Jackson Free Press

Jack Bass writes for Salon: "The recent recess appointments by President George W. Bush of two controversial Deep South Republicans to federal courts of appeals indicates that the Republican 'Southern strategy' remains alive and well. Much of the Democratic opposition in the Senate to confirming Charles W. Pickering of Mississippi and William H. Pryor of Alabama focused on matters suggesting insensitivity to civil rights issues. Opponents cited the records of both men that included criticism of or efforts to limit important remedies or provisions of the Voting Rights Act."

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"Ronald Reagan paid tribute to the Southern strategy. He opened his 1980 campaign in the South at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, an essentially white festival and political gathering in the county where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan. His subsequent talk of "welfare queens" removed any ambiguity."

"Overlooked in all of this are a handful of mostly Republican judges in the South, nominated by President Eisenhower and mostly handpicked by Herbert Brownell -- Ike's campaign manager and then attorney general. For a decade and a half after Brown, they made the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which then covered six of the 11 states of the Confederacy, the institutional equivalent of the civil rights movement. Usually led by Chief Judge Elbert P. Tuttle and his close ally John Minor Wisdom -- the two had co-chaired "Southerners for Eisenhower" in his campaign to win the 1952 Republican nomination -- this court transformed Brown vs. Board of Education into a broad mandate for racial justice."

"This small band of judges came to view Brown as incorporating into the Constitution the concept of equality expounded in the Declaration of Independence. They extended this principle well beyond integration of the region's public schools to include public transportation, voting rights, parks and playgrounds, jury selection, and discrimination in employment -- and also applied it to such powerless groups as prison inmates and the mentally ill. "