The conference had put forth the "Mississippi Plan" for circumventing the decision, a plan which might become the pattern all over the South unless better legal experts than the assembled attorneys general could spot holes in it. He indicates that the Plan was too complicated to explain in detail but essentially would place with local school authorities the final determination on which school any given individual child would attend, based on such factors as aptitude, ability to get along with others, capacity for total growth, competitive spirit, effective environmental background, and other such indicators, which Mr. McKnight regards as the "gobbledygook of modern, 'progressive' education", with no reference made to race in the determination of pupil assignment. There was a belief that this Plan might evade the Brown ruling, as such factors could not be challenged en masse, as a separate case would have to be brought for each individual pupil so assigned. It was reasoned that the resulting delay, while prolix litigation proceeded, could go on for at least a generation.

Mr. McKnight indicates that perhaps the most significant thing to come out of the conference was the general agreement by the governors that the Supreme Court implementing decision would be neither arbitrary nor capricious, the governors believing that they would be given a reasonable period of time to effect integration.

West Virginia, Maryland and Kentucky had made it clear that they planned to move rapidly toward full integration of their schools. To the other extreme were South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi, which had indicated that they would abolish their public school systems before integrating them.

It might be noted that Mr. McKnight begins the piece by indicating that the governors were staying at the John Marshall Hotel, a bit of irony, he suggests, that appeared to escape them, in that Chief Justice Marshall had been more responsible than any other single person in the history of the country in making the Federal judicial branch of the Government viable, on par with the executive and legislative branches.

We are aware, incidentally, that a history professor has been assiduously at work dragging down the historical reputations of two of the most esteemed members of the Supreme Court in the country's history, Chief Justice Marshall and Justice Joseph Story, the latter of whom announced the decision in the Amistad case in 1841. (In a book, the professor placed them in the company of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, who announced the infamous Dred Scott fugitive slave decision in 1856, and as to Mr. Taney, we have no quarrel as to his probable racial bias.) We assume he included Justice Story in his retrospective hit-pieces on the two esteemed Justices because Justice Story, who had the profoundest loathing for the institution of slavery, had provided in his writings nothing but admiration and praise for Chief Justice Marshall, both as to his legal acumen and his personal character, with whom he served on the Court from his own appointment in 1812 until Chief Justice Marshall's death in 1835.

The history professor betrays complete lack of understanding of how Supreme Court decisions are written, not by the single Justice announcing them but rather by compromise to reach a consensus of opinion on the Court, in his warped "analysis" of the Amistad opinion, for instance, starting at page 72 of the article, coming out exactly opposite the general trend of legal thought regarding that case, claiming Justice Story betrayed his personal "racism" by condoning therein slavery. He is treating a legal opinion as if it were a personally authored history treatise in an academic discipline, a naivete carried over to the subsequent analysis of legal opinions delivered by Chief Justice Marshall, supposedly "racist" because of specific language utilized which may not have been the language preferred at all by the Chief Justice in the drafting of the opinions in issue. Someone needs to instruct him that the law is very different from general academia, that legal analytical reasoning, always constrained to precedent and the rule of stare decisis unless the prior rules, as the Court found in Brown, demonstrate through time that they are out of joint with the times, not serving their intended purpose and also not susceptible to sound legal reasoning under the Constitution, is very different from the academic discipline of history, where, while constrained hopefully to historically agreed fact, the ultimate conclusions and interpretations rest wholly on the shoulders of the author of a particular work. Not so in the framing of Supreme Court opinions. Anyone who has been to law school for three years, as the professor has not, though teaching legal history in several law schools over the years, would recognize instantly the flaws in his analysis of the Amistad opinion, that while the opinion distinguishes precedent, it nevertheless provides deference to precedent because of the rules of stare decisis and the firm rule and practice in the law that decisions will not disturb binding prior precedent without necessity and will only sidestep precedent whenever possible through legal and/or factual distinctions, as in Amistad, to avoid direct conflict with precedent, while rendering the result believed to be just under the particular circumstances of the case, in a manner, in the case of Supreme Court cases, most likely to effectuate majority consensus on the Court. The professor plainly does not understand these longstanding practices in the law, extending back to the founding principles of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. The law is essentially conservative in that it relies primarily on precedent for decision-making, being dynamic and thus liberal, advancing toward change only incrementally, as necessary to accommodate the parties and facts and law at issue in a particular case, not being an institution by design, as the Presidency and the Congress, capable of promulgating new legislation or enacting it. The Court cannot usurp the function of either without treading on the carefully engineered balance of powers, which Chief Justice Marshall, for instance, in the early days of the republic, was careful to delineate and not transgress, while also engineering progress of the Court's basic role in the three-branch, balance-of-powers concept as established by the Founders, with salutary results through time.

