“It is time for South Carolina to rejoin the Union.”
Judge Waring, 1947 ruling in Elmore v. Rice
Julius Waties Waring was born in 1880 in Charleston, South Carolina, to a prominent white family, including a father who was the superintendent of education of Charleston County Schools. He attended the College of Charleston and read law before passing the bar and practicing in the city. He married Annie Gammell in 1913 and they had one child.
Waring worked in a number of positions, including city attorney and assistant U.S. attorney for South Carolina’s eastern district. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated him as a judge for the United States Court for the Eastern District of South Carolina, the federal court in Charleston. After serving for a few years and generally upholding the interest of white Charlestonians, Judge Waring’s outlook shifted around 1944. Over the next few years, he issued rulings in favor of Black teachers who were paid less than whites, pushed the state to provide law school opportunities for Black students, and ended the all-white Democratic primary in the state. He also divorced his wife and married Elizabeth Hoffman, a woman from Detroit.
After Judge Waring ended the white primary and his wife expressed support for interracial marriage, South Carolinians called for his impeachment. In March 1950, while the Warings were in New York, someone set a small cross on fire outside their Charleston home. Although the initials “KKK” were scratched onto its base, local police called it a prank. That October, after the Warings had returned, someone threw bricks and stones at their home. No suspects were identified.
Courtesy of Joseph A. De Laine Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina
When the Clarendon County case came before Judge Waring, he encouraged Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP to change the focus of the case to something broader: instead of pushing for equal schools, they should challenge school segregation itself. The NAACP was already considering such a change and, with Waring’s support, they refiled the case to argue that separate schools were unequal and unconstitutional. The case went in front of a three-judge panel: J. Waties Waring, John J. Parker, and George Bell Timmerman. Parker and Timmerman ruled in favor of Clarendon County, deciding that they needed to equalize the schools but not to integrate them. In his dissenting opinion, Waring argued that “segregation is per se inequality.” The case could now be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1952, Judge Waring retired and moved to New York where he and his wife remained active in civil rights issues. He died in 1968.
Dissenting Opinion by Judge Waring
