Justice Harlan

Justice John Marshall Harlan

Mr. Justice John Marshall Harlan was an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1877 until his death in 1911.  He was also a devoted member of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, serving as Elder or Trustee from 1900 on and founding and presiding over the Harlan Bible Class from its inception in 1896 until his death.

Justice Harlan was born into a family of committed Presbyterians in faith, of Whigs in politics, and of slaveowners by circumstance in the Kentucky of 1833.  It is his evolution from defender of slavery and ardent opponent of abolition to defender of the civil rights of Blacks in Plessy v. Ferguson, the infamous 1896 Supreme Court case in which the court majority held that segregated facilities were not necessarily unequal, that has made him the subject of a number of legal biographies.  As the lone dissenter in the case, Justice Harlan wrote, " Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens....  The arbitrary separation of citizens on the basis of race ... is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with civil freedom and the equality before the law established by the Constitution."  When the Court overturned Plessy in 1954, it, in effect, sanctioned the words of Justice Harlan.

At every juncture of his life, Harlan was forced to grapple with slavery and its consequences.  Kentucky, a Border State, formed a crucible in which the battle over slavery was fought both figuratively and literally.  In his early years as an up-and-coming politician, Harlan moved from the dying Whig Party to the nativist and pro-slavery Know Nothing Party; for most of the 1850s and 1860s, he espoused the property rights of slaveowners.  Harlan remained, though, a staunch Unionist, and that thrust him into a series of encounters that challenged his fundamental principles on equality of the races and demanded that he really "see" Blacks as persons.  Slowly but inexorably after the war, he moved into the Republican camp, where he was forced to recant -- on the political stump -- his former loyalties.  Once he made that shift, there was no returning.  Partisan loyalties, friendships, policies -- all reinforced his new stance.

Two quotes convey something of the power of his faith and the relationship of that faith to race relations in this country:

"I believe that the Bible is the inspired Word of God.  Nothing which it commands can be safely or properly disregarded -- nothing it condemns can be justified.  No civilization is worth preserving which is not based on the doctrines or teachings of the Bible."  (1906)

"Here those people [Blacks] are and here they will remain.  They were created as we have been, in the image of the Maker, and every dictate of humanity, to say nothing of self-interest, imperatively demands that political organizations shall cease to keep alive the prejudices and passions which grew out of the abolition of the institution of slavery."  (1875)

Justice Harlan seems to have applied the same judgment of segregation in the church as that he applied in the nation.  When in 1906 the Washington, D.C. Presbytery voted to reunite its Cumberland Presbyterian Church and Presbyterian Church USA congregations, Harlan was one of two Presbytery members to vote against the reunion, since the reunification permitted segregated congregations wherever people wanted to organize them.

When Brown v. The Board of Education overturned Plessy in 1954, The New York Times editorialized:

"Last Monday's case dealt solely with segregation in the schools, but there was not one word in Chief Justice Warren's opinion that was inconsistent with the earlier views of Justice Harlan.  This is an instance in which the voice crying in the wilderness finally becomes the expression of a people's will and in which justice overtakes and thrusts aside a timorous expediency."

Information from Alan F. Westin,
John Marshall Harlan And the Constitutional Rights
of Negroes: The Transformation of a Southerner,
Yale Law Review (April, 1957);
and Westin, "Mr. Justice Harlan", in Allison Durham and Philip B. Kurland, eds.
Mr. Justice: Biographical Studies of Twelve Supreme Court Justices
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964;
and James H. Smylie.
A Brief History of the Presbyterians.
Louisville: Geneva Press, 1996.