Judge: Roberts Misused My Quote
A federal judge who argued the landmark school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education says Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is taking his words out of context.
Roberts cited Brown and the arguments of Robert Carter in his majority opinion yesterday striking down school integration plans at two public schools, Adam Liptak writes for the New York Times. Roberts said there is no ambiguity in a transcript of Carter’s words.
“We have one fundamental contention,” the transcript read. “No state has any authority under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.”
Carter, a Manhattan senior judge who is now 90 years old, told Liptak that Roberts should have considered his argument in the context of the 1950s, when discrimination was widespread. “All that race was used for at that point in time was to deny equal opportunity to black people,” he said. He complained the chief justice now “stand[s] that argument on its head.”
