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Transcript on deposit at The Southern Historical Collection, The Louis Round Wilson Library
Citation of this interview should be as follows:
“Interview B-0043, in
the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007,
Southern Historical
Collection, The Wilson Library,
University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill”
In the 1950s, lawyer William Patrick Murphy fought what he describes as a
relatively understated battle against segregation. In letters, law journal
articles, and in his constitutional law class at the University of Mississippi,
Murphy argued for the wisdom of the Brown decision and against
the states' rights rationale that many white Mississippians were using to delay
integration. His support for integration put him under tremendous pressure from
segregationist Mississippians, and after a four-year struggle to keep his job,
he left the University. He describes that struggle in this interview, all the
while downplaying his contributions to racial justice in Mississippi. This
reflective interview will be useful for, among others, researchers interested in
white southerners who sought to undo segregation.
Lawyer William Patrick Murphy describes his 1950s battle against segregation and
his struggle to keep his job after his beliefs became public in Oxford,
Mississippi. Murphy, who taught constitutional law at the University of
Mississippi, used journal articles and his classroom to speak out in favor of
the Brown decision.
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
… thing started twenty years ago, you know.
I've got all the facts.
You probably are more up-to-date on it than I am.
I'm interested in the general question of what motivated you to take the
stand that you took at that time, whether it was a question of your
academic freedom or a vindication of law and order or whether you felt
there was specific injustice being done in the South in the separate
school systems, or how exactly you thought about it if you thought about
it at the time… In other words, when Brown v. the Board of
Education came out, you, I notice in your review of it, were
critical of the decision in some ways, but you ended up defending the
case ultimately.
I never really thought of it in terms of taking a stand on anything. It
all started because I was teaching the course in Constitutional Law. And
I taught the course basically the way it was taught all over the
country, the way I would have taught it anywhere else in the country,
and that assumes that Supreme Court decisions are law and at some point,
to some extent, ought to be complied with. And so I never really
consciously took a stand on anything. I started out just teaching a
normal Constitutional Law course. And the only thing that made that
unusual or got me in hot water was that that normal approach toward
constitutional law and the authority of the Supreme Court was contrary
to the basic approach which these Citizens Council types took. And that
was that the Supreme Court didn't have the authority, and that there
wasn't any duty
Were there other people teaching Con Law?
No, at that time we had a very small faculty and a relatively small student body. And I was the only Constitutional Law teacher.
So in effect you were the only one in the State of Mississippi.
That's right, because it was the only accredited law school in the State
of Mississippi, and almost all of the people who become practicing
lawyers and judges and influential politicians in Mississippi at that
time went to the Ole Miss Law School. So I can see—I could begin to see
even in the late fifties—why, from the point of view of my critics, I
was what they called me, a "dangerous man," because the Ole Miss Law
School was the throat through which the future lawyers and judges and
leaders of the state went. And here was this guy Murphy up there who was
teaching them things that were subversive of the Mississippi way of
life. I can understand why they thought I was dangerous. But it didn't
occur to me initially that I was taking a stand on anything, and I
certainly didn't set out to be a hero or a martyr or anything. But it
started out in the classroom, and then Mississippi Law Journal. That
engendered some opposition.
But that was equally accidental.
Yes, I didn't set out to become a cause celebre in
Mississippi. Nothing was ever farther from my mind. I later compared
myself with the innocent bystander who gets bit by a mad dog.
But you never took any joy in… Like in your review of Kilpatrick's book, you said that …
That was another thing that caught the attention of the Citizens Council
people, and after I published that review one of the Citizens Council
leaders reviewed my review in a later issue of the Mississippi Law Journal, and so that brought me to their
attention.
But that doesn't seem so routine; that doesn't seem like it's just in the
line of duty. You seemed to take a little joy in digging
Kilpatrick's book revived the long-discredited doctrine of state
interposition and nullification and put it forward in the 1950's as a
valid, credible Constitutional position. And that book was very
influential, because a lot of southern states actually passed
interposition resolutions. Now that's utterly preposterous, and I
thought somebody ought to say so. I can't remember now whether I told
the Law Journal people I'd like to review it, or
whether they came and asked me to. It could have happened either way,
but I don't remember now. That was a mischievous book that man wrote. It
caused a lot of trouble.
But that was still within your bailiwick; it was constitutional law.
Your classroom teaching and your publications in your area of competence
are within the narrowest ambit of academic freedom. The very narrowest
concept of academic freedom would embrace that. And everything I did was
within that ambit, with the one possible exception of the letter I wrote
to the newspaper in which I did defend the function and role of the
Supreme Court in our constitutional system. I guess you could say there
did come a point where I felt some obligation to try to counteract
erroneous propagand a with what I conceived to be the truth of things.
