Awakening to the injustice of segregation
Murphy grew up in segregated Memphis, Tennessee, and it took him many years to conclude that segregation and racial injustice must be eradicated. Although he continues to disagree with some aspects of the <cite>Brown</cite> decision, he welcomed the decision in 1954. He insists that he never took a public, aggressive posture against segregation despite his belief that it was wrong.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with William Patrick Murphy, January 17, 1978. Interview B-0043. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- SEAN DEVEREUX:
-
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 in
the South, Mr. Loewy or Mr. Strong or somebody had been in your
position, I think it really would have been different because you were
from Memphis, which is sixty miles away. You were a southerner; that was
your home. And so did you think about the substance of the cases? You
would have been forced to, I guess.
- WILLIAM PATRICK MURPHY:
-
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.
- SEAN DEVEREUX:
-
You're talking about in Memphis.
- WILLIAM PATRICK MURPHY:
-
Yes, I'm describing the segregated system that I grew up under
and took for granted all the time I was growing up, without
ever giving it a thought. And you'd go in the
stores, and here was a water fountain with a sign "White
Only" or a restroom, "White Only." And maybe
there wouldn't be any water fountain or restroom for black
people. And I grew up under that system, and I never gave it much of a
thought until long after I became an adult. I guess I first began to
think about it, maybe, when I was in the Navy during World War II, and
then when I was in law school. And I guess it's fair to say
that by the time I started teaching at Ole Miss, I had come to the
conclusion in my own mind that segregation was wrong and that something
ought to be done about it, and not just segregation but racial injustice
across the board. My God, I was thirty years old before I really began
to rethink all these things that I had grown up taking for granted. But
I certainly was not an evangelist or a zealot or anything like that. But
I suppose in honesty I would have to admit that I liked what the Supreme
Court had done; I was glad they had done it. But I don't
think I ever really said that to anybody in Mississippi or in class. And
I don't think even today students could accuse me of being a
propagandist in any of my classes. I think it's part of a
professor's duty to try to fairly lay out different points of
view, and I never did try to proselyte in class. But I guess
it's inevitable that maybe the emphasis and the nuances and
whatnot of the way you teach reflect your own personal views, so I will
admit yes, by the time Brown v. Board came down I was
an emancipated southern white man at that point in my own thinking.