Washington Courts: Judicial News Report Detail

An Unusual Atonement

It was a rare scene.

On May 25, the seven robed justices of the Florida Supreme Court sat in ceremonial session before a packed courtroom, watching a video narrated by the booming voice of former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

The rarity was this: For fifteen minutes, the justices listened in their Tallahassee courtroom as Jordan recounted in withering detail a series of racially charged opinions their Court had issued a half century ago in its vain effort to defy U.S. Supreme Court desegregation orders.

As Florida's most prominent civil rights leaders looked on, the justices heard words their predecessors had written about different "species" of human beings, divine anger at "race mixing," and their intention to interpose the state's power between Florida's citizens and federal authority.

When the video ended, Major B. Harding, Florida's chief justice, looked squarely at the audience and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard about a regrettable and poignant moment in the jurisprudential history of this Court. We must learn from the lessons taught . . . hatred and discrimination will not triumph."

Later, a Florida newspaper praised the justices' unusual public atonement. "Courts," it said, "don't generally say they're sorry."

The special ceremonial session stemmed from a request of the Court by Florida's NAACP chapters to publicly honor the fiftieth anniversary of one of its landmark cases: Florida's first desegregation lawsuit.

On May 25, 1949, Virgil Darnell Hawkins filed suit in Florida's supreme court, asking that it issue a writ of mandamus requiring the University of Florida to admit him to its law school. An application he made a month earlier had been rejected. Race was the sole reason for his rejection.

For nine years, Hawkins pursued his claims, which the Court rejected in opinions that grew increasingly racist--and that ultimately defied the U.S. Supreme Court itself. Finally, in 1958, a U.S. District Court judge gave Hawkins the most difficult choice of his life.

If Hawkins withdrew his application to the university, the judge said, he would that day issue a blanket order desegregating the entire state university system. But if Hawkins intended to pursue his own admission, the judge would let the state of Florida litigate whether Hawkins was actually qualified for admission--a move that could have delayed a final decree for years. Hawkins withdrew his application and enrolled in an unaccredited law school in Boston.

That fall, the first black student was peaceably enrolled at the University of Florida. Ironically, Florida became one of the few Southern states to desegregate its universities without the rioting and gubernatorial defiance that occurred elsewhere well into the 1960s.

During the recent ceremony, Hawkins' surviving family members were seated in places of honor in the well of the courtroom where they watched representatives of all three branches of government and the bar describe legal transgressions of the past.

African-Americans and whites alike wept openly during and after the formal ceremony. Florida bar association president Howard Coker was one whose tears heartened the Hawkins family most of all. That was because after Hawkins had finally become an attorney, the bar had been instrumental in stripping Hawkins of his hard-won license.

For years, his questionable Boston law school credentials had prevented Hawkins' admission to the Florida bar, until the Court granted him a special waiver in the 1970s. Then 70 years old, he was finally sworn in, fulfilling a lifelong dream since the age of six.

But his advanced years, coupled with the long passage of time since he'd garnered his legal education, led him to make mistakes in his practice. Members of the Florida bar sought to disbar him--too zealously, some said.

Old and worn with struggle, Hawkins finally resigned under disciplinary charges in 1985, but not before he went to the Florida Supreme Court to defend himself. "When I get to heaven," he told the Court, "I want to be a member of the Florida bar."

Months after his death in 1988, the Florida Supreme Court posthumously reinstated his bar membership, making him a Florida attorney before the "Bar of Heaven." The action was credited as the world's first posthumous bar reinstatement.

The second came just a few months later, when authorities in Great Britain granted the same honor to the world-famous Indian spiritual and political leader, Mahatma Ghandi.

Now public information director for the Florida Supreme Court, Waters has served the Court for 12 years, first as a law clerk and later as its first Internet webmaster. In 1996, as executive assistant to then-Chief Justice Gerald Kogan, he created the Court's first public information program. Before attending the University of Florida law school, he worked as a journalist, covering Florida politics.