William Rehnquist in Living History, by Hillary Rodham Clinton

On Education: 1970s: Supported "separate but equal"; opposed desegregation

Rehnquist, early in his career as a Supreme Court clerk, wrote a memo which had strongly favored upholding the Court's key pro-segregation decision of 1896, a case called Plessy v. Ferguson, which enunciated the doctrine of "separate but equal." He endorsed a Texas law permitting white-only primary elections. "It is about time the Court faced the fact that the white people in the south don't like colored people," he wrote in 1952. And in 1964 Rehnquist led efforts to challenge the qualifications of black voters at the polls in Arizona. In 1970, he proposed a constitutional amendment to limit and disrupt implementation of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation case of 1954. Since being named to the Court by Nixon in 1971, he consistently tried to turn back the Court's progress on race--and by extension the country's. His was the only vote favoring federal tax-exempt status for Bob Jones University, which banned interracial dating and had an expulsion policy on that basis. Source: Living History, by Hillary Rodham Clinton, p.396 Nov 1, 2003

The above quotations are from Living History, by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Click here for main summary page. Click here for a profile of William Rehnquist. Click here for William Rehnquist on all issues.
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Page last updated: Feb 14, 2019