Dana El-Kurd

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.

Perhaps Wisdom's most significant opinion came with the 1968 United States v. Jefferson case, which blocked states from avoiding compliance with the Brown v. Board of Education decision by setting up so-called, quote, school choice plans in which parents allegedly freely chose to send their children to segregated schools.

Coining a phrase that would later ignite fierce white backlash against civil rights north and south, Wisdom said school systems needed to move beyond ostensibly not discriminating and to take, quote, affirmative action to bring about a unitary nonracial system.

That phrase would provide a legal foundation for school busing as a means of genuinely integrating schools.

and also introduced the concept of affirmative action, hiring practices, and other stubborn aspects of racial exclusion.

The Fifth Circuit's record of judicial progressivism continued through the 1970s.

A 1976 decision by the Fifth Circuit, for instance, required public colleges and universities in Texas to recognize gay student organizations.

Meanwhile, moderate Republicans tried to persuade Richard Nixon to nominate Wisdom for the United States Supreme Court.

However, Attorney General John Mitchell, who later went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, squashed the idea.

He complained that the judge was a damn left-winger who would supposedly be as bad as the famously liberal Chief Justice Warren.

President Clinton would give Wisdom the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1993.

Wisdom died six years later.