May 13, 1958 – Letter from Jackie Robinson to President Eisenhower Advocating for Civil Rights

Jackie Robinson famously broke the color barrier in major league baseball when, in 1947, he signed on to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The first African American to play in the major leagues in the 20th century, Robinson was the target of “torrents of abuse,” as Robinson described it in his autobiography. Nevertheless, Robinson, as a National Archives post observes, “answered the people he called “haters” with the perfect eloquence of a base hit. In 1949, his best year, Robinson was named the league’s Most Valuable Player, and in 1962 he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. He retired from the major leagues in 1956.”

After Robinson retired from playing, he continued to advocate for Black civil rights. From the Archives:

Every American President who held office between 1956 and 1972 received letters from Jackie Robinson expressing varying levels of rebuke for not going far enough to advance the cause of civil rights.”

Jackie Robinson and President Dwight Eisenhower in the Oval Office, 1957.
Photograph Courtesy of the Dwight Eisenhower Presidential Library

On this day in history, Robinson sent a letter to President Dwight Eisenhower, following a speech by Eisenhower to Black leaders in which he implored Blacks to have “patience.” Robinson’s excellent rejoinder, with sentiments later echoed by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (written April 16, 1963) is worth quoting in full:

My dear Mr. President:


I was sitting in the audience at the Summit Meeting of Negro Leaders yesterday when you said we must have patience. On hearing you say this, I felt like standing up and saying, “Oh no! Not again.”



I respectfully remind you sir, that we have been the most patient of all people. When you said we must have self-respect, I wondered how we could have self-respect and remain patient considering the treatment accorded us through the years.



17 million Negroes cannot do as you suggest and wait for the hearts of men to change. We want to enjoy now the rights that we feel we are entitled to as Americans. This we cannot do unless we pursue aggressively goals which all other Americans achieved over 150 years ago.



As the chief of executive of our nation, I respectfully suggest that you unwittingly crush the spirit of freedom in Negroes by constantly urging forbearance and give hope to those prosegregation leaders like Governor Faubus who would take from us even those freedoms we now enjoy. Your own experience with Governor Faubus is proof enough that forbearance and not eventual integration is the goal the pro-segregation leaders seek.



In my view, an unequivocal statement backed up by action such as you demonstrated you could take last fall in dealing with Governor Faubus if it became necessary, would let it be known that America is determined to provide – in the near future – for Negroes – the freedoms we are entitled to under the constitution.



Respectfully yours,

Jackie Robinson

May 10, 1886 – Supreme Court Decides Yick Wo v. Hopkins

In the landmark case of Yick Wo v. Hopkins (118 US 356, 1886), the Supreme Court unanimously struck down legislation designed to close Chinese-operated laundries in San Francisco. It was notable as the first case to employ the “equal protection” clause of the 14th Amendment, prohibiting states from denying any person equal protection of the law.

Yick Wo was a laundry owned by Lee Yick, a Chinese immigrant. In 1880 San Francisco passed legislation requiring all laundries in wooden buildings to get approval of the Board of Supervisors for a license. Although workers of Chinese descent operated 89 percent of the city’s laundries, every single Chinese laundry owner applying was denied a permit. Moreover, both Lee Yick and Wo Lee (whose appeal was also considered as part of this case) were arrested for refusing to pay a fine for operating without the permit, and they were imprisoned by the city’s sheriff, Peter Hopkins. (C-Span’s reporting of the case relates that Sheriff Hopkins was responsible for arresting over 150 Chinese persons for not meeting the board of approval’s laundry regulations.)

Yick and Lee each sued for a writ of habeas corpus, arguing the fine and discriminatory enforcement of the ordinance violated their rights under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The case made its way to the US Supreme Court after losing in the Supreme Court of California and the Circuit Court of the United States for the District of California. Those courts determined that the law as neutral on its face, thus denying claims for Wo and Lee.

When the case reached the US Supreme Court, Justice T. Stanley Matthews, writing for a unanimous Court, ruled that despite the impartial wording of the law, its biased enforcement violated the Equal Protection Clause.

Justice T. Stanley Matthews, Associate Justice 1881-1889

According to the Court, even if a law is impartial on its face, “if it is applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so as practically to make unjust and illegal discriminations between persons in similar circumstances, material to their rights, the denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the Constitution.” The kind of biased enforcement experienced by the plaintiffs, the Court concluded, amounted to “a practical denial by the State of that equal protection of the law” and therefore violated the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment.

