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by Sandra Day O’Connor
Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the United States
Centre College
181st Commencement Address
May 23, 2004
In thinking about what to say, I decided to read you a poem written in the 19th century called The Bridge Builder.
An old man, going a lone highway
Came at the evening, cold and gray
To a chasm, vast and deep and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim;
The sullen stream had no fears for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.
“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day;
You never again must pass this way;
You have crossed the chasm, deep and wide—
Why build you the bridge at the eventide?”
The builder lifted his old gray head.
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followeth after me today
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building the bridge for him.”
—Will Allen Dromgoole
If I may, I would like to take a few moments this afternoon to talk about building bridges. That is the task in which Centre College and your professors have been engaged while you were here. I am confident they have succeeded and that you graduates will cross the bridges they have built for you and perhaps build some of your own for others in the future. After all, ours is a nation built on pride in sacrifice and commitment to shared values—on a willingness of our citizens to give of their time and energy for the good of the whole. Perhaps some of you graduates will yourselves go on to spending part or all of your lives in public service. Indeed, for all of the good that can be done by citizens who volunteer, or become involved in political affairs in other ways, the simple truth is that our nation needs hardworking, innovative, dedicated people to devote their working lives to its operation and improvement. We are the nation that we are today because those bridge builders of the past gave of themselves in a way that really mattered.
My own career in public service was born of necessity. After graduating near the top of my class at Stanford Law School, I was unable to obtain employment in a private law firm. I did receive one offer of employment as a legal secretary. But the gender walls that blocked me out of the private sector were more easily hurdled in the public sector, and I first found employment as a deputy county attorney of San Mateo County, California. Although brought to the position by something short of choice, I came to realize almost immediately what a wonderful path I had taken. I was having a better time at my job than were those of my peers who had opted for private practice. Life as a public servant was more interesting. The work was more challenging. The encouragement and guidance from good mentors was more genuine. And the opportunities to take initiative and to see real results were more frequent. Ultimately, this foray into the exciting arena of public service led me to the privilege of serving as an assistant attorney general in my state, a State senator, a State judge, and a United States Supreme Court Justice. At every step of the way, I felt the thrill of doing something right for a reason that was good. It was the thrill of building bridges.
To be sure, the work of bridge-building can be as taxing as it is rewarding. These efforts can call for sacrifice—sometimes emotional, sometimes financial, sometimes personal. Those who choose the life of public service open themselves to public review. There’s a wonderful little story told about Herbert Hoover, who became quite discouraged when his attempts to promote economic recovery during the Great Depression seemed to be making little headway. Hoover expressed his discouragement to former president Calvin Coolidge, noting that he was particularly disturbed that, in spite of all of his efforts, his critics were becoming ever more vocal and belligerent. Coolidge comforted Hoover: “You can’t expect to see calves running in the field the day after you put the bull to the cows,” he told him. “No,” Hoover replied. “But I would at least expect to see contented cows.”
Centre College graduates have a proud tradition of public service and dedication to the good of the nation. In fact, two of your alumni served my own institution with great success. Justice John Marshall Harlan, who graduated from Centre College in 1850, sat on the Court for an astonishing 34 years, from 1877 to 1911. And Fred Vinson, a member of Centre College’s Class of 1909, served as our Chief Justice from 1946 to 1953. Both of these justices worked tirelessly at what I can tell you is a difficult and sometimes thankless job, and each left an enduring mark on the institution. This week is a particularly fitting time to remember them because they were two of the key architects of a special kind of bridge. That was the bridge that led to what some people call the most important decision of the modern Supreme Court—Brown v. Board of Education.
Fifty years and one week ago, on May 17, 1954, the Court held that the segregationist doctrine of “separate but equal” was unconstitutional as applied to public schoolchildren. It struck down the legal fiction that children of different races received the equal protection of the law even though they were forced to attend separate schools. That opinion would have been impossible had it not been for a number of crucial intermediate decisions that paved the way—stones paving the bridge to equality, you might say. You will be proud to know that Justice Harlan and Chief Justice Vinson laid some of those stones themselves.
The first step towards Brown actually came 60 years earlier, when the Court first endorsed the doctrine of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson. In Louisiana, white and black train passengers were separated by law, but Mr. Plessy defied that law by refusing to move from a “white” rail car to a “colored” rail car. He claimed that Louisiana’s law violated his rights under the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution, which abolished slavery and guaranteed citizens equal protection under law.
Unfortunately for Mr. Plessy, the Supreme Court upheld his conviction, in an opinion full of sentiments that will, I hope, seem terrible and foreign to your young ears. It held that laws requiring the separation of the races “do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other” and were normally within the power of states to enact. As examples, the Court offered state laws segregating schools and forbidding interracial marriage—it thought that such laws were quite permissible under the Constitution. In fact, the Court thought that the legal separation of the races was not a problem at all because it had nothing to do with political or legal equality. If any such law created a “badge of inferiority” for African-Americans, it was, and I quote: “solely because the colored race [chose] to put that construction upon it.”
The sole dissent came from Centre College’s own John Marshall Harlan. Although it was only one of many dissents he would pen over the years, it is the most famous, and justly so. Justice Harlan first said what everyone knew: the Louisiana law wasn’t really meant to exclude white persons from black railroad cars. It was only meant to exclude blacks from white railroad cars. That meant that the law obstructed the civil right of blacks and whites to travel together at will. Once he established that, Justice Harlan found the case easy to decide. He said:
[I]n view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.
Justice Harlan predicted that, in time, Plessy v. Ferguson would turn out to be as pernicious as the Dred Scott case, and of course he was right.