But I never did go up and down the state on a soapbox urging integration
and talking about racial
Can you think of any examples of constitutional law professors at southern universities that set the Citizens Council idea of what a constitutional law professor should be?
Not a single one that I ever knew was any different, basically, in his approach to the course than I was.
Did they have trouble in Alabama or Louisiana? Were there other professors in positions similar to yours? What kind of reaction did they make in their states?
I know that no other constitutional law professor at any other southern
law school went through the four years of controversy that I did between
1958 and 1962. I had a counterpart, Jay Murphy, at Alabama, who was a
constitutional law and labor law professor. And they had a resistance
group in Alabama, as Mississippi did, but to my knowledge they never
made any efforts to get Jay Murphy fired from the law faculty. And I
don't think they ever tried to purge people from the University of
Alabama the way they did from the University of Mississippi. And I think
maybe the reason was not because the resistance group was any less
strong in their views, but
Even though you say that you were just doing your job and it was within
the realm of academic freedom, the school desegregation cases really are
different. Did you have any feelings about them one way or another? If
someone else had been teaching constitutional law
Well, sure, and I wouldn't want you or anybody to think that I was a 100
percent defender of this opinion in Brown against
Board. At that time and today, I am critical of the way the opinion
was written and some of the premises upon which the opinion rested, and
I think I voiced some of those criticisms in my review of the book about
Brown against Board. And I still criticize that
opinion today when I teach Con Law, and I think most constitutional law
professors (I'm not talking about the result of the case now; I'm
talking about the opinion that Warren wrote) do not think highly of that
opinion. Now so far as the result is concerned, segregation is out… I
grew up in a segregated system, not just schools but streetcars and then
busses when they came along, where the black people had to get on the
front of a streetcar or bus and work their way all the way to the back
to try to find a seat in the back of the bus or a streetcar. And where
if they wanted to go to a movie theater, they had to go in a side door
rather than the front door on the main street, and they had to go sit in
the back rows way up in the balcony.
You're talking about in Memphis.
Yes, I'm describing the segregated system that I grew up under and took
for granted all the time I was growing up, without Brown v. Board came down I was an
emancipated southern white man at that point in my own thinking.
Dr. Hall pointed out that two months after you left Ole Miss, James Meredith came, and that the same people …
Just one month. We moved away in August of '62, and he got there either late August or early September.
And the same people that had been after your scalp didn't even have to leave their positions. They were all in position to go after him, and in a way it was the same battle all over again. I think they hesitated to bully you, the Governor; they bullied you in subtler ways because maybe they were a little more afraid of you than they were of him. But you really prepared the way for him to a certain extent. What Dr. Hall said was without whites in positions of responsibility in the late forties and fifties and early sixties, the black civil rights movement wouldn't have been possible. Would you agree with that? You held the door open for somebody like Meredith, for example.
I never thought of putting it exactly that way because what happened to
James Meredith so far transcended what happened to me that, although the
basic underlying conflict is the same, the personal experience that he
underwent was so much more traumatic and so much more of an ordeal than
mine that from that point of view his case reduces mine to a footnote if
anybody was going to write a book about the whole period. Which is not
to say that mine was not traumatic in a personal sense to me and my
wife. Apparently nobody ever tried to kill me, and they didn't have to
send the troops into the state on my account or anything like that. So
Meredith's personal experience and ordeal was a far more dramatic one
than mine. I was white; he was black. He was the first one who was
breaking that
If you view the whole thing as a progression in a desired direction, out
of segregation and into justice and integration, people like yourself
and Dean Farley and Dr. Silver are necessary links leading toward
Meredith and toward… It couldn't have happened, the chain would have
been broken, if somewhere along the line moderate whites hadn't made
that effort to reconcile. And like you said, what you were doing was
ameliorative, and it seems to me that "reconciliation" is really the key
word. You were trying to make peace between what you considered
fundamental principles, but you
Let's put it this way, that I think it was damned important that during this period when the power of the state and the Citizens Councils and the governing board of the institution, when all of those aspects of the Establishment were overwhelmingly on one side, I think it was damned important that there were at least a few people around who put forward what I call the right point of view. I think it was damned important that there wasn't total submission to this police state approach that these Citizens Council people and Ross Barnett tried to blanket that state with. And I'm proud of the fact that I was one of the people who can be identified in that opposition group. And that is true. All I was trying to say a minute ago was that I don't think my contribution was as large or important or significant as some other people that we've already mentioned. But I'm proud of that.
