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In the Winter 2000/2001 issue of JBHE we outlined the early history of William H. Rehnquist's opposition to racial integration and full voting rights for black people. We noted that in 1951 the current Chief Justice of the United States, as a young law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, wrote a memo in opposition to public school integration. It was titled, "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases." In the memorandum, he wrote: "In the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are.... I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." Readers will recall that Plessy v. Ferguson was the original 1896 Supreme Court ruling that established the "separate but equal doctrine" of racial segregation that prevailed in the United States until 1954.
A year after the 1952 memorandum, Rehnquist was asked by Justice Jackson to prepare his opinion in Terry v. Adams, a case in which the Court finally ruled that blacks...