Yet, despite that lack of legal acumen displayed by the professor outside the limited purview of legal history, so much did the University of Illinois at Chicago find estimable his book, as condensed in his more recent Atlantic hit-piece on Chief Justice Marshall, dead for 186 years and thus not available to speak for himself, that its board of trustees recently changed the name of their law school, dropping John Marshall from the marquee, based on his slave ownership, even though he deplored slavery and even represented, as a lawyer, free of charge, slaves seeking their freedom—see argument of Mr. Marshall at pages 329-331—, a fairly progressive thing to be doing in the Commonwealth of Virginia prior to 1801, when he was appointed Chief Justice by President John Adams.

We do not care what name the University of Illinois at Chicago gives to its law school, as that is none of our business, not having any relationship to the University of Illinois. But to make a splash in the press by publicly dropping the name of John Marshall because of his having owned slaves 186 years ago is nothing short of asinine and stupid beyond belief. It obviously indicates that there was no research done, no understanding of John Marshall's legal legacy to the nation, as the board of trustees reached that idiotic and myopic decision, looking at history through one very thick lens, hazed by time and the societal process of change since, as if the "facts" were discovered yesterday and correction of opinion must, in consequence, be made today, before sundown, lest someone think that the University of Illinois at Chicago condones slavery.

If you are going to try to eliminate Chief Justice Marshall from the legal landscape, then you had better return to an era when states' rights were paramount, holdover from the days of the Articles of Confederation, for it was Chief Justice Marshall who established firmly the concept of Federal supremacy over state laws via the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, holding in the Cohens v. Virginia decision, delivered by Chief Justice Marshall, the Court's authority to review criminal law decisions from the court of last resort in any given jurisdiction regarding whether there was denial of a Federal Constitutional right in the lower court proceeding, among other innovations in the law for which he was largely responsible, establishing, as Mr. McKnight correctly stated, the judiciary as a co-equal branch of the Government, with the power to interpret state and Federal statutes as against the Constitution, having been largely a wastrel foundling when compared to the other two branches during the first 12 years after ratification of the Constitution in 1789. Cohens, alone, is the seminal case responsible for such later decisions as Gideon v. Wainwright in 1963, establishing the right to effective counsel under the Sixth Amendment and Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment due process, whenever there is at stake a liberty interest, potential incarceration, as in the misdemeanor case involved in Gideon, and any of a legion of other Supreme Court cases establishing the rights of accused persons under the Constitution, including Miranda v. Arizona in 1966, the bane to the old rubber-hose and coercive interrogation techniques employed in the past to extract false confessions, establishing the right to remain silent and to have a lawyer, hired or appointed by the court, present in the face of focused interrogation regarding specific criminal conduct of which the person being interrogated is a suspect, pursuant to the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, operating on the states through the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause, all of those established rights stemming ultimately from the Federal supremacy principle established by the Cohens decision delivered by Chief Justice Marshall, and other decisions of the Court over which he presided for 34 decisive years in the history of the republic, by extension into more modern times.

Racist? We think not. Indeed, the effort by the history professor to undermine Chief Justice Marshall's and Justice Story's reputations and hence their legal credibility appears, when boiled down to cases, to be motivated by something quite distinct from and opposing of racial justice, hearkening shades of the conservative trend in the law to turn back the clock as exemplified by the "common sense" approach to the law, a catch-phrase for return to the past, of the Rehnquist Court of more recent years.

One might also read the opinion held of Chief Justice Marshall by John Quincy Adams, and realize that it was former President Adams who, 12 years after his Presidency, co-represented the slaves in the Amistad case before the Supreme Court.

The history professor might be brilliant in history, but if he wants to render historical opinion based on legal "analysis", he should first understand the basis for legal opinions, how they are constructed, and the context which they occupy in the legal trends through time, and apply legal reasoning to them, which probably would require three years of law school training, if not also some years of practice of the law or at least teaching of the substantive law, not just its history, before spouting from his hip nonsensical conclusions reached through myopia vis-à-vis the law.

