Edward Douglass White: From Sugar Plantation to Supreme Court

From Sugar Plantation to Supreme Court

Edward Douglass White Jr. was born on November 3, 1845, on his family's sugar plantation in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana. His father had served as Louisiana's governor and U.S. Representative, so politics and power were the family business. Young Edward attended Jesuit schools in New Orleans and Georgetown University before the Civil War pulled him out of the classroom and into a Confederate uniform.

White served as a lieutenant under General Richard Taylor, was captured at Morganza in March 1865, and was imprisoned before being paroled the following month. After the war, he did what ambitious young men in New Orleans did — he studied law at the University of Louisiana (now Tulane), passed the bar, and began practicing in the city in 1868. New Orleans in Reconstruction was a difficult place to build a legal career, but White was patient, connected, and brilliant.

The Rise

White served in the Louisiana State Senate and on the Louisiana Supreme Court before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1891. Three years later, President Grover Cleveland appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court as an Associate Justice. Then, in 1910, President William Howard Taft elevated him to Chief Justice — making White the first sitting Associate Justice in American history to be promoted to the top seat. He served on the Court for twenty-seven years total.

A Complicated Legacy

White's judicial record is as complicated as the era he lived through. He was part of the Court that decided Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, upholding the "separate but equal" doctrine that legalized segregation for the next six decades — a case that originated in New Orleans, on a train leaving Press Street. But he also wrote the majority opinion in Guinn v. United States in 1915, striking down the grandfather clauses that Southern states used to prevent Black citizens from voting.

Edward Douglass White died of a heart attack on May 19, 1921, at seventy-five. He was a Confederate veteran who became Chief Justice, a New Orleans lawyer who shaped constitutional law for a generation, and a man whose decisions both entrenched and dismantled racial injustice. The contradictions are real. But then, he came from Louisiana, and Louisiana has never been a place that resolves its contradictions neatly.