It’s the biggest thing to hit Georgia since Sherman.
Shortly after Morris Abram began practicing law in Atlanta in the late 1940s, he was approached by Helen Douglas Mankin, the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress from Georgia. Mankin, an early feminist widely known as a progressive for her positions on race and labor issues during her tenure in the Georgia General Assembly, had won a surprise victory in a special election held in February 1946 to fill the seat of retired Fifth District Congressman Robert Ramspeck. She won with over one thousand votes from the last box counted, the overwhelmingly black Ward 3-B.1
Mankin’s election sent shock waves throughout the Talmadge-led state Democratic Party establishment, already reeling from the prospect of losing forever the white primary, the Georgia practice of prohibiting blacks from voting in Democratic primaries, then under court challenge. Under the Neill Act, each congressional district had the option of using either the popular or county unit vote to determine the party’s nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives. Mankin’s predecessor Ramspeck, a member of the House’s Democratic leadership, had used his control over the Fifth District’s Democratic Executive Committee to eliminate the unit voting system for the three counties in the Atlanta area over a decade earlier. He knew that with his moderate voting record in Congress, he would otherwise be vulnerable to losing two of the three counties that constituted the district.
By the time of the 1946 primary held only months after her special election, the white primary had been declared unconstitutional and the district’s Democratic Party establishment knew that the only way of defeating Representative Mankin was to reinstate the county unit system in the Fifth Congressional District.
Meanwhile, Eugene Talmadge, looking for a fourth term as governor, considered the coalition of poor whites, blacks, and organized labor that elected Mankin a threat to the state’s political order. Making the black scare a major feature of his campaign, he went around the state railing against the newly elected congresswoman whom he dubbed “the Belle of Ashby Street,” after the location of the black housing projects in Atlanta that had provided her margin of victory.2
In addition to reinstating the county unit system in the Fifth District, the DeKalb political bosses, who dominated the district’s Democratic Executive Committee, recruited the white supremacist James Davis, then a state superior court judge, to run against Mankin in the upcoming Democratic primary. In the July primary, Mankin won the district’s popular vote by carrying Fulton County by a wide margin. But the fix had been in at the time the unit vote was reinstated, and by winning his home county Dekalb and tiny Rockdale, Davis prevailed. The statewide results followed the same pattern. Although Talmadge lost the popular vote to lawyer and future Lockheed executive James Carmichael, he carried the unit vote by a comfortable margin.
Less than three weeks later, on August 3, 1946, two separate lawsuits were filed in federal court challenging the victories of Talmadge and Davis on grounds that the county unit system violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing equal protection of the law. As Mankin’s biographer points out, the plaintiffs were “a coalition of progressive whites who were appalled by the racism that blew like a tornado over the state” in the wake of these victories.3
But the plaintiffs had two problems. Just two months earlier, Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, writing for the court in a case seeking to overturn the malapportioned legislative districts of Illinois, had proclaimed that it was not the responsibility of courts to enter a “political thicket” that was the province of the political branches of government.4 The second was more immediate. As the three-judge panel convened to hear the case pointed out, not only had the primary election already been held, but ballots were already printed for the general election. The court ruled in the case of Turman v. Duckworth that the unit system challenge was moot as a result.
