school is going to be slow and tedious," Terrell said.
Mathews dissented, saying the segregation clause of Florida's Constitution meant that Florida's schools should be shut down.
The Florida court could do nothing to stall public school desegregation because the U.S. Supreme Court was entrusting that to the federal district courts. Desegregation was to take place with "all deliberate speed," an unfortunate phrase inspired in part by Florida Attorney General Richard Ervin's brief, which cited public opinion statistics in warning hyperbolically of a "tornado which would devastate the entire school system."
But the Washington court had not taken the Florida Supreme Court out of the loop with regard to the universities. Virgil Hawkins, a black man who wanted to study law at the University of Florida, became the scapegoat for Terrell and his wrathful colleagues.
Hawkins, a preacher's son from Lake County who had dreamed of becoming a lawyer to fight the multitude of large and small injustices