Gibson/Papenfuse
Race and the Law in Maryland

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Gibson/Papenfuse
Race and the Law in Maryland

Image No: 150   Enlarge and print image (72K)            << PREVIOUS   NEXT >>

days - even if we had the right to substitute our own ideas of what the Fourteenth Amendment ought to be for what it was written and adopted to achieve.177 Justice Black saw little relevance in the history recited by Justice Goldberg. "[T]he argument is shown to rest entirely on what speakers are said to have believed bills and statutes of the time were meant to do. Such proof fails entirely when the question is, not what statutes did, but rather what the Constitution does."178 He reacted strongly to Goldberg's comments on constitutional interpretation. "Confining ourselves to our constitutional duty to construe, not to rewrite or amend, the Constitution, we believe that Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment does not bar Maryland from enforcing its trespass laws so long as it does so with impartiality."179 On remand, the Court of Appeals of Maryland upheld Bell's conviction on October 22, 1964, stating that a state savings clause statute applied to sustain the application of the trespass law to conduct that occurred prior to the change in law. Judge Oppenheimer dissented from the construction of the statute. A petition for a rehearing was filed on November 23. It was granted on December 7. The judgments of conviction were then reversed without opinion on April 9, 1965.180 The Supreme Court had also remanded the decision in the Baltimore County arrests for disorderly conduct in light of its decisions in Griffin and Bell.181 The Maryland Court of Appeals noted that there was no evidence that the park security guard in Baltimore County had any authority from the state, and the arrests were made by policemen having no connection with the park. It concluded that Griffin was inapplicable. Similarly, the Court pointed out that the new state statutes did not cover amusement parks, so the issue in Bell was irrelevant. It then reinstated the judgments, despite a dissent from Judge Oppenheimer who urged a remand for taking additional testimony on the legal status of the park guard.182 An appeal to the Supreme Court was dismissed for want of jurisdiction and the petition for a writ of certiorari was denied. In 1964 Congress enacted a federal public accommodations act which did not have the exemptions and exceptions that plagued the Maryland law. Congress also enacted a law prohibiting discrimination in employment in 1964, a new voting rights law in 1965 and a statute prohibiting discrimination in housing in 1968. The national legislation generally gave state anti- discrimination agencies an important enforcement role, but the national law was structured to induce states to enact state anti-discrimination laws closely following the federal model. As a result, many of the issues on the role of law in racial issues became matters of federal statutory interpretation.183 V. Race and Education in Maryland After the decision in Brown, it was necessary for students in particular schools to bring individual suits to desegregate the school system. Under such pressure, the school system could permit the plaintiffs to attend the school of their choice and destroy individual standing. Even class actions required enormous effort with little reward, and progress toward the realization of 148