Cody
Williams
Diana Ross and George Bush’s
Supreme Court Nominee
Goodbye to Two Generations
of a Liberal Court
During the politically charged 60s Motown founder Berry Gordy presented to the world The Supremes, the quintessential girl musical group. In the 60s President Lyndon Johnson also appointed Thurgood Marshall to the US Supreme Court. Marshall was the quintessential liberal justice. The 60s was the ‘decade of change.’ For a lot of folks America was two very different worlds on either side of this decade and the Supremes helped to ease us through that transition, while the Supreme Court helped to facilitate it.
Gordy promoted Diana Ross as the Supremes lead singer. Diana, for me, went on to become the voice of the sixties. More than any other voice this soulful soprano stylist provided a musical backdrop, a soundtrack to a turbulent era of political and social upheaval.
Marshall, the first black to sit on the court in its two hundred year history, helped the Warren Court to become a “functioning partner in Kennedy-Johnson liberalism” says Lucas Powe author of the book “The Warren Court and American Politics.” This court, Powe writes, “helped to impose national liberal-elite values on groups that were outliers to that tradition--the white South, rural America, and areas of Roman Catholic dominance.”
The Supreme Court guided by Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren Berger helped to shape the America we live in today and gave blacks the liberties the constitution promised but society had previously denied. Before Motown and the dominance of these two liberal courts America for blacks looked a whole lot like Apartheid South Africa. Segregation was an accepted norm. Blacks were defacto second-class citizens. Previous Supreme Court decisions like Plessy vs. Ferguson and Dredd Scott, looking at the same constitution we have today, told America that it was perfectly fine for black and white public (and private) accommodations to remain separate. In the south there were Negro sections in movies houses and parks, Negro bathrooms and drinking fountains and blacks were not allowed the sit in some restaurant dining areas with whites or walk through some of the same building entrances.
As we processed Jack Kennedy’s call up of US troops to escort black children into white southern schools Diana and the girls sang "Where Did Our Love Go?" "Baby Love" and "Come See About Me."
With the anxiety of pending nuclear war we got "Stop! In the Name of Love." Watching replays of Dr. King’s great march on Washington, Jack’s assassination and George Wallace’s segregationist defiance we listened to "Back in My Arms Again."
When Malcolm and Medgar Evers were assassinated radios blasted "My World Is Empty Without You."
"I Hear a Symphony," "Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart," "Love Is Here and Now You're Gone," "The Happening," and "Reflections," played during Vietnam war protests, campus uprisings and Kent State.
In the wake of losing Dr. King Diana gave us "Love Child." Her "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me" made more bearable Bobby’s assassination, the Detroit riots, the Newark riots and the ruckus Democratic convention in Chicago. Then the Supremes ushered us out of the 60s with their breakup song "Someday We'll Be Together.”
“Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand,” was as close as Diana would get to directly challenging the political system. Supreme productions were not soul-searching message music but her songs, crossing a divide that speeches, prayers and polemic rhetoric couldn’t, made us feel better being who we were and about what we could accomplish. Her skinny little black girl ghetto-to-greatness story its self was motivational.
Black men came into the 60s carrying signs trying to convince the world that, “I AM A MAN.” We exited declaring, “I’m Black and I’m proud.”
Dianna Ross and the Supremes lulled us through turbulent progress and political advances. Motown’s Supremes gave us a degree of entertaining escapism during a very difficult a period in our nation’s history. Berry Gordy with his insistence on polish and professionalism gave mainstream America a rock-n-roll that was not so threatening. The world lovingly embraced his Supremes. Diana has delivered more hits songs than any female recording artist in history. Billboard named her the female Entertainer of the Century.
During the same period Diana beguiled the world with her voice a liberal US Supreme court was making sweeping decisions wrenching change throughout a nation that seemed to have had certain constitutional concepts lodged deep in its throat. Concepts like universal suffrage, equality, due process and pluralistic democracy. At least two generations of Americans do not know a world without Motown music. Neither do we know one with a predominantly conservative US Supreme Court.
The lucky only have to live with the bad decisions of an incompetent president for 4 or 8 years. The Supreme Court, however, makes decisions that shape the world in which we live for generations.
This all brings me to today and George W’s nomination of John Roberts Jr. to replace Sandra Day O’Conner on the current William Rehnquist Supreme Court. If Roberts is approved this appointment will give us the most conservative court in over two generations. We haven’t seen a conservative high court like this one can pan out to be since days long before Diana and her Supremes cooed us with “Baby Love.”
When you think about the positions conservative members of this court have taken recently this presents what we can see as the beginning of a challenging period in American politics and law. In the Elian Gonzales case conservatives sought to take a young boy away from his biological father solely because that parent wanted to remain in communist Cuban. Clarence Thomas sided with conservatives ruling that the brutal beating of a handcuffed and shackled federal inmate by prison guards was not cruel or unusual punishment. Conservative justices often challenge efforts that promote racial diversity, inclusion and tolerance. Women’s rights issues and our protections from religious extremists fall victim too to conservative interpretations of constitutional law.
One predominantly conservative Supreme Court decided that blacks were not legal citizens of the US and therefore had no right to sue for their freedom and escape the humiliation of being handed over as property from one slave holder to another. In 1896, the Supreme Court of the United States heard the Plessy vs. Ferguson case and found him guilty of the crime of wanting to ride in a train car reserved for whites.
Speaking for a seven-person majority, Justice Henry Brown wrote:
"That [the Separate Car Act] does not conflict with the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery...is too clear for argument....The object of the [Fourteenth A]mendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either."
"Stoned Love," “I Hear A Symphony.”
With Sandra Day O’Conner the Supreme Court teetered back and forth dangerously along a progressive and regressive political fault line. The split University of Michigan affirmative action decisions, the split Ten Commandment decisions and the New London eminent domain decision where classic examples of a schizophrenic court torn between liberal and conservative ideologies.
Just imagine a majority conservative court that relegates its liberals and free thinkers to the same dysfunctional opposition party status as limp noodle democrats have taken on in both houses of congress.
What will America look like with its three major branches of government (executive, legislative and judicial) dominated by rabid conservatives?
"You Keep Me Hangin' On"
Court watchers praised O’Conner for being the type of justice who weighed an argument presented before the court on its merit. She didn’t appear to allow political ideology to prejudice her opinions. Clarence Thomas, Antoine Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist seem bent on proving who can best out conservative the other regardless of the case argued in front of them. These men, like the courts that ruled on Plessy and Scott see law through filters that allow some Americans to freely deny rights and equality to another group of Americans in a guise of individual freedom.
If Roberts, or any subsequent Bush nominee, comes to the court towing the conservative line as well we can pretty much expect to be taken back a pre “Baby Love” America, a pre Warren Court America, in many respects and for generations to come. Our best defense against this will be the type of calculated case-by-case legal challenges that Thurgood Marshall waged to win his unanimous landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education decision, which literally divided post Civil War America into two dispensations: one with legal segregation and one more resembling the lofty ideas of equality and justice set forth in the constitution. A liberal court got us there. Would a conservative court take us backward?
The notion of the Supreme Court being a non-partisan arbiter of constitutional intent is a myth. Our country was born out of a struggle for equality, freedom and justice. The Supreme Court historically has been high battleground sought by conflicting ideologies to further entrench their way on our society. To the victor goes the spoil. Unlike that little girl group from Detroit our high court can at times become anything but supreme.
Sing, Diana.
"You Can't Hurry Love."
© 2005 By Cody Williams www.codywilliams.com
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