lawyer civil rights activist federal judge
Julius Waties Waring was born in Charleston, S. C. , the son of Edward Perry Waring, a railroad official, and Anna Thomasine Waties. Both the Waring and Waties families had long provided South Carolina with socially and politically prominent people. For eight generations Waring's ancestors had been, in his words, "fine, decent slaveholders. "
Waring attended a private secondary school in Charleston and got his B. A. at the College of Charleston in 1900.
After graduation, he clerked with a prestigious Charleston law firm. Once a lawyer, he built a thriving practice. From 1914 to 1921, Waring served as assistant United States attorney, a job he owed to his vigorous campaigning for Woodrow Wilson in 1912. In this position he gained extensive knowledge of federal law, which heightened his longtime ambition to be a federal judge. In the 1920's working mainly for corporate interests, his law firm prospered. His social status on the rise, he joined the elitist Charleston Light Dragoons, a kind of upper-class American Legion that traced its roots back to the American Revolution, and the even more exclusive St. Cecilia Society. In the 1930's he became more involved in politics. From 1933 to 1942 he was corporate counsel for the depression-ravaged city of Charleston, working under the opportunistic New Deal mayor, Burnett Maybank. In 1938, Waring directed the senatorial campaign of "Cotton" Ed Smith, a notorious baiter of blacks. By 1940 he was a solid fixture of the Democratic establishment in South Carolina, and in 1942, Senators Maybank and Smith, his former bosses, secured his appointment as a federal district judge. Waring donned his judicial robes with great emotion. It was "like being born again, " he said. He soon gained a reputation as a stern, efficient, and dignified judge. No longer a partisan, he claimed that he "gradually acquired a passion for justice. " Nevertheless, had he not changed his racial views and handed down a series of liberal civil rights decisions between 1945 and 1951, he undoubtedly would have escaped historical notice. In his first civil rights case, Thompson v. Gibbes (1945), Waring ordered the equalization of pay for black and white teachers. Thompson alerted him to the pervasive discrimination against blacks. He next raised local eyebrows by including blacks on jurors' lists and demanding that lawyers in his courtroom address all blacks as "Mr. ," "Mrs. ," or "Miss. " He also hired a brawny black man as his bailiff. Despite such actions, for some time Waring's outlook remained essentially that of a paternalistic gradualist. By 1947, however, he had begun to move leftward. Gradualism seemed inadequate in a state where officials employed every conceivable subterfuge to maintain the banned white primary. Thus, in 1947, Waring issued a decision on South Carolina's illegal disfranchisement of blacks that jolted the state. In a fiery opinion (Rice v. Elmore), he declared, "It is time for South Carolina to rejoin the Union. It is time to adopt the American way of conducting elections. " Waring's bombshell brought him instant ostracism. No local whites, not even relatives, visited his stately home after 1947. Night riders burned crosses on his lawn and fired shots through his windows. Hundreds of scurrilous letters and scores of obscene telephone calls deluged him. Politicians threatened to impeach him. Time called him "the man they love to hate. " Hostility only pushed Waring further leftward. By 1949, in fact, he felt compelled to help demolish segregation. He now considered desegregation as the necessary first step to racial progress and maintained that it could only be achieved by federal intervention. Sitting on the special three-man court in 1951 that heard Briggs v. Elliot (one of the four school desegregation cases finally decided by the Supreme Court in 1954), Waring argued passionately in dissent that segregation in public schools harmed blacks and was unconstitutional. "Segregation, " he underscored, "is per se inequality. " Waring retired in 1952 and moved to New York City, where he was a much-sought-after hero. On the night of May 17, 1954, Walter White, the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and a host of noted racial liberals held an impromptu party at Waring's apartment to celebrate the Brown v. Board of Education decision and honor the judge. He spent his remaining years in New York, lending his hand to many civil rights causes. Because Waring never questioned racial caste until his sixties, southern whites were perplexed by his transformation. Most interpreted his conversion as revenge for the hostile reaction encountered when he divorced his first wife in 1945. Actually, his change of heart was far more complex. Several factors were responsible: his appointment to the bench significantly altered his perspective on the law, and his marriage to a northern woman forced him to see the South through her shocked eyes. His new spouse introduced him to the writings of Wilbur J. Cash and Gunnar Myrdal, two severe critics of the South, and to many of her liberal northern friends. Waring also had a self-righteous streak that grew stronger with age. It was enhanced by the adulation he received from blacks and northern whites for his bold fight against Jim Crow. Furthermore, the timing of Waring's appointment to the court was crucial. It came when the race problem loomed large as a national issue. This forced him to deal with the matter. Addressing the issue with courage and dramatic fervor, he thrust himself into the limelight and into the nation's conscience at a crucial time in American race relations.
Quotations: "The cancer of segregation will never be cured by the sedative of gradualism. "
A handsome, genial six-footer, Waring enjoyed the life of an eligible bachelor for several years.
On October 30, 1913, he married Annie S. Gammell, a hometown belle from a well-established family; they had one child. He divorced his first wife in 1945 in order to marry Elizabeth Hoffman, a twice-divorced northerner.