By the time Morris Abram was engaged to help Mankin continue her fight against the county unit system, she had lost two more elections to Davis: a write-in effort in the 1946 general election and the Democratic primary two years later. The latter was particularly painful, as Mankin won less than 40 percent of the popular vote, losing even her home county of Fulton. But far from being finished, “Mankin was as determined as ever to push ahead with her suit against the county unit system, to take it if necessary to the Supreme Court, no matter what the cost in cash, health, or friends.”5
Abram had been drawn into the case by Mankin’s nephew, Hamilton Douglas III, an Atlanta lawyer who knew Abram from their days as students at the University of Georgia. Despite her insistence that she be allowed to sue the state for damages in her own name, both Abram and Douglas believed it would undermine the case to have the appearance of a political motive behind it.6 Instead, they enlisted an automobile parts dealer from Fulton County named Bernard South as plaintiff. South, a southern Baptist, had not been involved in politics or associated in any way with opposition to the county unit system. But as added insurance they brought in Harold Fleming, a staff member of the progressive Southern Regional Council, to be the co-plaintiff in case Mr. South was pressured to withdraw by pro-Talmadge forces. When asked many years later why he considered South’s desertion a possibility, Abram replied, “because the pressure [was] terrific; and he was in business. He was selling automobile parts, and you don’t sell automobile parts just to liberals.”7
Mankin had a strong personality and did not get along well with Abram. Had he not been brought into the case by her nephew, the only member of her family with whom she had warm relations, he might not have remained on the case. While Abram thought of Mankin as “strong medicine,” she complained that he was using the case to further his political ambitions. While he prepared the legal arguments, Douglas kept his aunt away from him.8
The case of South v. Peters was filed in January 1950 in U.S. District Court in Atlanta and came up for argument the following month before a federal three-judge panel. The timing was critical, because given the dismissal of the 1946 cases, Abram knew that he would have to get the case to federal court before the Democratic primary. But the problem for the plaintiffs was that, technically, the county unit system did not have to be employed if the state’s Democratic Committee decided to use a convention to nominate its candidates. And until the date of the primary was set, the court could dismiss the case as premature. As Abram put it, “we were always teetering between prematurity and mootness.”9
Abram effectively disposed of that possibility on the first day of the federal trial by getting James Peters, the state’s Democratic Party chairman and the defendant in the suit, to admit on the witness stand that the party would not be nominating its candidates “behind closed doors.”10 The three-judge federal panel hearing the case was presided over by Judge Samuel Sibley, the senior judge on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, who had presided over the 1946 county unit case. Following Felix Frankfurter’s reasoning in the Illinois reapportionment case, he dismissed the case as not a matter for the courts to decide. In a per curiam decision, the Supreme Court refused to accept the case.11
But there was an encouraging sign for Abram and other opponents of the county unit system in the form of a dissent issued by Justice William Douglas (and signed onto by Justice Hugo Black) in which he asserted, “The creation by law of favored groups of citizens and the grant to them of preferred political rights is the worst of all discriminations under a democratic system of government.”12
Abram’s brief noted the unit system’s reinforcement of racial discrimination. In his dissent, Douglas remarked, “The county unit system has indeed been called the ‘last loophole’ around our decisions holding that there must be no discrimination because of race in primary as well as in general elections.”13 In a 1951 article published in the Georgia Bar Journal, Abram expressed his confidence that it was only a matter of time before the unconstitutionality of the county unit system would be recognized by federal courts. In a democratic system governed by a constitution, he argued, how could a practice so blatantly discriminatory be permitted? “At best,” Abram wrote, “the place where the voter resides is a constitutionally irrelevant fact and cannot form the basis for discrimination. Would anyone doubt that a law permitting red-headed people no votes, black-headed people one vote, and blondes sixty-five votes, would on its face violate equal protection requirements?”14
After establishing the discriminatory nature of the system and its unconstitutionality with respect to both the Georgia and U.S. constitutions, he addressed the question of whether such discrimination might serve some reasonable or higher purpose, whether protecting county (as opposed to personal) interests, preventing the growth of city machines, or meeting the needs of good government. Counties, he argued, are not political entities, but simply geographical and administrative subdivisions in which people live. Constitutional guarantees run not to these entities but rather to the people who live in them. Regarding the rise of political machines, those operating in Georgia owe their support not to city but rather to rural interests. And besides, “a person’s franchise cannot be deprived him because of the ruling government’s fear of the manner in which he may use it.”15
In refuting the purely hypothetical argument that the unit system might further good government, Abram turned to the Bible, comparing the county unit rule’s all-inclusiveness to Herod’s command ordering the death of all male children born on a certain day because one of them might someday cause his downfall. Even if people living in large counties are bad citizens, “can we not, as in Sodom, find ten righteous men amongst Fulton’s 468,000?” The first demand of the classifier, argues Abram, “is that he obey the demand of justice to the individual. Group guilt is unknown to our jurisprudence.”16
