The Alarmingly Racist History of the Supreme Court’s Canceled 1947 Christmas Party
The Court held its first-ever office Christmas party in 1946. The following year, the clerks suggested inviting Black employees. It did not go over well.
The end of the year is nearly upon us, which means it is time for millions of people to endure what has become a staple of the American workplace: the office holiday party. I extend my preemptive condolences to everyone who will soon find out the hard way which of their colleagues are predisposed to overindulging in peppermint schnapps.
Somehow, all of these events will be less excruciating than the Supreme Court’s attempt in 1947 to host what would have been its second-ever office Christmas party. In 1946, the Court’s first-ever Christmas party was segregated, open only to white employees. The following year, however, the clerks had the temerity to ask that the Court’s messengers, who were Black, be invited to celebrate along with everyone else.
This suggestion did not go over well. From PBS News:
The court’s secretaries, who hosted the Christmas party the year before with the law clerks, balked at the clerks’ request for a building-wide party that would include the court’s messengers, who were African American, according to an entry in the book, “From the Diaries of Felix Frankfurter,” published in 1974 by Joseph Lash. The secretaries refused to participate, and the court’s marshal, unless ordered by the chief justice, declined to authorize a room for the party if the messengers were invited.
Chief Justice Fred Vinson called his colleagues into conference to solicit their views.
In a 2014 article in the legal journal The Green Bag, the law professor Ross Davies recounted the drama that followed: Vinson and Justices Hugo Black and Stanley Reed were willing to greenlight an integrated party, but Justice Robert Jackson was skeptical of allowing the clerks to use the event to, in his words, “make a demonstration” regarding one of the “great social conflicts in the country.” Apparently determined to combine multiple problematic arguments into a single objection, Jackson also told his colleagues that he was wary of requiring “the girls” to participate in “the kind of party that the boys have insisted upon.”
Along with Justice Felix Frankfurter, Jackson thus proposed to resolve the conflict by not allowing any holiday parties at the Court, other than those hosted by individual justices. After “deliberating at some length and with some heat,” Davies wrote, the justices voted down the Jackson-Frankfurter proposal, but apparently did not want to go forward with the clerks’ proposal, either. As a result, instead of throwing a desegregated office-wide Christmas party in 1947, the Court did not throw an office-wide Christmas party at all. (In retrospect, the Court’s willingness a quarter-century later in Palmer v. Thompson to allow cities to shut down public swimming pools rather than allow Black people to use them makes a lot more sense.)
For the next decade or so, the holiday season at the Court proceeded mostly in this manner: small parties hosted in the chambers of justices who assembled their guest lists as they saw fit. Even Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 decision in which the Court (including Jackson and Frankfurter) voted unanimously to strike down school segregation as unconstitutional, did not prompt the justices to extend the same basic principle to their own workplace’s events calendar.
Not until 1959 did the Court’s in-house newsletter announce a Christmas party open “for the first time” to “all employees everywhere in the Building.” The New York Times included a jovial little note on the subject, writing that the Court was “one of the last institutions holding out” on the office Christmas party trend, but had “succumbed” to the pressure to host one at last.
It’s not clear what prompted the change, but as Davies points out, keeping the Court’s aborted attempts to host an integrated Christmas party out of the Times was a huge public relations victory for the Court’s then-press officer, Bert Whittington—whom, incidentally, the Times credited with planning that “pleasant but sober affair” in 1959. Given that the Warren Court was, at the time, on the front lines of dismantling segregation in the United States, the revelation that the justices themselves had not yet mustered the courage to sing Christmas carols and share light refreshments with Black employees would have been pretty embarrassing stuff.
As always, you can find everything we publish at ballsandstrikes.org, or follow us on Bluesky at @ballsandstrikes.org. You can get in touch by emailing us at contact@ballsandstrikes.org. Thanks for reading. We’ll be taking some time for the holidays, but will be back in January to write more about people who make us upset.
This Week In Balls & Strikes
How Trump Is Making the Federal Judiciary Younger, Whiter, and More Republican, JP Collins
Trump’s first year of second-term judicial nominations could have been worse. It is still very bad.
Amul Thapar Desperately Wants to Be a Trump Supreme Court Justice, Madiba Dennie
How do ambitious appeals court judges get the White House to notice them? Invent a new legal theory that just so happens to align with Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.
Trump Judicial Nominee Has Some Complicated Thoughts About Disabled People Getting Married, Jay Willis
Justin Olson was asked to explain his 2015 suggestion that disabled people might be incapable of “the robust marriage that we’re called to.” He did not do a good job.
How the Trump Administration Is Quietly Resegregating the American Workforce, Madiba Dennie
The administration is unveiling new policies that together make it harder for people of color to challenge illegal discrimination at work.
Immigration Court Is a Sham, Rachel Wilson
From the “judges” deciding cases to the “rules” of evidence and procedure, every aspect of immigration court is stacked against the people caught up in it.
How the Supreme Court Warps This “Bedrock Principle” of Election Law to Help Republicans Win, Steve Kennedy
Part of the reason Republican lawmakers are so brazenly gerrymandering their states is that they know the Republican justices will have their backs.
This Week In Other Stuff We Appreciated
100 Days of Kavanaugh Stops and the Justices Who Silently Allowed Them—and a Bill to Change That, Chris Geidner, Law Dork
“In Law Dork’s email requests, Kavanaugh was asked whether he still thinks he was correct when he wrote that U.S. citizens questioned by immigration authorities would ‘promptly’ be able to go free after making clear their legal status. He has not responded to the requests.”
The Supreme Court’s Shadowy Plan to Subvert Democracy, Elie Mystal, The Nation
“We are now being governed by the whims of six people who don’t have to explain themselves and can never be voted out of their positions of power.”
This Week In Obscure Photos of Supreme Court Justices On Getty Images
Why would you even have a Christmas Party. Separation of church and state lost? At my school and Town library, we do not have religious decorations or parties. We do have seasonal decorations and lights in winter.