♪ ♪ > Good evening, and welcome to the final segment of our series with the Honorable Bruce Wright of the State Supreme Court of New York.

On African-Americans and the court system of this country.

Judge Wright, who served in the infantry during World War II, was wounded twice and was awarded the Purple Heart, a Bronze Star, and an Oak Leaf.

The Honorable Bruce Wright of the State Supreme Court of New York.

Hon.

Wright> The judicial system in this country is the mirror image of the rest of life in America.

And once you see that the nation's moral codes are based on Christianity and religion, then you should not be surprised at any anti-intellectualism.

In this month, when we Blacks have our rituals and special obsequies over Black History.

It is well also to remember, just how we got here.

More so than the Jews and their sacred ordeal with their great 7,000-year-old bearded traditions.

We, the Blacks in this country, should pause at least once a year and allow a little child to ask an elder of the tribe, "Oh father, how is this time so different from all others?"

And the elder would reply.

"We were once slaves."

Dumas Malone, A Southern White Historian has speculated that there are at least 10 million Black skeletons at rest on the bottom of the Atlantic.

Relics of the devastation wrought by the Middle Passage.

It is well to remember, then, since Whites never forget that washed by the ocean blood of abolition, we carry the marks and the names of former masters.

In Harlem, there lives a woman, now in her 80s named Doctor Anna Arnold Hedgeman.

And she is the author of a book entitled The Gift of Chaos .

And since it is published by the Oxford University Press, even the Black bourgeoisie should have no hesitation in buying it.

And she reminds us, that at one time Blacks came to these American shores without passports, without visas, without tickets of passage.

They came as common freight and, to America and to the West Indies.

And in the poignant words of Dr.

Hedgeman, "At one time, they were the only immigrants to this country who could never receive a letter or a package from home.

What a terrible sense of isolation that must have been.

Torn from relatives, language, religion, and land.

No other immigrants have had such an experience.

Most came through Ellis Island and they never had to declare their most precious treasure and asset, their White skins."

Franklin D Roosevelt, long venerated and revered as the keeper of the flame both by Jews and Blacks.

But it was a flame that seared and often incinerated the hopes of Black Americans.

A Black lawyer during World War II sued the government to enjoin it from inducting his brother into a segregated army.

And he was relying on a federal statute then in force.

And when this was reported to President Roosevelt, his comment was, "What's wrong with that?

We've always done it that way."

And when the Black lawyer asked for help from the Civil Liberties Union, the Civil Liberties Union promptly called the NAACP.

The NAACP said that its then executive leader, Walter White, had promised Roosevelt that the NAACP "would never insist that the law be honored during the war."

And after that kind of sweetheart arrangement with perfidy, no one should have been surprised when Walter White divorced his Black wife to marry a White woman.

His new wife was named Poppy Cannon.

At least she had a Black name.

And the most naive among us used to think of judicial bias as a product exclusively of the South.

Well, let me mention a few New York incidents, and perhaps one from California that will emphasize how all of us are members of an endangered species.

Not so long ago, in New York City, a ten-year-old Black boy named Clifford Glover was shot and killed by a White police officer named Thomas Shea.

He was indicted because of the outrage protests of the Blacks in the city.

And his defense was that he thought this ten-year-old boy was a fully-grown robbery suspect.

And the judge was so deeply moved by this that he did something that no judge should do in the presence of a jury.

He said, with some spirit, "Officer, couldn't you tell the difference between a little boy of ten and a fully grown adult, especially at a distance of three feet?"

And Shea, who was under oath, replied, "Your Honor, all I saw was the color of his skin."

That happened on the eve of the International Year of the Child.

Shea was acquitted.

Randy Evans, on the brink of his teens and puberty, was standing outside the project where he lived, doing nothing.

And a White officer named Torsney, came up to Randy calmly unholstered his pistol, put it to Randy's head and blew his brains out.

He then calmly reholstered his gun and walked quietly to his squad car and sat down.

He too, was indicted when he was tried for that killing.

Torsney's defense was somewhat more novel than that of Officer Shea.

He said, "That an attack of a rare form of epilepsy had made him do it."

Which is rather like Flip Wilson saying, "The devil made me do it."

And he was acquitted by a jury that practiced law without a license, or practice medicine without a license.

No doctors were ever able to discover a trace of the so-called "rare form" of epilepsy.

In California, a White officer went into a Black home, and the only one there was a five-year-old boy dressed in a cowboy suit with a toy pistol.

And the officer shot and killed the child.

He was never indicted.

When he retired, to a psychiatric clinic to claim his pension, he said, "He had felt in fear for his life."

Now, one of the problems for Blacks in the judicial system, especially those who come before the bench as litigants or defendants, is that most of the judges in America are White, they are middle class, socially distant and aloof from any real knowledge of Blacks as human beings.

