TCA and the courts

The Tuskegee Civic Association (TCA) became an important force for challenging unjust laws and practices with legal action - especially once the NAACP was outlawed in Alabama in 1956. Below are a few of the most important and influential court cases they shepherded through the legal system.

Pictured here is Attorney Fred D. Gray, Sr., who has represented the TCA, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others in important civil rights cases over the decades of his practice. In 2022, he received the Presidential Medal for Freedom for his work. (Alabama Department of Archives and History)

William P. Mitchell, the TCA’s executive secretary, was denied his voter registration by the Board of Registrars and decided to sue the Board (of whom Mrs. George C. Wright was a member) in federal district court, instead of local court. He was represented by Arthur Shores of Birmingham who was assisted by the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall. After a series of appeals, the U. S. Supreme Court opted not to hear the case and sent it back to the district court for retrial. That court ruled against Mitchell for lack of evidence. While he was preparing another appeal in late 1947, the Board of Registrars “remembered” they had certified him as a voter in 1943 and just forgot to notify him. This satisfied the court, and the case was dropped. 

In the aftermath of the Alabama State Legislature’s passage of a bill which gerrymandered all of Tuskegee’s Black voters out of its city limits, Black Macon County residents responded by “trading with their friends.” White merchants accused the TCA of violating Alabama’s 1921 Anti-Boycott law, and in July 1957, Attorney General John Patterson investigated the TCA and filed a bill of complaint in in Macon County’s circuit court seeking a temporary injunction against the TCA coercing people to boycott white merchants in Tuskegee. Attorneys Fred D. Gray and Arthur Shores represented the TCA. The Court filed the temporary injunction and the TCA filed a motion to dissolve it on 21 different grounds, including that is was misleading and vague, in violation of the U.S. and Alabama Constitutions, and in violation of freedom of the press. After the final hearing, the judge ruled that the State did not meet the necessary burden of proof to make its case, and that the Constitution protects freedom of speech and people’s freedom to trade with whomever they like. He ruled in TCA’s favor that the temporary injunction be dissolved. 

In August, 1957, the TCA retained Attorney Fred Gray to test the constitutionality of Alabama Act No. 140 - the state law which redrew the boundaries of Tuskegee to exclude Black voters and residents. The case was dismissed by District Court Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. on the grounds that the court did not have authority over municipal boundaries - regardless of the intention of the creation of those boundaries. The TCA appealed to the U.S. Fifth Court of Appeals arguing that the actions of Tuskegee’s current boundaries on the people of Tuskegee violated the 14th and 15th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The Court upheld the lower court’s decision. The United States Supreme Court heard the case October 18 and 19, 1960. On November 14, 1960, the Court returned a unanimous decision in favor of the TCA. This case was especially significant because typically federal courts, with support of the Supreme Court, tended to rule that matters that should be the jurisdiction of individual states were outside of the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction. The court reversed itself with this ruling. 

In 1959, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, working in cooperation with the TCA, filed suit against the State of Alabama and two former Macon County Registrars seeking a permanent injunction against racial discrimination in voter registration processes. This case ended up in front of the U.S. Supreme Court which sent it back to the district court and resulted in Judge Frank M. Johnson ruling in favor of the TCA and ordering a list of restrictions on Boards of Registrars forbidding them from acting in racially discriminatory ways in the fulfillment of their duties.

In 1963, the TCA with Attorney Fred Gray brought a class action on behalf of the parents of 16 high school students against the Macon County Board of Education seeking school integration. The case was decided in favor of the TCA and the parents. The Macon County Board of Education was ordered to open Tuskegee High School on a desegregated basis on Sept. 2, 1963, although Governor George Wallace had issued his own order that the school be opened a week later. The Governor sent 100 state troopers to bar the students’ entrance to the school on September 2. The state troopers surrounded the school, and when the bus with the Black students arrived, they turned it back. A week later, both Black and white students were able to attend classes at Tuskegee High School. Federal Judge Frank M. Johnson placed the Governor and the state troopers under a restraining order to keep them away from the school, and President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard to keep watch over the situation.

This suit brought against the Macon County Jury Commission in 1964 alleged that the jury selection in Macon County was discriminatory and that the names of only a very few registered Black voters were kept on the jury rolls of the county. The circuit court ruled that the jury commission had to act in accordance with Alabama State Law, and ensure that the jury roll for the county included every male over twenty-one years of age and under 65 who was of good character and judgement and not legally exempt from service. The Jury Commission failed to comply, and the TCA took the suit to federal district court. The court noted the Constitutional violations and discrimination in the practices of the Jury Commission and ruled that they be fixed. Rather than comply, the jury commission resigned. A newly appointed jury commission complied with the order. This case was important because it was one of the first civil cases targeting the systematic exclusion of Blacks from jury service, and it made “systematic inclusion on the basis of race where it results in only token representation… as much of a denial of Constitutional rights as is complete and systematic exclusion.” *

*Race Relations Law Reporter, Spring-Summer 1966, p. 428-435, as quoted in: Guzman, Jessie P. Crusade for Civic Democracy: The Story of the Tuskegee Civic Association, 1941-1970. Vantage Press: New York. 1984.