That's what I think I mean when I say that you did keep the door open. Things could have been shut down even more tightly than they were.
I'm proud of what I did. I don't make any bones about that. I could have
been pusillanimous and shut up. I could have gone over to the other
side. I could have quit when they tried to get me to quit at first. I
don't make any apologies for what I did. There don't come many times in
a man's life when he really has to test what kind of a person he is and
where it can really be costly to do what he thinks is right. And I have
faced that position twice in my
What do you mean, more?
I mean in retrospect what I did seems so modest that I sometimes wonder if I really was doing everything I should have been doing at the time.
You still had people and friends in Memphis, people you'd grown up with and family, I guess, and you were featured pretty regularly in the Memphis newspapers.
No, not really.
Was your case known outside of …
Later on, after I became a subject of controversy and they were trying to get me fired, I guess the Memphis paper did cover that.
I was wondering if this brought about any conflict between yourself and the people that you'd been…
None whatsoever.
Old friends never questioned you about what you were doing?
No. As a matter of fact, they were strongly supportive when I would see
them. "We're proud of you, Bill," and "Stick it out,"
But you said you grew up under the system utterly …
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
You asked me what kind of reactions I'd get from my friends outside the state and in Memphis. I think it's even more interesting the reaction we got from people there in Oxford, and I'm talking particularly about people down on the Square. Oxford's one of these small towns that has the courthouse square in the center of town and then a rim of stores around it on four sides. And I'm talking about people like the local druggist and the hardware store people and the department store people and the barber I used to go to. These people, up to the very last day we left town to move to Missouri, let us know that they liked us; they were sorry it had all happened; they wished we could stay; they were very supportive. And they didn't care whether or not I was defending the Supreme Court or whether I was an integrationist or whatever. They liked me; they liked my wife; and they went out of their way—more than a lot of people on the Ole Miss faculty, I might add, did—these townspeople, a lot of them went out of their way to make sure that my wife and I knew how they felt about us.
But if you had polled them on the school desegregation issue, how would they …
You said it took you until you were thirty years old in the Navy to really think through desegregation and get to the point where you questioned things. What about people back in Memphis that you had grown up with?
I think it's fair to say that most of my friends had gone through the same personal learning experience, and I can think of three of my best friends in Memphis now all of whom had the same experience I did. You eventually just come to the point where you realize, if you've got any kind of humanity about you at all, that this is wrong, to treat people differently because of the color of their skin. It's so obvious in retrospect you wonder how the proposition could have been defended. All of my friends had gone through pretty much the same experience that I had.
Were they all educated to the degree that you were?
Yes. One of them's a federal judge in Memphis right now.
It may be unfair of me to say this about Memphis, but I recall it as being… Wasn't it where Martin Luther King was shot.
That's where he was killed.
And Memphis's history during the civil rights period is not without blemish.
It's an old saying that the Delta begins at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis
and then goes south from there. Memphis is populated mainly by people
from Mississippi and Arkansas. Although it was in
Your family and the people you associated with in Memphis must have had a degree of education or something that removed you from the general run of the Memphis citizenry, I would suspect.
I guess that's always true. Some people are lucky enough to get more education than other people are.
Was that what did it, or was your family just… What were you taught about race at home?
I can't remember ever really being taught anything. I can't remember that we ever really talked about it when I was a kid. It was just something that was kind of taken for granted.
How many generations back had your family been from the South?
My grandparents on both sides of the family were from Missouri originally, and I was the first one to be born in Memphis. But my grandparents had lived in Memphis since, I guess, the middle 19-teens. And my mother had moved there when my father died in 1919. My father died six weeks before I was born in the big flu epidemic of 1919.
In Missouri.
Yes. And my mother then moved to Memphis to join her parents who were already living there, and that's how I happened to be born in Memphis. I can't remember we ever talked about race.
William Patrick Murphy's a pretty Irish name, and you would
I may have stood out in other ways while I was going through school, but not so far as the race question is concerned.
We moved to Jacksonville, Florida, when I was ten years old, and I had never really thought about race to any great extent. And my best friend lived up the street, and his father was in the Ku Klux Klan. That was sort of interesting to me, but I didn't think about it too much in one way or another. And I remember being up there one Sunday morning. His father was in the next room talking to his mother, and this boy's father started talking about my father. And they knew each other, and they would have a beer every now and then at the corner tavern. And he was sort of saying what a good fellow my father was, but he couldn't forgive him for being an Irish Catholic. And that was the first time in my life I'd ever been singled out for…
I think maybe that made me more receptive. If I'd had to line up at that time on the side of the blacks or on the side of the Klan, I would have immediately joined forces with the blacks because I had been singled out, and I'd sort of been shunted off to one side, at least in his mind.