And certainly, they're not radicals.

Radicals do not get on the bench.

In the words of Cathy Douglas, the widow of Mr.

Justice Douglas, with whom I have made several speeches trying to recruit minorities and women for careers in the law- I make a 20 minute speech and get polite applause, and Cathy Douglas makes a one sentence speech and gets a standing ovation.

And what she says is, "The law is too pale and too male."

And that is true and has been for a long time.

For the most part, White judges are ignorant of Black History, an important branch of World History that has been for too many years ignored as a target of scholarship.

Thus, these White judges sit in judgment of those they regard as dangerous aliens, or worse.

Since the conventional hearsay is that, "Most crime is committed by Blacks," no one should have been amazed when Bernhard Goetz, a White New Yorker, shot four Blacks on the subway recently.

Two of them, he shot in the back.

The newspapers report, "That the youths had asked him for five dollars."

It is not said that they threatened him in any way, although they were said after their arrest "to have had screwdrivers in their pockets."

Now Goetz has been hailed as a national hero, and he has only been accused of possessing an illegal firearm.

Meanwhile, one of his victims has lapsed into a coma and is expected to die.

That's one incident.

A Black police officer gave a White man a summons recently in New York.

And, the White man's reaction was to take his fist and punch the Black police officer in his mouth.

He then, tore up the summons in the presence of the officer to show his contempt.

He was tried and found guilty.

The judge, who happens to be a rabbi also refused to sentence the man to jail.

Saying that, "With his blond hair and his blue eyes, he would be raped by the Black and Hispanic prisoners.

So he sentenced the man to write an essay.

[soft laughter] The subject is not revealed.

President Nixon... excuse me for mentioning his name in such polite society, but you remember him as the leader of the Oval Room Gang, the betrayer of a national trust.

He's the man who went to Duke University and must have known, that Blacks were being bused for hundreds of miles past beautiful White schools to one room shacks.

And yet, he declared busing for integration to be a capital crime.

Little wonder, that the judges at a conference I attended at Ohio State University, one of whom, was appointed to the federal bench by Nixon, could nevertheless say "That Nixon was the only man in America known to use Preparation H orally."

So, the mood of the country for justice, for law and for order, for bias, for prejudice, all too often finds its leadership in the White House.

Too many people have forgotten, for example, the ordeal of Willie Francis.

And I dare say that some of you here are for the death penalty.

Despite the fact that even in the case of Furman versus Georgia , if you read the footnotes carefully, you'll see that most of the judges agreed, that the death penalty is most often applied against minorities and the poor.

But Little Willie Francis in Louisiana was said to be "the youngest person ever sentenced to the electric chair" in that state.

And the executioner, pulled the switch.

And as one of the witnesses said, "The chair just leaped from the floor."

Willie's eyes bulged out and his lips puffed up, and a little boy's cry came from his throat and he screamed, you know, "Let me breathe, take it off."

When the sheriff saw that Willie was not dead, he yelled to the executioner, "Give him some more juice."

The executioner said, "Goodbye, Willie."

But Willie did not die.

The chair had failed properly to function.

They took Willie from the chair to heal him in the prison infirmary, while the chair was repaired, so they could place him in that same chair again.

His lawyers came in, saying, "This will violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment."

But the court said, in effect, "You were sentenced to die.

You didn't die.

Let him be put back."

Next time, of course, the chair functioned perfectly.

Now ask yourselves, had Willie been a White boy, would he have been twice subjected to the passage of an electric current through his body?

Especially where the United States Supreme Court was divided five to four, or whether or not to let the second execution proceed.

When we say, "there's a reasonable doubt," it seems to me that five to four certainly creates a reasonable doubt.

Running through American judicial history like a virulent infection, has been the fallout from the infamous Dred Scott case.

You remember, and in that case, the chief justice was Roger Brooke Taney.

Now, Roger Brooke Taney was a kind of minority himself because he was a Roman Catholic in essentially a Protestant society.

You may also remember, that he made himself famous or infamous by saying at the time that he announced the majority opinion in that case, "That Black people were never intended to be citizens under the Constitution, and that none had any rights that any White man was bound to respect."

Keep in mind that the Chief Justice, although a devout Roman Catholic, was also a slave owner.

That was 1857.

Thus, in 1896, the Plessy case was able to say, "That the co-mingling of races was unsatisfactory to both the Whites and Blacks."

Interestingly, the court observed Mr.

Plessy was seven-eighths White and one-eighth African, and that the mixture of colored blood was not discernable in him.

In other words, he could pass.

Now, many innocent people like to think that the Plessy case was annulled by the ruling in Brown versus the Board of Education .

But Brown, as I said, appears to have been a fraud dressed in the Emperor's new clothing.

First, it said, "That racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional."