The same year his bar journal article appeared, Abram was back in court fighting the county unit system, this time with Baxter Jones Jr., the lawyer from Macon who would challenge James Davis for the congressional seat the following year. Although the target was the same, the strategy shifted from stopping the voting practice outright to seeking damages for his client, thus making the practice too expensive to continue. This, Abram believed, could best be achieved in state court.17 According to the argument on behalf of plaintiff Cox, his vote was “diluted, devalued, and reversed,” by the method of counting it, and therefore he was entitled to damages.18
But once again, the challenge to the county unit system was denied. The argument offered by Georgia’s state supreme court on appeal was disingenuous and particularly frustrating for the challengers. According to the court, nothing in the Georgia state constitution “makes any reference to a party primary.” Furthermore, “primaries are in no sense elections for an office, but merely methods by which party adherents agree upon candidates whom they intend to offer and support for ultimate choice by all qualified electors.”19 The appeal to the Supreme Court was dismissed “for want of a substantial Federal question.” Once again, Douglas and Black registered their dissents, noting that the heavy black population in the large cities was substantially disenfranchised by the unit system.20
Among the state’s prominent citizens, the only one as determined as Morris Abram to help bring about the demise of the unit system was Atlanta’s longtime mayor, William Hartsfield. First elected in 1937, Hartsfield would become the longest-serving mayor in Atlanta’s history (1937–41, 1942–61). During his tenure, the city’s population grew tenfold to over one million. Under Hartsfield, who built a biracial coalition to secure repeated reelection, the city peacefully integrated its schools and solidified its reputation as “the city too busy to hate.”21
Preparing for the 1958 election, Mayor Hartsfield asked Abram to bring another county unit case. Arguing that the unit system would dilute his vote, he sought an injunction to enjoin the state Democratic primary from being held later that year. The South case had been rejected in part on the fact that it sought equitable relief (i.e., preventing the next primary election from taking place under the usual terms). But the year before the Hartsfield suit, Congress had passed the 1957 Civil Rights Act which, among other measures, gave federal courts equitable powers in voting cases. Abram believed that this legal provision had the chance of meeting the Frankfurter objections to granting jurisdiction to those challenging the unit rule.22
First, Abram needed to find a judge who understood the legal subtleties involved. He believed he found the solution outside his Atlanta home district. One spring morning he traveled fifty miles to the courthouse and post office in Gainesville, where he knew Judge Boyd Sloan would be working on a Saturday. According to Abram, the judge was “madder than hell” and asked why he hadn’t served the chief judge in his own hometown. Abram replied, “Judge Hooper doesn’t work on Saturday.”23
But if he thought the strategy would work, Abram was mistaken. Telling him that his case had already been decided, Judge Sloan refused even to convene a three-judge panel to hear it. Abram took the unusual step of “mandamusing” the judge in the U.S. Supreme Court to force him to convene the panel, something he admitted was “a tricky business.” This prompted his wife Jane to ask, “Morris, can’t you beat the county unit system without suing a federal judge?”24
In the 1958 case of Hartsfield v. Sloan (357 U.S. 916), the Supreme Court refused to order the empaneling of a three-judge federal court to hear the county unit case on its merits, upholding Judge Sloan’s denials by claiming there was no substantial federal question raised. But since the previous two unit cases, President Eisenhower had made several appointments to the Supreme Court. Although the court voted against hearing the case of Hartsfield v. Sloan, this time two of the new appointees, Justice William Brennan and Chief Justice Earl Warren, jointed Justices Douglas and Black in dissent.25 Abram was more than encouraged by this development. “We’re naturally disappointed,” he said. “We note that the decision was by a very narrowly divided court. I am positive that someday the judiciary will invalidate the Georgia county unit system.”26 Abram now knew that he needed to turn only one more justice against the Frankfurter doctrine that the unit system was simply a “political” matter to get a future case heard by the country’s highest court. As he later remarked, “This fourteen-year struggle really, fundamentally eroded the Supreme Court’s position gradually, gradually, like drops of water.”27
It was not long before Abram found what he regarded as the perfect vehicle for reaching his goal of getting the Supreme Court to act. He was approached by a voter from Savannah following the 1958 election in Georgia’s First Congressional District where the unit system was used to nominate candidates for Congress. The man was seeking damages, since the candidate he voted for had lost the election because of the unit system.
But Abram’s maneuver was undermined by Judge Frank Scarlett of the Southern Federal District of Georgia, who had served on the panel that had turned away the original 1946 unit case. Abram knew that Judge Scarlett would dismiss the case, as indeed he indicated to Abram at its first hearing. But the judge simply refused to take any action at all, effectively bottling up the case and frustrating completely Abram’s strategy of getting a reversal in the Supreme Court.28
On March 26, 1962, Mayor Hartsfield learned from a reporter friend that in a case from Tennessee, Baker v. Carr, the Supreme Court had just overruled the 1946 reapportionment decision that had prevented the county unit cases from receiving a hearing in the federal courts. He immediately called Abram with the news, including the fact that the court’s opinion in Baker had included references to the county unit decisions, including Hartsfield v. Sloan.