It must be borne in mind that, in terms of decision-making, justices of the Supreme Court or any Federal court in those earlier times, prior to the Civil War and its aftermath, did not have the benefit of the working tools afforded by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, under which to justify their legal reasoning. While absurd contortions of the law to circumvent the Fourteenth Amendment, as best exemplified by the predominantly Republican-appointed Court which decided Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, are not excused by that lack of legal framework after 1868, before that time, they have to be, to a large extent, given deference for that constraint by the extant laws and Constitutional framework, and praised whenever, as in Amistad, they came to a just human conclusion, despite the strictures imposed on them by the times, the Constitution, and the laws then at work. They could not, contrary to popular opinion, fueled by such narrow focus as the professor's take, simply form the law out of whole cloth and hope to maintain a society of laws rather than men, the basic founding principle of our Constitution. It is not a popularity contest which determines the outcome of cases, nor should it be anywhere except in societies dangerously on the brink of falling by dint of submission to the commonweal and its demagogic hero of the moment leading the charge and determining "the law" by force of personality and mob action, such as in Nazi Germany. That vox populi is for the executive and legislative branches, determined by popular election, to discern and advance collectively where appropriate, not the courts, the courts' province being to determine, in this context, whether the laws passed by the legislative branch meet the requirements of the Constitution and established legal precedent under the Constitution as it presently exists in its still effective provisions, some of which having been rendered obsolete or altered by subsequently ratified amendment of the document.

Parenthetically, it is quite curious that we never hear, for instance, anything about Alexander Hamilton's views on race, he being the Founder who is the darling of the conservative political establishment and the Republicans. But we leave that aside for some future treatment.

The point is that in looking closely, with attempted semantic "analysis", at the racial views of anyone in the Nineteenth Century, including Abraham Lincoln, who, while a lawyer, statesman, and later a politician, was not a jurist, they are going to be disappointing and come out sounding "racist", when sought to be juxtaposed to modern views on race and racial justice. Learn from history that we change as a nation, and respect that process of slow change through time, how it is effected, rather than trying to destroy and hide from history through some silly, symbolic, quick-fix erasure of part of the past by removing this or that name from a building or this or that statue from a public area, without appreciation of its context in time. That quick-erasure, a white-out fix involved as surely in idee fixe stereotyping as any other racist view, does nothing to change views on race, indeed, will only harden and exacerbate views which are not very well grounded in reality in the first instance, historically or legally, on either side of unfortunate racial divides through time.

No one who has been alive since roughly the mid-1950's had anything at all to do with the institution of slavery or can therefore be held in the least accountable for it, no matter their ancestry. Otherwise, we are condemned in perpetuity to live in the grip of the past, with no progress to be made by anyone, perpetual action and reaction holding the society in stasis or semi-stasis. Slavery is a part of the country's history from which we must learn and not try to use to divide humanity from one another. There are many forms of slavery other than the American former peculiar institution, in many lands through time, with no society in the world—including African tribes, some of whom enslaved other tribes, some of whom aided the slavers for bounty in capture of their charges—, left wholly innocent in its dark past when ownership of human beings, before the age of farm machinery in agrarian-based economic systems, was deemed a practical solution to enable clothing or feeding of vast numbers of people, including, in the American antebellum context, the residents of the North, from the cotton plantations of the South. No one, of any race, escapes blame for that system in the past. There were many slave-owners in the North who were absentee owners, leaving the slaves in the charge of an overseer, often physically cruel, that practice of absenteeism being more the norm than the exception in the Deep South where the climate was not hospitable in the days before air conditioning. (Cf. Impending Crisis of the South, by Hinton Helper, 1857, and its associated subsequently published supporting statistical Compendium, the Crisis having been distributed by the Republican Party in the 1860 election to support the election of Abraham Lincoln)

But no one today can be held the least bit accountable for slavery except in the realm of insanity. Reaction would seek to hold every descendant of any murderer or rapist accountable today for that act, though it happened 160 years ago and more. That would obviously be ludicrous. It is equally ludicrous to try to hold anyone, individually or collectively, responsible today for slavery. But we do not intend for this to be any probing analysis of slavery, rather only to seek reason in adjudging the past and its personages rather than taking precipitous action which, in twenty years time, will seem rather short-sighted, silly and embarrassing. No one considers building names or statues in the first place, save people with too much time on their hands.

As we have previously stated, we attended law school at UNC for three years and never once even knew for certain how to pronounce the name on the 1968 building, Van Hecke-Wettach, let alone who they were or whether it was just one person. And had we asked anyone on campus where Van Hecke-Wettach was, the inevitable response then, as no doubt now, would be, "Who?"

Do you know the way?

Irony, indeed, Mr. McKnight.

"Arms Alone Won't Do the Job" indicates that El Salvador was the smallest country in Latin America, sharing the southeastern border of pro-Communist Guatemala, which had just suspended its civil liberties, after receiving a large shipment of arms from Communist Poland. No one, however, was worried about a Communist coup in El Salvador, thanks to the U.S. providing Point Four technical assistance, the program initiated by President Truman, which had become a reality in El Salvador.