I believe I can truthfully say I never gave much of a thought until after
I had graduated from college and during World War II. And it wasn't
until I went to work for the Labor Department in Washington in 1950 that
I ever saw any interracial socializing.
So you fairly say that you were just a complete southerner from …
I think I was a pretty typical southerner, except to the extent I did have the opportunity to see the world more and get more education, and I believe those experiences should be eye-openers, and in my case they were.
And any southerner in your position probably would have come to…
Well, I won't say any southerner, but a lot of southerners did. Of
course, a lot of them didn't.
When you finally chose to leave Mississippi in the end, did you do so with any feelings about… You went to Missouri, so I guess you were still in the South to a certain extent, but did you feel any alienation from the South or just from this particular element?
I never have felt any sense of alienation from the South as a region.
I've never been ashamed of the fact that I was a native-born
Bitterness directed at the specific element that had… The Citizens Council people.
Yes. Governor Barnett and the Citizens Council people and those people on
the Board of Trustees and Chancellor Williams at the University, who's
the most spineless, pusillanimous character I've ever known in my life,
but that's beside the point. Yes, I went through a period of bitterness.
I'd say for a couple of years I felt kind of bitter about it, and then I
realized that my sitting up there in Missouri being bitter wasn't
helping the situation
But you never generalized that bitterness toward Mississippi generally.
No, I don't think so. We liked living in Mississippi. We liked Oxford. My wife's parents are from Mississippi, and we continued to go back. Two of our kids were born in Oxford, Mississippi. There hasn't been a year since we moved away that we haven't gone back two or three times, and in a lot of respects we think Mississippi is head and shoulders above a lot of other places in the country as a place to live. Oh, no, it was just this particular stripe of political leadership that I felt bitter toward.
But it seems to me if the people of Mississippi had wanted
I think it's fair to say that the Citizens Council viewpoint and mentality did represent a majority of the people in the state. I never doubted that. As wrong as it was, it was a majority view. I'm convinced of that.
But despite that fact, you still felt… If it hadn't been for the specific events that caused you to leave, you still would have been comfortable enough in the atmosphere of Mississippi to have stayed.
Sure. When I went there, we had a feeling at the Law School and at the
University (I don't mean it started the year I went, but the feeling was
there when I went in '53 and continued on up for about five years) that
we were part of an important process of building a first-rate state
university. And that gives you a sense of accomplishment, to feel that
you're part of a building process, and something that the state really
needed was a good university. You'd be surprised how many absolutely
first-rate people there were at the University of Mississippi in the
1950's. Of course, they all left
Do you think you'd ever go back?
Oh, no, I don't think so.
If you retired, you wouldn't retire to Memphis or in Mississippi?
Oh, it's possible that when I retire that my wife and I'll go back and live on a little land that is in the family and near Houston, Mississippi. I say it's possible. I wouldn't want to do it, but not because it's in Mississippi; because it's so far away from the kind of cultural opportunities that we enjoy: music and drama and things like that. But it wouldn't be because it was in Mississippi that we wouldn't go back. I've said many times that Mississippians, if you can keep them off the race question and states' rights, they're the salt of the earth.
I think that was what my question was.
Yes, we liked Mississippi. One of the ironies of this whole thing is, these people who were out after me hot and heavy, White and Wilburn Hooker from Lexington County and Bill Simmons, the head of the Citizens Council, and these other people who were leading the campaign to get rid of Bill Murphy, most of those people I never laid an eye on, to my knowledge, and they never laid an eye on me. I never met them, never talked to them face to face, wouldn't have known them if I'd passed them on the street. They were just names. I knew that they were my enemies, they were trying to get rid of me, but we didn't know each other personally at all. And this went on for four years, and I left the state and I never laid an eye on White or Wilburn Hooker or Bill Simmons or any of these people. Now Ross Barnett, of course, I had met, because he was an alumnus of the Law School and I had met him when he'd come back for Alumni Day. But I never met any of these other people.
What did you think about him personally? I read a little biographical
sketch of him that was in the New York Times. Maybe
they went out of their way to make him seem like a…
I don't know the piece you're talking about, but I think Ross Barnett was not only wrong in his views, but I think he was not a very intelligent person. He's kind of dumb, really. And even some of his best friends didn't claim that he was real smart. There's a real funny story I could tell you about that.
I can turn that off.
All right, turn it off and I'll tell you.
