Chief Justice Warren E. Burger is an unsung hero in our nation’s struggle to remove vestiges of racial segregation and race-based slavery and to create an environment of racial equality and equal treatment. What is noteworthy about Burger’s contribution to racial justice is that he accomplished as much, if not more, in his off-the-bench activities as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court than in his very respectable jurisprudence on racial issues. Burger did not simply talk the talk of racial equality. He practiced it, effortlessly and without fanfare, in his daily life and in discharging his administrative duties as Chief Justice. In order to fully appreciate Burger’s transformative impact on racial equality, it is necessary to revisit the interior life of the Court as it existed when Burger took the helm in June 1969.
In 1974, five years after Burger became Chief Justice, and more than forty years ago, an article was published which rocked Washington, D.C. A cub columnist, Nina Totenberg, accused the Court of being the “Last Plantation,” because it was thoroughly segregated, with whites overseeing a phalanx of black subordinates. This was a shocking portrait because the Court had been the moving force in attempting to desegregate the rest of the country; yet, Totenberg portrayed the Court as practicing internally precisely the opposite of what it preached to the rest of the country. Many culprits were identified, but blame was ultimately placed on the racial norms that had long prevailed at the Court and in the country itself. Some of the Justices seemed to treat blacks as racial inferiors without even realizing it.
Totenberg’s provocative article painted a bleak picture of the Court as it stood in 1974, but she was apparently unaware, and made no mention, of the much worse racial atmosphere which had prevailed inside the Court during the tenure of Burger’s predecessor, Chief Justice Earl Warren. Nor did she mention the truly transformative role that Burger played in improving the racial climate at the Court.
During Chief Justice Earl Warren’s era, blacks at the Court viewed Warren’s staff as openly hostile towards them. Burger’s arrival at the Court was a welcome and surprising change in the manner in which blacks were treated.
To the best of my knowledge, the only document that captures the racially unfriendly climate under Warren, and the transformative role played by Burger, is a transcript of remarks made by Alvin Wright Jr. to the Charles Hamilton Houston National Moot Court Team at Howard University School of Law in 2013. Mr. Wright Jr. is the son of now-deceased Alvin Wright Sr., an African American who had long served as the in-chambers messenger for Chief Justice Warren and then for Chief Justice Burger.
The son, Alvin Wright Jr., remembered well that there was “a vast difference in terms of the kind of relationship and the kind of behaviors that my dad experienced for Warren versus Burger.” Although Warren “was not a bad person to my dad,” Warren’s longtime lead secretary, Mrs. Margaret McHugh, “was the bane of my dad’s life.” Alvin Wright Sr. had reported on a daily basis to Mrs. McHugh, and he confided to me on many occasions during my year at the Court that he and the other blacks at the Court viewed her as a racist and openly hostile to blacks.