he 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 that Florida blacks suffered, was public relations director of Bethune-Cookman College at Daytona Beach when he applied to the University of Florida law school in 1949.
Four other blacks applied with Hawkins to UF graduate programs. All were refused. They sued a month later in the Florida Supreme Court for an order requiring the UF to admit them. Only Hawkins would stay the long, discouraging course.
Florida offered to send them out of state, as other Southern states were doing, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court had already ruled unconstitutional. The Board of Control voted to establish a segregated law school at FAMU, as Texas had done in a similar situation. Meanwhile, Hawkins could be admitted, but only temporarily, to the University of Florida. In 1950, in the first of its six rulings on the Hawkins case, the Florida Supreme Court told him it was that or nothing.
Hawkins sued again. Denied again, he appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which turned him down because he still didn't have a final judgment from the very clever justices of the Florida Supreme Court. On his third trip to Tallahassee, in June 1952, the Florida court finally refused him flatly. This time the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review his case and others like it. "The judgments are vacated," it said of Hawkins and the others, "and the cases are remanded for consideration in light of the Segregation Cases decided May 17, 1954."
That should have been clear, but the Florida court remained evasive and defiant. By a 5-2 vote, it ordered Hawkins to resubmit his issues with emphasis on "conditions that now prevail." Meanwhile, a special master, Circuit Judge John A.H. Murphree, would take testimony at Gainesville on how Hawkins might be received at the university. Sitting with the Supreme Court on special assignment, Murphree had been one of the judges signing Terrell's screed in the bond validation case.
Hawkins went back to the U.S. Supreme Court, which had already ordered the University of Texas to admit a black law student. On March 12, 1956, i