November 25, 2014 – Our speaker was US District Judge Richard Gergel. He serves on the District Court for the District of SC. Judge Gergel was born in Columbia SC and earned an undergraduate degree from Duke in 1975 and then graduated from Duke School of Law in 1979. He was president and partner of his own law firm in Columbia from 1983 until his nomination to the district court in 2009 by President Obama. Judge Gergel successfully represented public school teacher Maggi Hall in a First Amendment Rights case in 1994. The case went to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeal in Richmond VA and was considered one of the most important First Amendment cases to come down from the 4th Circuit in over a decade. The case upheld the lower court’s decision that the school district acted illegally in firing Hall for exercising free speech in criticizing her superintendent and school board for reckless spending.
Judge Gergel concentrated his speech today on a discussion of the late US District Judge J Waties Waring who served the SC district from 1942 to 1952. Gergel was instrumental in getting a statue of Judge Waring erected in the garden at the Four Corners of Law in Charleston earlier this year. Judge Gergel discussed 4 of the main civil rights cases presided over by Judge Waring. Judge Waring handed down several landmark civil rights era decisions about teacher pay and open primaries before his dissent in the school desegregation case Briggs v Elliot became the backbone of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v Board of Education.
Waring graduated 2nd in his class at the College of Charleston in 1900 and passed the SC bar exam in 1902. He served as the City Attorney for Charleston from 1933 to 1942 and was nominated to serve as a federal judge on the SC district court in 1941 by FDR. Waring had strong ties to secessionist politics and had served as campaign manager for Senator ‘Cotton Ed’ Smith, whose slogan was ‘Cotton is King and White is Supreme.’
However, in 1943, everything changed for Judge Waring. He had fallen in love with Detroit native and liberal Elizabeth Avery Hoffman. In 1945, Judge Waring asked his wife of 32 years, Annie Gammell, for a divorce. He and Elizabeth Avery soon married and his career suddenly veered dramatically to the left. Elizabeth Avery had been born into a wealthy liberal family and she urged Judge Waring to look at issues of race with more scrutiny and compassion. Judge Waring and his wife Elizabeth began doing a lot of reading about racism and had come to the conclusion that the idea of separate but equal from Plessy v Ferguson was immoral.
During his tenure as US District Judge, Waring presided over Duvall v School Board and ruled in favor of the African-American teacher Duvall who was requesting equal pay. He also presided over Elmore v Rice in 1947. Elmore was an African-American who wanted to vote in the Democratic Primary. Again, Waring decided in favor of the civil rights plaintiff Elmore. But his most famous case was the school desegregation test case Briggs v Elliott. Here the civil rights plaintiff lost, but Judge Waring was the dissenter on a 3-judge panel and this caused the case to form the legal foundation for the US Supreme Court case Brown v Board of Education. Of course, Brown v Board of Education led to desegregation of schools.
On Sunday, February 11, 1950, Judge Waring’s wife Elizabeth appeared on NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ and complained that while other states had made progress in race relations, South Carolina remained an exact replica of Russia. She also called for intermarriage between whites and blacks. The following Monday, the SC House of Representatives introduced a resolution to appropriate funds to purchase one-way tickets for Judge Waring and Elizabeth to any place they desired provided they never returned to the state. The resolution passed and was sent to the state Senate. Ultimately, Judge Waring would retire in 1952 and move to New York. He died in 1968 and Elizabeth followed him 9 months later. They are both buried in Magnolia Cemetery here in Charleston. Charles Kuralt of CBS News covered Judge Waring’s burial and reported that out of the 200 people that attended, less than a dozen were white.
— Doug Holmes