Did you know any blacks at all at any time during this period?
In Mississippi?
Yes. I guess there weren't any civil rights leaders. I guess they hadn't gotten started yet, really.
That's right.
But I wondered if you ever came in any contact with… Here you were, in effect, sticking up for them. If they ever tried to communicate appreciation to you or encouragement.
… No personal contacts. And I'm trying to remember if there was a time when a black leader by the name of Aaron Henry in Clarksdale… He was a druggist and an NAACP leader, and he had his own problems with the Citizens Council. That's his story. I'm trying to remember if at one time Aaron Henry dropped me a note, and I just simply can't remember. But that would have been the extent of it. No personal meetings or conversations or anything like that with black leaders. Is that what you mean?
Yes.
No, never. They didn't seek me out, and I didn't seek them out.
Last time we started talking a little bit about when you left, that for a year or so after you left that you had a feeling that maybe you had capitulated and given them what they wanted. You had second thoughts. Would you talk a little bit about that?
I don't remember what I told you before, but I'd say yes, for several
years after I moved to Missouri and the situation in Mississippi
Had it become just impossible for you and your family?
Were you just taking too much?
Yes, that's the reason we left is because it was just a constant strain,
and I couldn't even count the hours' sleep that my wife and I lost over
a four-year period. I finally got to the point
Those are the big concerns I had. There were a couple of specifics I wanted to get to. One is the incident with Clennon King when the ACLU asked you to check and make sure his rights weren't being violated. And there was some correspondence in your files between yourself and, I gathered, one of your former students.
Yes.
And that incident interested me. It seems as if he's one of those people that you talk about, if you did some good it was in the form of instructing these people and having them go out into their communities and be a temporizing force in their community. But in his correspondence he was being real careful to let everybody know that he wasn't really with you.
That's right.
You can't say he was repudiating you, exactly, but he was definitely keeping you at a distance, and I just wondered if I read the correspondence wrong or if that's the way it happened.
Yes, I think that's a fair statement, but what doesn't come through in
the correspondence is that this former student was in his forties when
he came to law school. And he was trying to establish a legal career
late in life, and he had cut his ties with
He was a little bit older than you were.
Oh, yes, he was older than I was. Bald-headed.
It sounded as if, when you first wrote to him, that you had at least some hope that he might, not represent King, but he might get involved further than he did. Were you disappointed in him that he didn't?
I can't remember now whether I had that hope or expectation or not, but I do think I can tell you that whatever it was, no, I didn't suffer any sense of disappointment. We continued to be good friends, and when he and his wife would come back to Oxford or we went to Jackson we would see them. No, it never affected our personal relationship at all.
I couldn't tell. In his letter it sounded like he might just be putting
all that on the record in his letter to you, and it
I think that's exactly what he was doing, was keeping his distance. He didn't want anybody in Jackson to believe for one second that he had any connection with the ACLU, and he did the very, very minimum that he could do in order to reply to my request. As I say, I can't remember whether I hoped or expected he would do more, but no, it never affected our personal relationship at all.
Is he still practicing in Mississippi?
He's dead now.
Did he practice for some …
Yes, he did well in Jackson. He died back in the sixties, I think.
You said your grandparents were from Missouri, so how many generations back would you say that you were a southerner?
If you want to count Missouri as a southern state, as far back as you go. On my father's side, they came over from Ireland in 1849, I believe was the year of the big potato famine in Ireland, and on my mother's side, they are English. I think they'd been here from the beginning.
They came to the South or to somewhere else?
They lived in Missouri. The first connection with Tennessee, as I say, was back in the middle 19-teens, when my mother's parents moved to Memphis. He went into business in Memphis, and then she joined them after my father died in 1919.
Then your wife is a native Mississippian, you said?
Actually she's a native Memphian. She was born in Memphis. Her father was a businessman in Memphis at the time. Her mother is from Mississippi, but her mother was working in Memphis at the time, so she was born and went to school… Part of her school years were in Houston, Mississippi, and part in Memphis, and so she is both, I guess you could say, a native Memphian and a native Mississippian in about equal proportions. And then her father had a serious illness in the thirties and they had to move to Florida, so she spent part of her years in Florida. But I think it's fair to say she thinks of herself as both a Memphian and a Mississippian, in about equal proportions.
When you issued your "cult of crackpots" statement, what kind of reaction did that get from the Citizens Council?
I was told—and I can't remember by whom now—but the report circled back
that they were just absolutely enraged. They just saw purple and red and
every other color when that sentence was written. And the sentence is a
little out of character, really, for me. But by that time, you have to
realize
END OF INTERVIEW