Time to dip once again into the mother lode of Federal Bureau of Investigation memos about William Rehnquist. The memos, released recently under the Freedom of Information Act, were written prior to the late jurist’s Senate confirmation as associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1971 and as chief justice in 1986. (For previous Rehnquist “Hot Documents” gleaned from the release, see here and here.)
Today’s memo (see below and on the following 11 pages) preceeded Rehnquist’s first Senate confirmation. It addressed the question of whether Rehnquist, who was then working in President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department, was a racist. That the issue even had to be raised gives you some sense of how abysmal Rehnquist’s civil rights record was.
On Page 5, leaders of the Arizona branch of the NAACP are described as having stated that Rehnquist “openly harrassed [text blocked out] and members of NAACP” during a peaceful protest against urban poverty, and that in a May 1969 speech in Newark, N.J. (two years after that city’s race riots), Rehnquist labelled such protesters “barbarians.” On Page 6, an NAACP leader recalls Rehnquist telling him that he opposed a bill before the Arizona legislature outlawing segregation in public accomodations on the grounds that it would infringe on private property rights. On Page 7, an NAACP leader recalls that during the 1964 presidential election, Rehnquist asked a group of blacks waiting to vote whether they could read something on a card in his hand; if they couldn’t, Rehnquist said they had to leave the line. (One month later, this last allegation would be debated fiercely in the Senate.) And so on. Denials by various “prominent judges” that Rehnquist is a racist follow on Pages 10 and 11.
Throughout the released version of the memo, the names of both Rehnquist’s accusers and his defenders have been blocked out. On Page 1 (below), however, Rep. Morris Udall, D-Ariz, a highly principled liberal, but from whose home state Rehnquist hailed, is listed along with several Republican U.S. senators for having given a “favorable” interview to the FBI about Rehnquist. Five years later, Udall would wage an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination on an equal rights platform.
