Dana El-Kurd
speaker
4,891 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 30 May
Dana El-Kurd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He quickly formed an alliance with three other liberal judges on the Fifth Circuit, Albert P. Tuttle of Georgia, John R. Brown of Texas, and Richard T. Revis of Alabama.
Rivas was the only Democrat on the squad that came to be known as the Fifth Four.
These liberals typically prevailed over the conservatives serving on the Fifth Circuit.
And at that point, the Fifth Circuit heard cases from states that spread across the core of the one-time Confederacy, including Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia.
This placed the Fifth Four on the front lines of the civil rights struggle.
In 1958, the Fifth Circuit began chipping away at Jim Crow.
The court heard the case of Joe Dorsey Jr.
of New Orleans challenging a Louisiana law that outlawed matches between black and white boxers.
Wisdom wrote the majority opinion, which declared such legislation made a mockery of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.
That opinion, like many Wisdom wrote, would be upheld the following year by the Supreme Court that was presided over by Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Louisiana integrated boxing matches, but for years outside the ring, the arenas divided into black and white seating.
In the coming years, the Fifth Circuit forced St.
Helen Parish in Louisiana to reopen their schools after that school board voted to close all campuses to prevent integration.
The Fifth Circuit court ordered the University of Mississippi to admit an African-American student, James Meredith.
In his opinion, Wisdom wrote that Ole Miss, as it's known, had engaged in a carefully calculated campaign of delay, harassment, and masterly inactivity.
Riots broke out as federal troops had to enforce the order.
In 1963, the Fifth Circuit ordered the desegregation of community centers, cultural centers, playgrounds, and public parks.
The next year, the court ruled that jury selection system in Orleans, Paris, where, as Wisdom noted, no Black had ever sit on a grand jury or trial jury panel, violated the Constitution.
Two years after that, the Fifth Circuit overturned Louisiana's voter registration literacy test, which required a citizen to pass, in the judgment of white officials, a written test on the Constitution.
Such laws had long disenfranchised impoverished African Americans and whites.
Showing 2781–2800 of 4,891 · page 140 of 245
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