Then it allowed the racist segregators to continue, in effect, giving the racist school boards an indefinite period of time within which to stop depriving Black children of their constitutional rights.

It is interesting, that the same state of Louisiana that gave us the Plessy case and the Willie Francis case also gave us in 1984, the Phipps case.

Some of you may remember, that it was another spin of the color wheel of democracy, another loss in America's skin game.

You remember Susie Guillory Phipps, she sued to have her birth certificate changed from Black to White.

But poor Susie was the great, great, great, great granddaughter of a Black slave and a White planter.

And in this era of base ten mathematics and electronic numerology, Susie was ruled by a Louisiana court to be one-thirty-second Negro.

Now, this was a precise blemish not detectable to the naked eye.

Her brothers and sisters had the good sense not to sue, because somehow their birth certificates listed them as White.

Now the national tone on race was set by the Constitution itself.

If you read it, you'll find that, that allowed the slave trade to continue until 1809.

And there was a very vigorous illegal slave trade after that.

Some people are proud that they are descended from slave owners.

You may read about the case of this fellow von Bulow in Providence, Rhode Island, who was accused of having introduced some substance into his wife's veins.

She's been in a coma, now for two years.

And the jury could not agree when he was tried for attempted murder.

But the interesting thing was that he had some character witnesses come forward.

And there was a woman who was a socialite in Newport, Rhode Island by the name of Brown, who said, when asked where she got her wealth from, she said, "that her great, great grandfather had become wealthy in the African slave trade, that she was proud of that."

Nor can it be forgotten on the subject of slavery that John Marshall, who has been sanctified as the greatest chief justice we have ever had, was given a Black slave for his 10th birthday and another upon his marriage.

It reminds me of a film I saw.

Also had a locale in Louisiana with Richard Pryor called The Toy.

A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., a judge of the United States Court of Appeals, has written an historical discussion of the roots of racism in our judicial system in his book In the Matter of Color .

And Derrick A. Bell Jr.

a brilliant young man who is Black calls his book Race, Racism, and American Law .

And Haywood Burns has authored Black People and the Tyranny of American Law .

None of these authors is a radical.

Higginbotham is a graduate and a trustee of Yale.

Bell is a former professor at the Harvard Law School and now Dean of the University of Oregon Law School.

And Burns is a graduate of both Harvard and Yale and Oxford.

Justice will be denied the Black presence in courtrooms so long as skin color is visible.

And so long as those who sit in judgment remain arrogant, ignorant of Black history, Black ambition and Black aspirations.

At a meeting of judges, a loaded question was posed for me to bite.

And of course I bit.

And the question was, to these White judges, "What would you do if you had before you for sentence a Black boy, his afro in complete disarray, his sneakers didn't match, nor did his socks, half his teeth were missing, he was dirty and ill-educated, and he had stolen from Macy's a pair of blue trousers, size 36.

And you had before you also a well-educated, well-dressed White man, apparently a man of means, well-spoken, and he too had stolen from Macy's a pair of blue slacks, size 36.

Would you treat them differently?"

There was a loud Greek chorus of voices.

"Of course not," the judges said.

I said, "gentlemen, you're not under oath.

It would be perjury if you were.

Let's not lie to each other.

You know that as soon as you saw the Black face, it would make a difference."

And one of the judges, an older man for whom I had great affection, said, "You know, Bruce, you're hung up on the question of race.

We never see the color of a defendant when he stands before the bench.

Just the other day, I had a little colored kid before me-" [laughter] And if you tell him that the Black skin is visible, he'll tell me that I'm a reversed racist.

I have suggested for years that judges who preside in places where there is a large Black presence, such as our Eastern, Midwestern, and West Coast cities, should not be eligible for the bench unless they can show that they have studied Black History and Sociological Jurisprudence.

I have urged the same precondition upon police officers, who all too often are not only police officers, but also executioners of Blacks.

Training for the bench, should embrace in-depth psychoanalysis for each judge and each police officer to determine as nearly as possible whether candidates are racist.

There are too many fantasy, preconceptions and perceptions held by Whites to admit justice to penetrate.

When Doctor Harry Kalven of the University of Chicago did his investigation of White jurors, in the North sitting in judgment of Black people, he quoted one juror as being fairly typical of the others.

And this is what that juror said.

"Niggers have to learn to behave.

If he hadn't done what he was accused of, he had probably done something else even worse.

So we thought we had to put him away for a good long while."

I sued my fellow judges and district attorneys and the police department some years ago, because I thought they were violating my rights under the 14th Amendment.

And when I went to the Bronx to get some witnesses, one of the clerks took me into a room which had just been vacated by the jury, going back into the courtroom.

And there on a yellow pad, the foreman had made some doodles.

What these doodles said was, "All niggers have guns.

But we got to give this nigger a fair trial.

So let's go.