It should also be noted that Matthews’ opinion added:

The fourteenth amendment to the constitution is not confined to the protection of citizens. It says: ‘Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.’ These provisions are universal in their application, to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction, without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality; and the equal protection of the laws is a pledge of the protection of equal laws.”

May 7, 1992 – Ratification of 27th Amendment

The 27th Amendment is short, reading:

No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.”

A congressional pay amendment was first proposed in 1789 as part of the group of amendments eventually comprising the Bill of Rights.

The move to establish a set and regulated congressional pay scheme was intended to ensure both that a pool of talented people from all economic backgrounds would serve as legislators and to reduce the potential for corruption that might result if legislators received compensation from other sources.

It was not ratified however, having been approved by only six states out of the eleven needed. It “lay dormant” until the 20th Century per the Constitution Annotated (a resource of the Library of Congress).

The Constitution Annotated site explains that in 1982, Gregory D. Watson, an undergraduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, argued in a paper for a political science class that the states could still adopt the amendment because Congress had not imposed a deadline on its ratification. Watson followed up his paper with a campaign to obtain the state legislatures’ ratification.

From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, more than 30 state legislatures ratified the amendment, responding to public opposition to congressional pay increases. The National Archivist proclaimed the amendment to have been ratified on May 7, 1992. Although the Constitution does not require Congress to confirm that an amendment has been ratified, the House and Senate each subsequently passed a concurrent resolution recognizing that the 27th Amendment had been adopted.

Gregory Watson, via NPR

For a more extensive analysis, see Teitel, Ruti, “The Sleeper Wakes: The History and Legacy of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment,” 61 Fordham L. Rev. 497 (1992), online here.

May 4, 1980 – Death of Josip Broz Tito, President of Yugoslavia

Josip Broz was born to a Croat father and Slovene mother in May 7, 1892. He was a Yugoslav communist revolutionary and politician who served in national leadership from 1943 until his death.

In 1920, Tito joined the Communist Party of the newly established Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and by 1937 had assumed de facto control over the party. He was formally elected its general secretary in 1939 and later its president, the title he held until his death.

Josip Broz Tito, 1961

During World War II, after the Nazi invasion of the area, he led the Yugoslav guerrilla movement, the Partisans (1941–1945).[5] By the end of the war, the Partisans – with backing of the Allies since mid-1943 – took power in Yugoslavia.

Tito was the only leader in Joseph Stalin’s lifetime to leave the Cominform, the co-ordination body of Marxist-Leninist communist parties in Europe during the early Cold War that was formed in part as a replacement of the Communist International. He established Yugoslavia as an idiosyncratic model of socialist self-management in which firms were managed through workers’ councils and all workers were entitled to an equal share of profits.

While autocratic, Tito supported a decentralized federation to keep ethnic tensions under control. A very powerful cult of personality was built around Tito, which was maintained even after his death on this day in history. Tito made strides in reducing illiteracy, expanded the average Yugoslavian’s access to consumer goods, permitted Yugoslav workers to go to western Europe as guest workers, and opened its borders to foreign visitors. But not everyone agrees that the Tito years were a halcyon period of human rights or reconciliation among ethic groups.

Map of Yugoslavia’s ethnic groupings, Ministry of Defense United Kingdom, 1990, Micahel Getler Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress

For example, Topics of Meta reports:

Washington Post foreign correspondent Dusko Doder, who emigrated to the U.S. from Yugoslavia in 1956, suggested that Yugoslavians — Croats and Serbs alike — fought off the Nazis, but they also spent most of the war killing each other. Although some 1,700,000 Yugoslavs died in the war, only about 300,000 were killed by Germans. The rest were victims of fratricidal warfare – among Tito’s Partisans, Draza Mihailovic’s Chetniks, Croatian fascists and others’.”

Ethnic tensions escalated after Tito’s death, especially when, twelve years later, communism collapsed in Eastern Europe and Yugoslavia dissolved. Misha Glenny, in The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-1999, (New York: Penguin, 1999), at p. 574 contends that Tito frequently pitted one ethnicity against another in an attempt to neutralize one or both of them, feeding ethnocentrism. Furthermore, in an effort to dilute Serbian political power, Tito took parts of Serbia and added them to Croatia and Bosnia. He also declared Kosovo an autonomous province despite its centrality to Serbian life, historically and religiously. Later on, former president of Serbia Slobodan Milošević built his nationalist appeal on the return of these regions. (Milošević was the president of Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. He led the Socialist Party of Serbia from its foundation in 1990 until his death in 2006.)