Justice Harlan’s famous dissent in Plessy was, of course, only the first of many important steps towards the decision in Brown. But by explaining the legal arguments that would eventually win the day, Justice Harlan laid the first stone in the bridge that all of us in this nation would eventually cross: the bridge from a nation plagued by the inequity of Jim Crow laws and segregated schools to the one in which we now live. Justice Harlan must have known that Plessy might outlive him, but he also knew that the struggle against it would continue. His dissent served the highest ideal of public service—it inspired those who came after him to dedicate their own lives to the service of others. Before Brown, Justice Harlan’s immortal words stood as a beacon of hope to my late colleague Thurgood Marshall and countless others who struggled tirelessly for racial equality under law.
After Justice Harlan passed away, the Court suffered without a Centre College graduate for 35 long years. But our next arrival, Fred Vinson, continued the proud tradition of public service that Justice Harlan embodied. After graduating from Centre College law school with the highest grades anyone had ever earned there, Vinson represented Kentucky in the House of Representatives for six terms. Later, he served President Roosevelt as Director of Economic Stabilization and Director of War Mobilization during World War II. Vinson’s successes led President Truman to appoint him as the 13th Chief Justice of the United States.
Although Chief Justice Vinson was not a civil rights revolutionary, his cautious and incremental approach to the law helped build the bridge to Brown no less than Justice Harlan’s ringing dissent. In fact, he authored three of the most significant opinions in the struggle for racial equality. First, in the 1948 case of Shelley v. Kraemer, he wrote for a unanimous Court to strike down enforcement of racially restrictive real estate covenants that prohibited the sale of homes to blacks. He said that “the Constitution confers upon no individual the right to demand action by the state which results in the denial of equal protection to other individuals.” Like Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy, the Shelley opinion was a crucial symbolic victory: it bolstered the morale of the civil rights movement and provided the motivation for further legal challenges.
Two years later, Chief Justice Vinson issued two opinions for the Court that represented the final gasp of the Plessy era. McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents considered the case of six African-American students who had been admitted to a formerly all-white institution, but were forced to sit separately from white students in classrooms, libraries, and cafeterias. Chief Justice Vinson wrote that setting African-American students apart in such a way handicapped their pursuit of an effective graduate education. He rejected as irrelevant the argument that white students might refuse to associate with black students even without official segregation; to him, there was a constitutional difference between state-enforced and voluntary segregation. In Sweatt v. Painter, meanwhile, the University of Texas had claimed that it gave an African-American man an equal education by creating a new law school for him in a Houston basement as a counterpart to its all-white law school in Austin. Cutting through the rhetoric of segregation, Chief Justice Vinson focused on the practical differences between the two schools, finding it “difficult to believe that one who had a free choice between these law schools would consider the question close.” To him, Herman Sweatt was entitled to the “rich traditions and prestige” of the Austin campus, not the false equality of a Houston basement.
While neither Sweatt nor McLaurin directly addressed the validity of the separate-but-equal regime, Chief Justice Vinson’s opinions all but completed the bridge that Justice Harlan had begun in his Plessy dissent. Immediately after his victories in the two cases, Thurgood Marshall wrote to his NAACP supporters that Sweatt and McLaurin had “gutted” Plessy, and that the “end [was] in sight.” Indeed, Justice Vinson only narrowly missed the opportunity to be part of the momentous decision in Brown; after hearing initial arguments in the case, he ordered reargument, but suffered a heart attack before it could occur.
The lives of Justice Harlan and Chief Justice Vinson illustrate the sacrifice that is sometimes part of public service, and show that we cannot expect that our efforts will meet with immediate success. But the ever-present understanding that you are a part of something bigger than yourself, and that your efforts are paving the way for those who will follow, makes a life of public service worth the bumps along the way. Justice Harlan passed away before he could see his prophetic words become law, but if he had not taken up his pen against injustice, our nation might have taken a slower path to equality. And while it surprised me to discover that Chief Justice Vinson died a relatively poor man, he left behind a gift worth more than any gold: a bridge to freedom and equality under law.
A single generation of public servants cannot be expected to bridge the gaps of inequality and injustice, nor span the chasms of our nation’s critical needs. The bridge to Brown was not built overnight, and Brown itself hardly eradicated racial injustice in our nation. But if we focus our energies on sharing ideas, finding solutions, and using what is right with America to remedy what is wrong with it, we can make a difference. Our nation needs bridges, and bridges are built only by those, like Justice Harlan and Chief Justice Vinson, who look to the future and dedicate themselves to helping others. Commit yourselves today, as you embark on your new life as a college graduate, to being bridge-builders. Our nation needs you, and those who cross the bridges you build will thank you.
Endnotes
Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).0
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
Richard Kluger, Simple Justice 243 (1976).
Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1 (1948).
James E. St. Clair & Linda C. Gugin, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, 307 (2002).
McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, 339 U. S. 637 (1950).
Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950).
St. Clair, 316.
Sandra Day O’Connor is the first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. She was nominated by President Reagan in 1981 and confirmed unanimously by the Senate. In more than two decades on the court, she has participated in resolving some of the most controversial issues of the day. Some have called her the most powerful woman in America.She earned two degrees at Stanford University, a bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in economics and a law degree. Before her appointment to the high court, she was an assistant Arizona attorney general as well as a trial court and appellate court judge. She also served as a state senator and senate majority leader, making her the only current Supreme Court justice with elected legislative experience. Her publications include The Majesty of the Law and, with her brother, a best-selling memoir, Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest. During an earlier visit to Centre College, in 1987, she spoke with students about the responsibilities of citizenship.
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