Let's give this nigger a fair trial."

That's New York City.

At a time some years ago, when the police in this country, from coast to coast, use .32 caliber weapons- At one of their national conventions, one of the men stood up and urged that they change to .38 caliber weapons.

Asked why, the spokesman said "that the .32 caliber pellet would not pierce a Black man's skin because all Negroes were addicted to cocaine."

Some surprise was expressed since cocaine is so expensive and Negroes were thought to be so poor.

The spokesman said, however, that Coca-Cola was the favorite refreshment of the Negro underclass.

And in those days it did have some cocaine in it.

And you might say that it was really the real thing.

Not only, did it make the Black man's skin impervious to the .32 caliber bullet, he said, but "it improved the Black man's marksmanship and made him rape all White women."

Now, you can read all about that if you think I invented it in a book called The American Disease by Doctor David Musto, published by the Yale University Press.

Who can doubt the words that I mentioned to you earlier?

That hate is legislated, shot into the veins like a vaccine.

American Blacks do not have the options of the Haitians under Toussaint Louverture in his fight against Napoleon and French slavery.

When he asked, that is when Louverture asked Boisrond-Tonnerre to write Haiti's Declaration of Independence, Tonnerre lived up to his name, which means "thunder."

And he said, "To write this act, we need the blood of a White man for ink, his skull for an inkwell, and a sword for a pen."

We can say that, but we won't mean it.

We're outnumbered.

We need a more subtle approach.

And so, we have sought to educate White America, bringing home to its its own democratic definitions of not only what the Constitution and its amendments mean, but what it means to be Black in White America.

America is a slow and retarded learner, however.

In New York, as I sat in court one day, I was astonished to see a White defendant before the bench to be sentenced.

Now, I was astonished because 85 to 90 percent of the people who appear before the criminal bar as defendants are Black or dark Hispanics.

This White man's White lawyer asked the White judge to place the defendant on probation, saying, "Your Honor, he can be rehabilitated."

And the judge, with some impatience, practically snarled, "How is he going to be rehabilitated when he's living with a colored woman?"

He said that three times.

When he said it the first time, I realized that I, too, was then living with what his honor referred to as a "colored woman."

And I had left her that morning with a kiss and on fairly tranquil terms.

And remembering the Scottsboro case, and how White men had come to the defense of some White whores.

I thought the least I could do, was defend what his Honor referred to as "colored women."

And I rose and approached the bench and advertised my status as an officer of the court.

And I asked the judge if I might be heard on the question of what his Honor referred to as "living with a colored woman."

And I suggested to his Honor, that I had a bit more experience than his Honor, and I offered to give him a few survival techniques.

However, his honor did what all judges do in a crisis.

He called an adjournment and disappeared behind a wall into his chambers.

And when I testified against him, he accused me of trying to crucify him.

Naturally, I denied any such religious intention.

And more recently, another White judge in New York told two Black defendants who were asking for the appointment of another lawyer because they didn't trust the one they had.

The judge said, "You wouldn't know the difference between a good lawyer and a watermelon."

And even later, than that, a White judge, baffled by a simple proposition, said, "That's the nigger in the woodpile."

Perhaps one day, and Black citizens take the trouble to vote and to protest such indignities.

We will have schools for judges after all, executioners are civil servants, why not judges?

I'm not sure about the training that executioners get.

Racism is a lack of civilization.

The racism that deprives one of justice defines a double jeopardy.

After Mahatma Gandhi helped liberate India from the yoke of British Colonialism, he became guru to the world.

And as he sat near a symbolic spinning wheel wrapped in coarse cloth, people came from around the world to seek his wisdom.

And on one such occasion, a young philosopher asked Mr.

Gandhi, "Mr.

Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization?"

And Gandhi, without a second hesitation, responded "You know that's not a bad idea.

Why doesn't somebody work on it?"

We must have Black History on a year-round basis, as a regular part of the curriculum to help White America work on it.

White Christians have much to learn.

Gandhi knew something about that, too.

They didn't show it in that enormous film about him.

But after so many years of British racism, he understood a great deal.

He understood that he was a colored man too.

And he had been at one time before he got, the religion that helped him free India.

He had been at one time one of the best dressed lawyers in all of London, and his closest friends were members of the aristocracy and the nobility.

And they said to him, "You know, you are more British than the British.

Why don't you go all the way and become a Christian?"

And Gandhi said, "I would, except for those who are."

So we have an enormous job to do in helping to civilize America.

We must then support the Bill of Rights with vigilance and with enthusiasm.

And as we labor in our missionary work, think in terms of a school for judges.

As far as I'm concerned, it was on the job training.

The only thing I was told was be sure to go to the toilet before going on the bench.

That was my curriculum.

And as we labor in our missionary work to achieve justice, may the force be with us.

Thus endeth the reading.

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