By Lee A. Daniels

I can only say that segregation is wrong today, it was wrong yesterday. Segregation was never right.

– Rep. Richard H. Poff (R.-VA); June 1971

Given the fresh proof that the woeful neglect of American history in the schools has helped produce an astonishing ignorance of basic details of American history, it’s clearly foolish to expect that many today would recognize the name of Richard H. Poff.

His name may be even more in danger of being “lost” to the general public now that he died last week at age 87 in Tullahoma, Tennessee.

That would be unfortunate because Richard H. Poff’s distinguished public career – he was a former, ten-term Congressman from Virginia and later a long-serving Justice of the Virginia State Supreme Court – dramatically illustrates one of the fundamental lessons of the American past: the high cost of white racism.

Richard H. Poff

Of course, white racism’s centuries-deep cost to black Americans has long been evident and discussed; and the penalties American society as a whole suffered during the era of Slavery and Jim Crow are now being charted with a finer and finer precision.

But it’s always been rare to see in the public sphere an acknowledgement of what white racism cost white Americans, either individually or as a whole, during those times – especially from one who, literally, was on the front lines of the racist resistance. That was even more the case in the early 1970s, when the political and cultural battles over the War in Vietnam, the conservative policies of President Richard M. Nixon and the political and social advances of African Americans had produced an environment of razor-sharp polarization.

That is why what Richard H. Poff did in the middle months of 1971 was – and remains – so stunning.

Poff’s death last Tuesday comes forty years almost to the moment after he turned away from a lifelong goal and informed President Nixon in early October 1971 that he did not wish to be nominated to be a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

All evidence indicates that he was Nixon’s top choice to occupy the “Southern seat” that had become vacant in September, 1971 upon the retirement of Justice Hugo L. Black. Poff, a Virginia native and the first Republican congressman elected from Virginia in the twentieth century, was barely known outside his own state. A graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, he was reserved and modest, with a reputation among his colleagues for diligence and probity – and a deep desire for the High Court. It was well-known in Washington that he had said just the year before he’d rather be a Supreme Court Justice than President.

But, on the eve of his nomination, it became clear that Poff would be buffeted by two distinct but related forces swirling around both the Court and the larger American society.

One was President Nixon’s intent to use the appointments coming his way to make the Supreme Court of the 1970s and 1980s “the Nixon Court.”

He had already appointed Warren Burger as Chief Justice to replace Earl Warren, who had announced his retirement in 1968, and Harry Blackmun, then thought to be reliably conservative. Further, he would soon nominate William H. Rehnquist, to replace Justice John M. Harlan, who, ill with bone cancer, had announced his retirement from the Court shortly after Justice Black.

(When Poff withdrew from consideration, President Nixon nominated Rehnquist and Richmond lawyer, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., to fill Black’s seat on the same day.)

Liberals, within and outside Congress, were willing to accede to the appointment of nominees considered moderate conservatives. But, in two bruising nomination fights in 1969 and 1970, the progressive coalition of civil rights, labor and feminist groups coalition successfully persuaded the Senate to reject Nixon’s nominations of U.S. District Court Judge W. Clement Haynesworth, of South Carolina, and U.S. District Court Judge G. Harrold Carswell, of Georgia

Part of the damage which sunk the two Southerners was their judicial rulings and statements on race in the 1950s and 1960s.

The racial “paper trail” on Poff was even clearer — and more damning.

As a Congressman from Virginia, Poff was at the forefront, at least nominally, of the Congressional political forces of “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision and to the demands of the Civil Rights Movement spreading across the American landscape. He had also signed the two editions of the infamous Southern Manifesto issued in 1956 – the one condemning the Brown decision itself; the other pledging unyielding resistance to any and all civil rights legislation – issued by 101 members of Congress from the Southern states where Jim Crow was law.*

Further, he had an unblemished, nineteen-year record of voting against every major civil rights bill that had come before the Congress.

Clarence Mitchell, the legendary director of the Washington office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, mentioned Poff’s record and his “purely gratuitous” signing of the two Southern manifestos in stating that the liberal coalition was prepared to mobilize against his nomination as it had against Carswell and Haynesworth.

However, in what has to be considered an extraordinary response to the liberal criticism of Poff, two pillars of the civil rights coalition in Congress, Representatives Emanuel Cellar, D.-Brooklyn, and William M. McCullough, R.-Ohio, with whom Poff worked closely on the House Judiciary Committee, declared their support of his nomination. Cellar was the chairman, and McCullough, the ranking minority member of the important committee.

But their support was not enough. Less than a fortnight later, as the tension in Washington built, Poff, a deeply private man, decided on a course of action. He withdrew his name.

A month later the widely-read syndicated columnist Jack Anderson published a column reporting that Poff had withdrawn for a powerful family reason: He and his wife wanted to prevent their 12-year-old son from learning he was adopted until he was older.

That would have certainly been a compelling motivation. Poff never discussed his reasons for doing so, other than to state at the time his desire to preserve his family’s privacy, to enable the Court’s (by that time) two vacancies to be filled quickly,  and to avoid a “conformation process that would be protracted and controversial.”

But I believe it wasn’t the only reason. Three months earlier, Poff had given a remarkable, 90-minute interview to a reporter for a Virginia newspaper, in which he, as the October 3, 1971 account of it in the New York Times put it, “made this confession about his anti-civil rights record …”

“I can only say that segregation is wrong today, it was wrong yesterday,” he began. “Segregation was never right.

He continued:

But it is one of the most lamentable frailties of mankind that when one’s wrong is most grievous, his self-justification is most passionate, perhaps in the pitiful hope that the fervor of his self-defense will somehow prove him right. But this doesn’t make it so. And he doesn’t fool himself.

The pressures that were brought to bear on all members of Congress [to join the racist opposition to the Civil Rights Movement] were more intense than they had been in my recollection …

The old doctrine of interposition was at the heart of the Southern Manifesto. Lawyers knew the doctrine was long since invalid, discredited, and yet some of the language of the manifesto was temperate.

As a lawyer, I knew that it was not [valid]. In the political imperatives of the moment, I’m afraid it outweighed some of the legal considerations that all members who signed that document brought to bear upon the question.