John Minor Wisdom: The Judge Who Made Civil Rights the Law

The Judge Who Made Civil Rights the Law

When people talk about the civil rights movement in the South, they usually talk about marchers and preachers and activists. They don't talk enough about judges. And no judge in the South did more to make civil rights the actual law of the land than John Minor Wisdom of New Orleans.

Born in 1905 and raised in the Garden District, Wisdom was New Orleans aristocracy — Tulane Law School, first in his class, a successful private practice, a Garden District address. He was the last person you'd expect to become the most important civil rights judge in the Fifth Circuit. But that's exactly what happened.

President Eisenhower appointed Wisdom to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 1957, and for the next four decades, he helped reshape the legal landscape of the American South. As one of the legendary "Fifth Circuit Four" — four judges who used their positions to advance the goals of the civil rights movement — Wisdom authored rulings that desegregated schools, protected voting rights, and dismantled the legal architecture of Jim Crow across Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.

His rulings weren't just legally sound. They were eloquent. Wisdom wrote that the Constitution is both color blind and color conscious — a formulation that acknowledged the complexity of race in America in ways that most legal minds couldn't or wouldn't.

In 1993, President Clinton awarded Wisdom the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The following year, the Fifth Circuit's New Orleans headquarters — the building on Camp Street where so many of those landmark decisions were handed down — was renamed the John Minor Wisdom U.S. Court of Appeals Building.

Wisdom served on the court until his death in 1999, just two days short of his ninety-fourth birthday. He'd spent more than forty years on the bench, and in that time, he did as much as any single person to make the South's legal system match its constitutional promises. He did it from New Orleans, and New Orleans should never forget it.