Tito became increasingly ill throughout 1979 with circulation problems and died on this day in history, three days short of his 88th birthday. His funeral attracted government leaders from 129 states. A 2010 poll found that as many as 81% of Serbs believe that life was better under Tito. Tito also ranked first in the “Greatest Croatian” poll which was conducted in 2003 by the Croatian weekly news magazine Nacional.

May 1, 2004 – Slovenia Becomes a Member of the European Union

Historically, as Wikipedia explains, the territory of Slovenia has been part of many different states: the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Carolingian Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Republic of Venice, the Illyrian Provinces of Napoleon’s First French Empire, the Austrian Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In October, 1918, the Slovenes co-founded the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs. In December 1918, they merged with the Kingdom of Serbia into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

In 1946, Yugoslavia became a socialist federation of six republics: Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia. At this time, it adopted the name Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY).

In 1992, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Macedonia seceded. (Serbia and Montenegro claimed to be, in combination, the successor state to the SFRY but were not recognized as such. The two countries eventually split up in 2006, with each declaring independence as sovereign states.)

Slovenia had officially declared independence from Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991, but the Yugoslav People’s Army was dispatched to Slovenia. A ten-day war followed, and on July 7, an agreement was signed implementing a truce. In December 1991 Slovenia adopted a new constitution. The EU recognized Slovenia on January 15, 1992, and the UN accepted it as a member on May 22, 1992.

On this date in history, Slovenia became the first former Yugoslav republic to join the European Union.

Today, Slovenia has one of the highest per capita GDPs in Central Europe, according to the CIA World Factbook. It currently has a female president, Natasa Pirc Musar, who was elected in November, 2022. (The constitution of Slovenia holds that the president is the highest representative of the state. In practice, the position is mostly ceremonial. The prime minister, the actual head of the government, is nominated by the President after consultation with the parties represented in the National Assembly. That person is then formally elected by a simple majority of the National Assembly.)

Natassa Pirc Musar

The currently serving president is Robert Golob, who assumed office in 2022. He obtained a PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Ljubljana in 1994. After his studies, he was a post-doctoral Fulbright scholar in the United States at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He leads the Freedom Movement, a social liberal political party in Slovenia.

Robert Golob in 2023 picture via Wikipedia

April 22, 1793 – George Washington Issues Proclamation of Neutrality

King Louis XVI of France was beheaded in January of 1793. Ten days later, France, already fighting Austria and Prussia, declared war on England, Holland, and Spain. Having helped America in her war of independence, France now felt entitled to reciprocation from the former colonies. To that end, France sent Edmond Charles Genêt, who called himself “Citizen Genêt” as minister to the United States, for the purpose of enlisting American assistance to the fullest extent possible.

Engraving of Edmond-Charles Genêt

Genêt’s mission, as recounted by Joel Richard Paul in Without Precedent: John Marshall and His Times, was to persuade the U.S. to help France liberate Canada, Louisiana, and Florida from rule by Britain and Spain. If the Americans refused to enter the war on France’s side, Genêt was instructed to “germinate the spirit of liberty” by instigating a popular uprising in favor of France. He had other assignments as well, all of which were designed to advance the position of France in the U.S. to the detriment of Britain.

Genêt launched an immediate campaign to realize his goals, taking assertive actions that amounted to “an astounding breach of diplomatic protocol and international law” (per Paul, p. 73).

President George Washington wanted the U.S. to remain neutral in the war between France and Britain, much to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson’s chagrin. Jefferson, besotted with France as well as its revolution, fiercely opposed neutrality. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, strongly supported it.

Jefferson had already been meeting secretly with Genêt, and was anxious for Genêt’s help to elect a republican majority in Congress in return for support for an alliance with France and a removal of tariffs on French imports. Paul writes:

Jefferson made clear that his enemies – the federalists [which included President George Washington], particularly Adams and Hamilton – were France’s enemies. . . . From these conversations, Genêt formed the misimpression that the president was irrelevant and that an appeal to Congress, or to the people directly, would be more effective.”

Genêt also confided his plans to arm regiments in South Carolina and Kentucky to attack Spanish holdings in Florida and Louisiana, and Jefferson helped put Genêt in touch with people who could help him.

