The unvarnished truth about Rehnquist

Derrick Z. Jackson - The Boston Globe: "PRESIDENT BUSH said William Rehnquist should be remembered for ''improving the delivery of justice for the American people." To Rehnquist, justice meant just us white men, preferably connected, preferably straight and preferably with all limbs functioning.

This was a chief justice of the Supreme Court who dissented in last year's 5-4 ruling in favor of a paraplegic who sued the state of Tennessee for courtroom access. The man dragged himself up 24 stairs for a traffic violation hearing because the court had no elevator. When he did not show up for a second appearance, saying he was humiliated by crawling up the stairs, he was arrested.

Rehnquist was not impressed by the man's plight. ''A violation of due process occurs only when a person is actually denied the constitutional right to access a given judicial proceeding," Rehnquist wrote. Translated, it is not enough that a man could not walk up the stairs. There must be evidence that Bull Connor was at the door to beat him back down.

Rehnquist, who died last week, spent his career standing at the door of the high court, beating down countless Americans, whether they were black or brown, gay or lesbian, Florida voters, or women trying to control their bodies. A half century ago, he wrote a memo as a clerk to Justice Robert Jackson that said the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson separate-but-equal ruling ''was right and should be reaffirmed." In 1964 he spoke out against desegregation in public accommodations in Phoenix, saying it would result in the ''unwanted customer and the disliked proprietor . . . glowering at one another across the lunch counter. It is, I believe, impossible to justify the sacrifice of even a portion of our historic individual freedom for a purpose such as this."

Rehnquist owned two homes in Phoenix and Vermont with restrictive covenants against selling to people of color and Jews and claimed to be ignorant of the clauses. When he was nominated to the court by President Nixon in 1971, Rehnquist feigned a change of heart, saying he came to realize ''the strong concern that minorities have for the recognition of these rights. I would not feel the same way today about it as I did then."

History proved he felt the same way all along. Almost without fail for a third of a century, he voted against affirmative action for municipal workers and school desegregation plans, in utter disregard for the nation's injurious history of slavery, segregation and disparate resources. As recently as 2003, he wrote the majority opinion that struck down Michigan's mechanical point-system affirmative action for undergraduates at the University of Michigan. He then dissented from the opinion crafted by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor that upheld a more nuanced form of affirmative action at the Michigan law school. Rehnquist pooh-poohed even nuanced affirmative action as ''a naked effort to achieve racial balancing."

Rehnquist's naked indifference was marked by the fact that he never had an African-American law clerk, as pointed out in an editorial this week in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Even though he did not completely destroy affirmative action at the collegiate level, his court instilled a national defeatism in city halls and school boards. A shining or sordid monument to Rehnquist's momentum, depending on your point of view, is right here in Boston, where white plaintiffs forced the end of affirmative action at the city's flagship public school, Boston Latin.

The fear of facing a Rehnquist court was so intense that the NAACP and the Clinton administration's Department of Education urged Boston school officials not to appeal a federal appeals court ruling striking down affirmative action. But in the meantime, there were no alternative strategies to compensate for the white privilege of students who come to Latin with the benefit of private or parochial educations and private test-prep programs. The enrollment of African American and Latino students at Latin has dropped from 27 percent in 1998 to 16 percent today.

While white students make up only 14 percent of the total enrollment of the Boston Public Schools, they make up 54 percent of the student body at Latin. Despite President Bush's claims behind No Child Left Behind, funding dried up for the test prep program for the entrance exam to the city's three exam schools.

Latin's massive racial imbalance is symbolic of the nation's resegregation of public schools in the Rehnquist years. The man who said Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed lived to see his vision thrive into the 21st century. Bush said Rehnquist improved the delivery of justice. Rehnquist delivered a half-century of denial. He was the man who stood at the courthouse stairs, with no sympathy for even those who crawled on all fours to get there."