January 18th, 2016
J.R. Clifford was West Virginia’s first black attorney and a civil rights pioneer. The Williams case represents an early and significant win in the civil rights movement, predating Brown v. Board of Education by over 50 years.
Clifford represented the plaintiff, Carrie Williams, who was a public school teacher in Tucker County. Williams taught at an all-black school. The county board of education dictated that white schools would run for eight months every year. However, black schools would only run for five months. Williams continued teaching after five months. Even though she was ordered to stop teaching, she refused. After continuing to teach for a full eight months, she sued the board to recover the additional pay she alleged was due and owing. Williams prevailed in the circuit court and was awarded the full amount of additional pay--i.e., $120. The board appealed.
The Supreme Court had little trouble affirming the circuit court’s judgment. In fact, it found the board’s attempt to establish different teaching schedules for white and black schools to be “clearly illegal”:
“This distinction on the part of the board, being clearly illegal, and a discrimination made merely on account of color, should be treated as a nullity, as being contrary to public policy and good morals.”
Interestingly, the Supreme Court neither cited nor quoted from the Fourteenth Amendment, but its commitment to equal protection principles could not have been more clearly expressed. In the case’s most famous passage, the Court not only emphasized the importance of equal protection, but also the role that must be played by education to insure that blacks would be “elevated…, both morally and intellectually”:
“Discrimination against the colored people, because of color alone, as to privileges, immunities, and equal legal protection, is contrary to public policy and the law of the land. If any discrimination as to education should be made, it should be favorable to, and not against, the colored people. Held in the bondage of slavery, and continued in a low moral and intellectual condition, for a longer period of years, and then clothed at once, with preparation, with full citizenship, in this great republic, and the power to control and guide its destinies, the future welfare, prosperity, and peace of our people demand that this benighted race should be elevated by education, both morally and intellectually, that they may become exemplary citizens; otherwise the perpetuity of our free institutions may be greatly endangered.”
There would, of course, be many more civil rights fights to come. Some would be won. Some would be lost. But Williams helped to provide a good foundation that would guide West Virginia civil rights law into the 20th century.
Williams v. Board of Education of Fairfax Dist., 45 W.Va. 199 (1898).