Paul observes:

Jefferson’s relationship with the French envoy was ill-advised, probably illegal, and certainly disloyal to Washington.”

One of President Washington’s great fears was foreign entanglements, which he saw as inimical to the success of an American project in its infancy. Thus he resisted the attempt to draw the new United States into a European war, and on April 22, 1793, this day in history, he issued his Proclamation of Neutrality, declaring the U.S. a neutral nation in the conflict and threatening legal proceedings against any American providing assistance to the warring countries. Attorney General Edmund Randolph wrote the 293-word Proclamation for the president’s signature.

As a Mount Vernon history of the proclamation reports, it ignited a fire storm of criticism. Much of the American population, like Jefferson, sympathized with the cause of revolutionary France.

Republicans denounced the proclamation as exceeding the president’s constitutional powers. Using the pseudonym Pacificus, Alexander Hamilton wrote a series of essays in support of Washington’s authority to determine the country’s foreign relations. Jefferson, as was his usual modus operandi, remained silent in public while stealthily prodding his henchman James Madison to attack.

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson sent a letter to Madison, bemoaning the fact that nobody was taking exception to the writings of Pacificus:

Nobody answers him, and his doctrine will therefore be taken for confessed. For god’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies, and cut him to pieces in the face of the public. There is nobody else who can and will enter the lists with him.”

[When Jefferson himself was president, he of course would feel differently about presidential authority.]

The sniping over Genêt, Paul writes, would eventually lead to the spawning of two competing political parties. Madison (writing for Jefferson) and Hamilton (writing for Washington) provided each side of the growing partisan chasm between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans with powerful talking points.

The tide of public opinion finally shifted when Hamilton leaked to the press information about Genet’s attempts to act against President Washington and destroy the new union.

Congress responded by passing the Neutrality Act in 1794, giving Washington’s policy the force of law. The act marked an acknowledgment by the legislative branch that foreign policy resided largely in the constitutional domain of the executive. It made it illegal for a United States citizen to wage war against any country at peace with the United States. [The act, repealed and replaced several times while also being amended, is in force as 18 U.S.C. § 960.]

On July 7, 1798, during the Quasi-War crisis in the presidency of John Adams, Congress formerly annulled the twenty-year-old Treaty of Alliance with France.

April 19, 1832 – Birth of Lucretia Rudolph Garfield, Who Became First Lady of the US in 1881

Lucretia Rudolph was born on this day in Garrettsville, Ohio. She met her future husband, James Garfield, in 1849 at Geauga Seminary, a Free Will Baptist school in Chester Township, Geauga County, Ohio. [Free Will Baptist is a Baptist Christian denomination and group of people that believe in free grace, free salvation, and free will.]

As an article on her in PotusGeeks recounts, after Geauga, Lucretia attended the Ohio Hiram Eclectic Institute, a non-sectarian institution that her father had helped found. She studied French and took a rigorous classical course of study, continuing in Greek and Latin and widening her expertise in classical literature, British literature and French literature. She helped to organize a literary society which staged elocution, debate and oratorical presentations, often taking to the stage herself and defending the rights of women to do so at a time when many men considered it improper for women to so publicly present themselves. She also worked as editor and illustrator of “The Eclectic Star,” a school magazine.

Lucretia married James Garfield in 1858 and had seven children together. James, a lawyer and Civil War general, served nine terms in the US House of Representatives before being elected as US President.

James A. Garfield and Lucretia Rudolph was taken around the time of their engagement. (Western Reserve Historical Society)

PotusGeeks reports that the marriage had its problems from the start. Lucretia expressed to her husband:

. . . the tremendous degree of frustration and anger she felt towards him for his lack of passion towards her, and his frequent absences from home, her being left with the responsibility for his demanding mother and enduring the presence of one boarder, his admiring woman teacher and friend Almeda Booth. With his serving in the Union Army and as a member of Congress in Washington, she calculated that they had spent a total of six weeks together during their first six years of marriage. Garfield had a love affair with a New York woman, Lucia Calhoun which he later greatly regretted and confessed to his wife. After the death of their first child and more separation, James Garfield firmly committed himself to the marriage and it improved, aided by their mutual love of literature and the classics.”

Notably, in 1861, James wrote to her that he had the opportunity to meet Abraham Lincoln for the first time, when the president-elect stopped in Columbus on his train journey through the north before reaching Washington, D.C., for his March 4 inauguration. Garfield was favorably impressed by Lincoln, but not so much by his wife Mary, writing to Lucretia, “His wife is a stocky, sallow, pug-nosed plain lady, and I think has much of the primitiveness of western life. He stands higher, on the whole in my estimation than ever. She considerably lower.”

