Judge Waring’s dissent at the federal courthouse

In late May 1951, Thurgood Marshall and lawyers from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund walked into this building to challenge segregation in public schools. The lawsuit, Briggs v. Elliott, began seventy miles inland in Clarendon County when Black parents asked their school district for a single school bus. Marshall represented Harry and Eliza Briggs and nineteen other parents before a panel of three judges in the courtroom inside.

Marshall lost the case two to one. The two segregationist judges on the panel, John J. Parker and George Bell Timmerman, ruled against the parents. The third judge was Julius Waties Waring, a Charleston native and the son of a Confederate veteran, who had served as a federal judge here since 1942.

Waring wrote a dissenting opinion. He declared that segregation must go and must go now, writing that segregation is per se inequality. He was the first federal judge to take that position since the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896. Three years later, in 1954, the United States Supreme Court adopted Waring's exact reasoning in Brown v. Board of Education, which consolidated Briggs v. Elliott with four other cases to end school segregation nationwide.

Waring had already issued other civil rights rulings from his bench, but this dissent ended his life in South Carolina. Charleston society cut off the judge and his second wife, Elizabeth. After facing threats and intimidation, Waring retired from the bench in 1952 and left his hometown for New York City.