Abram told Hartsfield that everything was ready to go with another lawsuit, and that his name was on the complaint. The mayor hesitated, realizing he would have to check first with “the cigar” to see if he approved Hartsfield’s name appearing on what could mark the downfall of the state’s voting system. The “cigar” was Robert Woodruff, the man behind the international success of Coca-Cola and his most important supporter. Hartsfield called back with the news that Abram needed to find another name.29
The replacement of Hartsfield’s name on the lawsuit by Atlanta businessman James O’Hare Sanders did not dampen the mayor’s enthusiasm for the prospects of at last overturning the unit system. In the calls he made to friends and reporters from Morris Abram’s office following the filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia of the case of Sanders v. Gray, he said over and over that “This will be cataclysmic in Georgia politics,” adding, “it’s the biggest thing to hit Georgia since Sherman.”30
While Abram was similarly thrilled with this prospect, he did regret that circumstances prevented him from getting his cases to the Supreme Court before Baker v. Carr. In 1978 he told Lorraine Spritzer, “I regretted—when they finally held the issue of geographic representation justiciable, that it was in the Baker v. Carr case which came at the right moment after the court had already been eroded to the point of five-four in the Hartsfield v. Sloan case.”31 This was because there was a clear distinction to be made between the county unit case, where the issue was the equality of each vote, and the reapportionment cases, which revolved around the population of legislative districts, which could only approximate numerical equality.
The 1962 Baker decision created a sense of panic for the Georgia political establishment. Herman Talmadge, now a U.S. senator, issued a statement that read, “It is beyond the comprehension of anyone who ever has been exposed to a law book how a court at any level could compel a state legislature to take or not to take action on any question.”32 Governor Vandiver called the state’s General Assembly into emergency session on April 16. Two days after Abram filed the Sanders suit, a case was brought challenging the apportionment of state legislative districts, not surprising given the fact that the number of House seats was tied closely to the number of unit votes in each county.33 With the 1962 elections only months away, the assembly faced the prospect of a court-forced reapportionment.
More than two dozen bills were introduced during the special session to alter the system in the hope of passing muster with the panel hearing the Sanders case. Under the bill that was signed into law, a majority of the population would still have only 33 percent of the unit votes.34
When the new statute was sent to the judges hearing the Sanders case, the defendants moved for immediate dismissal on the grounds that it rendered the plaintiff’s complaint irrelevant. But Abram and his team had prepared amendments to their complaint for every bill that had been proposed. When the motion was presented, they promptly produced an amendment that mirrored the statute, including its inequities, and enabled them to proceed with the case.35
Following the successful Sanders decision before the three-judge panel led by Judge Bell, the state turned to the Supreme Court for a stay, but its appeal was rejected by Justice Black, thus throwing the upcoming September Democratic primary into turmoil. The demise of the unit system, along with the decision overturning the state’s unequal apportionment of legislative seats, had led to the need to create an entirely new structure of legislative districts. Jimmy Carter soon announced his candidacy for one of the newly created state Senate seats.36
The decision also led to a turnaround in the electoral fortunes of moderate candidates for governor, such as Carl Sanders and later Carter and George Busbee. When Sanders, who had represented the city of Augusta in both the Georgia House and Senate, was elected in 1962, the first held following the Gray decision, he was the first governor elected in a non-rural county since the 1920s.37 The Sanders decision also made it possible for the voters of the Fifth Congressional District to retire James Davis, who lost to Atlanta attorney Charles Weltner. Two years later Weltner became the only Georgia congressman, and one of only a handful throughout the South, to vote in favor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Following the federal panel’s decision in Sanders v. Gray, the chairman and secretary of the Georgia State Democratic Executive Committee, and the Secretary of State of Georgia, took their case to the Supreme Court, which for the first time in a Georgia county unit case, accepted jurisdiction. The oral argument was set for hearing on January 17, 1963, before any of the numerous related reapportionment cases that were waiting to be heard.
On December 21, Abram, who had recently left Atlanta to join the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison in New York, received a letter from Solicitor General Archibald Cox, asking if he would cede some of his time to the government to allow it more than a half hour to present its brief, which favored the lower court’s ruling.38 Abram was reluctant to comply with the request. But two weeks later, he received another letter from Cox, writing with the extraordinary news that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had decided to argue the government’s brief himself. As a result, he would no longer need the extra time he had previously requested.