Lucretia, early feminist that she was, wrote back to her husband, “Don’t you think you were rather severe on poor Mrs. Lincoln? You were not called on to admire her beauty if she possess none of course, but must you place her lower in your estimation because she lacks it?”

In Washington, D.C. she went with her husband to meetings of a locally celebrated literary society. They read together, made social calls together, dined with each other, and traveled in company until by 1880 they were as nearly inseparable as his career permitted.

Lucretia Garfield

In the White House, she hosted dinners and twice-weekly receptions. More importantly, she advised her husband on whom to select as cabinet officers and her choice for Secretary of State, James Blaine, proved to be successful.

Lucretia had been convalescing from malaria at a seaside resort in New Jersey when her husband was shot by Charles Guiteau on July 2, 1881 at a railway station in Washington. The President was planning to take a train north to New Jersey that same day in order to meet his wife, before continuing on to a function at his former college in Massachusetts. The First Lady hurriedly returned to Washington by special train—”frail, fatigued, desperate,” reported an eyewitness at the White House, “but firm and quiet and full of purpose to save”. As her train raced south, it was speeding so fast that the engine broke a piston in Bowie, Maryland and nearly derailed. Lucretia Garfield was thrown from her seat, but not injured. After an anxious delay, she reached the White House and immediately went to her husband’s bedside.

Lucretia Garfield in 1920

One of the doctors hired to take care of President Garfield was a woman, Dr. Susan Edson. However, she was paid half the amount the men were being paid. Upon hearing about this discrepancy in pay, Lucretia wrote a letter expressing her outrage, using the word “discrimination” to express her fury. Dr Edson then received the same amount as the men.

During the three months that the President fought for his life, her grief and devotion won the respect and sympathy of the country. After his death and funeral, the bereaved family went home to their farm in northern Ohio. For another 36 years, she led a strictly private, but busy and comfortable life, active in preserving the records of her husband’s career. She created a wing to the home that became a presidential library of his papers.

She died at her winter home in South Pasadena, California on March 14, 1918, at the age of 85.Her casket was placed above ground beside the coffin of her husband in the lower level crypt of the James A. Garfield Memorial at Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio.

Thanks to the Library of Congress, you can read the full correspondence of James and Lucretia Garfield online in the James A. Garfield Papers, online here.

April 15, 1930 – Birth of Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, 1st Democratically Elected Female President in the World

Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, inaugurated as president of Iceland on August 1, 1980, was the first woman to be democratically elected president in any nation. She served for 16 years, also making her the longest- serving elected female head of state to date.

Vigdís Finnbogadóttir in September 1985

She was born at Reykjavík on this day in history, April 15, 1930. Vigdís studied French and French literature at the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne in Paris from 1949 to 1953, then studied the history of theater at the University of Copenhagen. She then acquired a BA in French and English, as well as a Professional Graduate Certificate in Education, at the University of Iceland. She married a physician in 1954, but divorced in 1963, and at the age of 41 she adopted a daughter, becoming the first single woman in Iceland to be allowed to adopt a child.

After graduation, Vigdís taught French and French drama at the university and worked with experimental theatre. She worked with the Reykjavík Theatre Company from 1954 to 1957 and again from 1961 to 1964. During the summers, she also worked as a tour guide.

She was the Artistic Director of the Reykjavík Theatre Company, later the Reykjavík City Theatre from 1972 to 1980. From 1976 to 1980, she was a member of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Affairs in the Nordic countries.

She got involved in politics as well. Vigdís participated in the 1960s and 1970s in numerous rallies held to protest against the U.S. military presence in Iceland (and in particular at Keflavík).

In 1996, she became founding chair of the Council of Women World Leaders at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Two years later she was appointed president of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology.

As reported by the Law Library of Congress, the role of the president in Iceland is different than that of the president of the United States and more ceremonial. Nevertheless, Finnbogadóttir certainly put Iceland on the map when she hosted the Reykjavik Summit where U.S. President Ronald Reagan met with Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, on October 11-12, 1986.

Some have argued, the Law Library writes, that her presidency contributed to more pro-women and family-friendly legislation. Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index for 11 years straight.

Since her presidential career ended, Finnbogadóttir has served as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for world languages. She is also a member of the Fondation Chirac’s honour committee, ever since the foundation was launched in 2008 by former French president Jacques Chirac in order to promote world peace.

April 10, 1869 – Congress Increased Number of Supreme Court Justices to Nine

Per the Constitution Annotated site compiled by the Library of Congress:

Congress first enacted legislation to structure the Supreme Court in the Judiciary Act of 1789. Under the 1789 act, the Court comprised one Chief Justice and five Associate Justices. Congress enacted legislation to change the size of the Court multiple times during the nineteenth century. In 1801, Congress reduced the size of the Court to five Justices. The 1801 statute did not eliminate an occupied seat on the Court; instead, it provided that the change would take effect ‘after the next vacancy’. Congress repealed the 1801 law before any vacancy occurred, leaving the size of the Court at six Justices.

. . .

At its largest, during the Civil War, the Court had ten Justices, with the addition of the tenth seat on the Court coinciding with the establishment of the Tenth Circuit. In 1866, Congress reduced the size of the Court to seven Justices, a change widely viewed as one of the Reconstruction Congress’s restrictions on President Andrew Johnson.”

The Judiciary Act of 1869 (41st Congress, Sess. 1, ch. 22, 16 Stat. 44), formally “An Act to amend the Judicial System of the United States” and sometimes called the Circuit Judges Act of 1869, increased the size of the Supreme Court to nine justices and established separate judgeships for the U.S. circuit courts, allotting each Supreme Court justice one of the nine circuits in which that justice had to attend at least one term in each of the circuit’s districts every two years. It also included the first provision allowing judges to retire without losing their salary.

In early 1869 there were eight men on the bench. As the History Channel online reports: “Congress routinely changed the number of justices to achieve its own partisan political goals, resulting in as few as five Supreme Court justices required by law under John Adams to as many as 10 under Abraham Lincoln.”

As the Federal Judicial Center (FJC) recounts:

The first version of the act [proposed by Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull] was approved by Congress at the close of the session in March 1869 but fell victim to a pocket veto from outgoing President Andrew Johnson. After the new Congress convened a day later, the Senate quickly reintroduced and passed the measure. The House of Representatives then amended the bill to permit the retirement of federal judges appointed during good behavior. Justices and judges who reached the age of seventy and had served at least ten years could retire and receive their current salary for the remainder of their lives.”

According to Stanley I. Kutler, writing for The Journal of Southern History, Vol 32, No 1 (Feb 1966) in “Reconstruction and the Supreme Court: The Numbers Game Reconsidered” (online here), “The increase of one Supreme Court member provoked absolutely no controversy, Republicans and Democrats alike conceding the need.”

The bill’s progress, however, bogged down in the Senate over the circuit-court reform. Apparently “partisan descendants of Jefferson” felt it was desirable for members of the Supreme Court to deal with people and law on the local level. Some senators also resisted the idea of expanding federal power with an increase of ten federal jurists.

Lyman Trumbull, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee 1861-1873

Trumbull argued however that the establishment of circuit judgeships was made necessary by the increased workload of the federal courts in the wake of the Civil War. The docket of the Supreme Court was two to three years behind schedule. The appointment of circuit judges would better enable the Supreme Court justices to focus on cases before the Court. Trumbull and his fellow Republicans also hoped that the appointment of circuit judges would provide a more uniform administration of federal justice, particularly in the South, where federal authority only recently had been reestablished.

In addition, by virtue of the act allowing all federal judges to retire with full salary after serving for at least 10 years, provided they had turned 70, it provided an incentive for older judges to leave their courts before their deaths. The salary of the circuit court judgeships created was set at $5,000 a year. In addition, the act stipulated that federal judges (including Supreme Court justices) who had served for ten years or more and who was at least 70 would receive a pension upon their retirement. ($5,000 in 1869 would be approximately $110,600 in 2023 dollars.)

April 5, 1856 – Birth of Booker T. Washington, “The Great Accommodator”

Booker T. Washington was born on April 5, 1856 near Hale’s Ford, Virginia on a tobacco plantation. He was born into slavery to Jane, an enslaved Black woman impregnated by a white man. He, his siblings, and mother gained freedom after the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Washington’s mother was a major influence on his schooling. Even though she couldn’t read herself, she bought her son spelling books so he could learn to read. She then enrolled him in an elementary school, where Booker took the last name of Washington because he found out that other children had more than one name. He worked with his mother and other free Blacks as a salt-packer and in a coal mine. He was hired as a houseboy for Viola Ruffner, whose husband owned the salt-furnace and coal mine. Booker’s diligence impressed Mrs. Ruffner, and she encouraged him to attend school. Soon he sought more education than was available in his community.