Since no announcement about the attorney general had been made to the press, Abram was to keep the information confidential, even from his co-counsel and client. Since by Supreme Court tradition Kennedy was not expected to receive questions from the Justices, “This means that you will probably have to bear the brunt of questions ranging broadly into the basic philosophy concerning the Fourteenth Amendment and the standards of adjudication that apply in the election and reapportionment areas.”39
The practice of having the U.S. attorney general present a brief before the Supreme Court was not unprecedented. But what was unusual in this occasion is that Robert Kennedy had never argued a case of any kind. Indeed, he had never even entered a courtroom. Cox and Burke Marshall, the Justice Department’s civil rights chief, had determined that the county unit case would be a relatively easy one for Kennedy to argue.40
But there was another reason as well. According to Bruce Ferris, who worked in the solicitor’s office, after arguing the government’s position in Baker v. Carr that the federal courts should become involved in cases involving voter inequality, and after being questioned harshly by Justice Frankfurter, Cox had whispered to him on the way out of the courtroom that Frankfurter’s position was the correct one. His misgivings about the government’s position explains why Justice Department officials were eager to have Kennedy argue the case and why Cox was prepared to defer.41
Ferris helped prepare the attorney general for the oral argument. Kennedy spent two weeks during the Christmas and New Year’s holiday period studying the case. His material included a memorandum that had been prepared for him by Cox. The memorandum noted that the Supreme Court had not set out a standard it believed the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment imposed on states in their apportionment of voting power. While Georgia’s county unit system was clearly discriminatory, Cox believed that none of the Justices beyond Douglas and Black would go so far as to rule that the Constitution mandated that all votes be given equal weight. Rather, as the government was arguing in its brief, it was at least theoretically possible that some form of county system, one not blatantly discriminatory, could pass muster.42
The afternoon before the oral argument, Abram traveled to Washington at Cox’s request to meet with himself, Kennedy, and Civil Rights Division chief Burke Marshall. Cox wanted to coordinate the two arguments, which puzzled Abram, since he knew that the government’s position was at odds with the one he would be taking. While the solicitor’s brief essentially supported the lower court’s decision, Abram would be insisting on the “one man, one vote” standard that the lower court had stopped short of declaring.
During the meeting, Abram pressed his point about the impossibility of devising a unit system that adhered to the equal protection doctrine of the Fourteenth Amendment. When Kennedy told Cox that he agreed with Abram, Cox made it clear that the government had already filed its brief, and that was the one Kennedy was going to argue. Baldy, the Atlanta Constitution’s political cartoonist, drew a cartoon of Abram holding up a book to the attorney general and saying, “Read here, Bobby.” In fact, Abram was not pleased that his thunder was being blunted, if not stolen, by Kennedy’s personal intervention in the case. According to Abram’s law partner Joseph Lefkoff, who assisted him on the case, “Morris was upset that Bobby Kennedy chose to make that case his only appearance before the Supreme Court. Morris, bless him, enjoyed the glory, and that sort of took the shine away from him.”43
It was clear to Supreme Court observers on the morning of January 17, 1963, that this day in court would be different, if not historic. The courtroom audience included members of the Kennedy family, including the attorney general’s mother, his wife Ethel, his brother Senator Ted Kennedy, and his sister-in-law Jacqueline, the First Lady. In addition to supporting the attorney general, they were present to see Ted sworn in as a member of the Supreme Court Bar.44
Arguing for the state of Georgia, two attorneys in the state attorney general’s office, B. D. Murphy and E. Freeman Leverett, defended the county unit system as one that went back to the founding of the state of Georgia. According to Leverett, counties were governmental units in Georgia before it entered the union and had their voice in the councils of government on the state level through representation. From the very earliest, Georgia had accorded a high degree of autonomy to its counties.