In 1872 at the age of sixteen, Washington enrolled at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, in Hampton, Virginia. Students with little income such as Washington could work at the school to pay their way. The normal school (teachers college) at Hampton was founded to train teachers and was chiefly funded by church groups and religious individuals. From 1878 to 1879 he attended Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., and returned to teach at Hampton. Soon, Hampton president Samuel C. Armstrong recommended Washington to become the first principal at Tuskegee Institute, a similar school being founded in Alabama. Such positions heading schools, even Black schools, had traditionally been held by whites. Booker T. Washington was 25 years old.

The new school opened on July 4, 1881, initially using space rented from a local church. The next year, Washington purchased a former plantation, which became the permanent site of the campus. Under his direction, his students literally built their own school: constructing classrooms, barns and outbuildings; growing their own crops and raising livestock, and providing for most of their own basic necessities. Both men and women had to learn trades as well as academics. The Tuskegee faculty utilized each of these activities to teach the students basic skills to take back to the mostly rural Black communities throughout the South. The school later grew to become the present-day Tuskegee University.

Tuskegee provided an academic education and instruction for teachers, but placed emphasis on providing Black males with practical skills, such as carpentry and masonry, which many would need for the rural lives most Blacks led in the South. The Institute illustrated Washington’s philosophy about his race. His theory was that by providing needed skills to society, African Americans would gain acceptance by white Americans. He believed that Blacks would eventually gain full participation in society by showing themselves to be responsible, reliable American citizens. Washington was head of the school until his death in 1915.

Washington gained national prominence in 1895, after a famous speech in Atlanta where he called for racial conciliation and urged Blacks to focus on economic self-advancement. The address would make him the central figure in American race relations for the next two decades.

His 1901 autobiography, Up From Slavery, was translated into seven languages. Washington, as the guest of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, was the first African-American ever invited to the White House. (This event caused such an uproar, however, that Roosevelt never repeated it.) Andrew Carnegie called him the second father of the country. Many of America’s other moneyed men, including John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, were admirers and major benefactors to the Tuskegee Institute. Harvard and Dartmouth gave him honorary degrees (in 1896 and 1901, respectively). Mark Twain and William Dean Howells sang his praises, the latter calling him “a public man second to no other American in importance.”

Late in his career, Washington was criticized by leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was formed in 1909. W.E.B. Du Bois especially favored a harder line on activism to achieve civil rights. He labeled Washington “the Great Accommodator,” arguing that political power was necessary to protect any economic gains. Washington’s response was that confrontation could lead to disaster for the outnumbered Blacks. He believed that cooperation with supportive whites was the only way in the long run to overcome pervasive racism. Nevertheless, Washington quietly contributed money for court challenges to the segregation and disfranchisement of Blacks. In his public role, he believed he could achieve more by skillful accommodation to the social realities of the age of segregation. Through his own personal experience, Washington knew that good education was a powerful tool for individuals to collectively accomplish that better future.

Washington’s reputation among Blacks grew tarnished again in the radical 1960’s. Appeasement was rejected in favor of confrontation. Even Martin Luther King, Jr.’s style was bitterly contested by more radical Black activists.

Washington was not as accommodating as he seems to modern eyes. During his lifetime, Washington was fighting an upsurge in white backlash against Reconstruction as well as a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Whites, particularly in the South, were opposed to giving Blacks educational opportunites, preferring that they had no options but to sign “contracts” that put them in virtual bondage to white employers. Booker T. Washington fought aggressively just to give Blacks the chance to learn. Furthermore, his efforts at fund-raising spurred philanthropic contributions to the construction of more schools throughout the South.

Washington did make some public protests against discrimination, writing in 1899, “I do not favour the Negro giving up anything which is fundamental and which has been guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States.”

On November 14, 1915, Washington died at the age of 59 from hypertension and arteriosclerosis. He was buried on the campus of Tuskegee University near the University Chapel. At his death Tuskegee’s endowment exceeded $1.5 million in 1915 dollars. His greatest life’s work, the work of education of Blacks in the South, was well underway and expanding.

Laboratory at Tuskegee Institute, 1902, Library of Congress

You can read Up From Slavery online here.