In trying to justify deviations from pure equality of the vote, Leverett gave the example of the U.S. Constitution’s establishment of such institutions as the Senate and the electoral college, but Justice Stewart, for one, was unimpressed. Unlike the United States, he pointed out, Georgia wasn’t created by several counties getting together and voluntarily giving up some of their sovereignty to create the state. Leverett argued that the constitution does not prevent the states from choosing any electoral structure it thinks best suited to “the interest, temper and customs of its people.” As Mr. Justice Frankfurter’s dissenting opinion in Baker v. Carr points out, the idea of equality of voting power is not implicit in the history of American institutions.45
Abram, who had waited many years for this moment, opened his remarks by addressing the point of opposing counsel that there is no distinction to be made between legislative voting classifications and electoral ones. While you can protect a minority in voting for legislators either by proportional representation or by drawing boundaries between districts, classification in the case of voting must necessarily involve discrimination, since “if you give a man more than a vote, you’re necessarily giving another man less of a vote.”46
Pressed by Justice Stewart on whether age, literacy, and other requirements are therefore not legitimate, Abram agreed that they are, though once they are established, you can’t make distinctions among voters simply by where they live. So, for example, even if the state made holding property a requirement, it couldn’t then make the vote of one property holder greater than another.
The appellants had reminded the court that the unit system under review was not the one that had been in effect in previous years, but rather the one that the people of Georgia had passed the previous year through their elected representatives. To this argument, Abram pointed out that the lower house, which approved that law, represented 22 percent of the people and the state senate, a mere 5.5 percent. In both 1952 and in 1950, Abram pointed out, amendments to embed the county unit system in the state constitution passed by two-thirds of both houses of the legislature. Yet, when they were submitted to the people of the state for their approval, each was defeated soundly. Furthermore, the system was particularly detrimental to blacks. In counties benefitting from the system with large black populations, they were disenfranchised, whereas “where the Negroes were voting and of reasonable proportion of their population, their votes didn’t count.”
When asked by Justice Brennan whether the court had to rule the unit system unconstitutional per se, Abram responded that he was arguing for doing so because if the court writes an opinion, it would want to set guidelines on the actual way in which the constitution should be interpreted. He closed with the following words: “I do not think there is any way that you can uphold this system even if you don’t say a system is per se unconstitutional, until you can say that two equals four or feel that 50¢ is the proper amount of change for a dollar or that you can give eight ounces per pound. I think a qualified voter is a qualified voter, is a qualified voter, and a vote, is a vote, is a vote.”47
For his part, the attorney general stuck to the script prepared by Archibald Cox. He got a laugh from the audience when he struck a personal note into his remarks: “We used to have, and I repeat used to have, a saying in my city of Boston which was vote early and vote often. If you live in one of the small counties in the state of Georgia, all you have to do is vote early and you accomplish the same result.”48
Unlike previous attorneys general who had argued before the Court, Kennedy welcomed questions from the bench.49 Under questioning by Chief Justice Warren as to whether there was any place for a weighted system such as Georgia’s county unit system, Kennedy’s initial response was that he didn’t think it necessary to reach that point. But then he added, “I do say that although I have given it a great deal of thought, I have difficulty coming up with any system that makes any sense which a unit voting in connection with a statewide election is.”50 According to Abram, who was sitting next to the solicitor general, when Kennedy gave this response, “Archie almost died.”51 Abram later sent a letter of protest to Time magazine, which had reported that Kennedy read the brief his department had prepared for him. Abram wrote that RFK delivered an oral argument without any notes and responded to questions from the court.52
Under questioning from the chief justice, the attorney general also distinguished Georgia’s county unit system from the U.S. Electoral College, which was the result of a compromise between the small and larger states. (As Abram told William F. Buckley on his PBS program two decades later when discussing the state voting inequality in the U.S. Senate, the Fourteenth Amendment protects people, not states.)
The attorney general closed his remarks with an eloquent statement of what was at stake:
The great miracle of the Constitution is that we’ve been able to deal with the problems of the twentieth century as well as the problems of the eighteenth century. These are the great problems that are facing the United States at the present time. And this kind of invidious practice that exists now and has existed before and the Georgia County Unit System strikes at the very heart of the United States. If we can give equal protection to those who feel that they’ve been deprived of their economic rights, certainly we can give equal protection to those who have been deprived of the most basic right of all, which is the right to vote. If we cannot protect them, then the whole fabric of the American system, our whole way of life, is irreparably damaged.53
The Supreme Court’s decision in the case of Gray v. Sanders, announced on March 18, 1963, went well beyond upholding the lower court’s ruling and beyond the U.S. government’s supporting brief. It was entirely appropriate that the court’s opinion was penned by Justice Douglas, who had dissented in the previous county unit cases the court had refused to hear. His words vindicated Morris Abram’s longtime position regarding voter equality: “The conception of political equality from the Declaration of Independence, to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, to the Fifteenth, Seventeenth, and Nineteenth Amendments can mean only one thing—one person, one vote.”54