Associate Justice Antonin Scalia hosted about 26 students from the Thomas Jefferson High School in Alexandria ( Fairfax County),Virginia at the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday. C-Span organized the meeting as part of its “Students and Leaders” program with sitting Supreme Court Justices.
Susan Swain of C-Span explained that TJ, as the school is known, had just been named the top high school in the nation by U.S. News & World Report.
I was surprised the Trenton, N.J.-born Scalia, who grew up in Queens, New York, is 72 years old. I’d thought him to be in his 50s (probably because his age, for me, was fixed at around the time he came on the court). In any case, Scalia is a father of nine and has 28 grandchildren (the session must have seemed like a normal family gathering to him).
Scalia was discursive and trenchant, if it is possible to be both at the same time, explaining, for instance, why he’s against the Court’s proceedings being televised. He talked about his upbringing and his hopes and dreams growing up. Here’s a link to the full talk, if you have RealPlayer. The most important point he addressed, to me, was on Free Speech. But before we get to that, he opened on an interesting note:
“Most of our time, I understand, would be devoted to questions but the price of admission is that I’m permitted to say a few things that I want you to know. And most of them pertain to the Constitution. You know the American people used to have a degree of veneration for that document that seems to have disappeared in recent times.
“I once receive a letter from a lady in Indiana which enclosed a copy of a letter that one of her ancestors had written to his grandson who at that time was in Georgia . The letter enclosed a copy of the constitution. It was written in about 1840. And it said to the grandson:
“My dear young man, if you would commit this to memory and repeat it to me upon your return, I will pay you the sum of $5.”
That was a lot f money in those days, 1840. That’s the kind of importance that people of prior generation placed upon the document.”
He went on to discuss the Constitution, its importance to our society compared to some of the oldest democracies in Europe. It was an engaging, very informative hour. Scalia did not condescend to the students. He mentioned Lawrence v. Texas, the 6-3 landmark ruling that in 2003 struck down sodomy laws that had criminalized homosexual sex, a number of times in a tone that left no doubt the ruling still rankled him.
The last question then fell to a student whose name I did not quite catch (I listened several times and the best I could make it to be is Kenneth Lee):
“Justice Scalia, how do you define Free Speech and has your definition evolved over time and does it have the capacity to evolve?” he asked:
Scalia:
Well, now it can evolve. I guess I have the capacity to admit that I made a mistake because what I look for is what was, what was considered . . . You know, the First Amendment does not guarantee Free Speech. It says: “Congress shall make no law abridging the Freedom of Speech . . .”
He seemed flustered at first but, now relishing the question, plowed on:
Ha, the definite article. What freedom of speech? That freedom of speech that was the right of Englishmen in 1791. So, I look back there and I say, you know, it doesn’t mean absolute any freedom of speech. In 1791 you couldn’t give information about troop movements to the enemy. That was treason. That speech was not permitted. You could not libel people. You would be punished in court for libeling people.
So, it was the freedom of speech that was the tradition of the Anglo Saxon law. And, no, my view on that doesn’t change because I’m not an evolutionist. I don’t believe in a ‘living Constitution’ (a well trod ground during the hour the students spent with him).
But, you know, you ought to be happy about that because I was the fifth vote, you may or may not know, in the case that held it was unconstitutional to prohibit the burning of an American Flag.
Now, in my social views, which I don’t apply from the bench, I’m a fairly conservative fella, to tell you the truth, and I don’t like people who burn the American flag and, if I were king, I would put them in jail. But I am not King and I am bound by First Amendment and my understanding of it is it gives you the right to criticize, to criticize severely, the country, the Court, the flag, and burning the flag is just a matter of communication. It’s a symbol. Just as language is a symbol. I mean, there is no communication that isn’t symbolic, right. I mean, these noises I’m making symbolize ideas.
And, when you read a paper, the markings on the paper symbolize sounds which in turn symbolize ideas. Burning a flag symbolize an idea. So, that was why I was the fifth vote and you ought to be happy about that because once I find what’s in the first Amendment, you got me. I can’t do what I would like to do.
The lesson I leave you with is, how are you going to control the judges who don’t believe in the original meaning, but who think the Constitution morphs and it means whatever it ought to mean today? You know what, they’re going to find that it ought to mean what they think it should mean, which is to say you don’t have much control over the judges.
Technorati Tags: Alexandria, Va., C-Span, Lawrence v. Texas, Queens, N.Y., Scalia, Sodomy, Thomas Jefferson High School, Trenton, N.J., U.S. Supreme Court
Sunday, April 5, 1998
Children were raising innocent voices in freedom songs in church basements as adults braved firebombs, water hoses, dogs and jails for full rights as American citizens.
As a 5-year-old, Suzan Johnson joined the other children singing at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. Now 41, the Rev. Suzan Johnson Cook is pastor of the Bronx Christian Fellowship Baptist Church and a
member of President Clinton’s race-relations panel.
“Those were the wonder years for us,” say Johnson Cook, whose mother taught public school in Harlem for 22 years and whose father was one of the city’s first black trolley car drivers. “I remember the energy of our
community, as if we were all moving as one wave, not waves clashing against each other. We had a common purpose, a common cause, and we worked toward making it happen. And there hasn’t been in my lifetime
another movement like that. It was a spiritual movement.”
Virginia Fields was 17 in 1963 when a bomb exploded in Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, while she was worshiping there. She was primed for activism when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. came through town months later for his first march on Birmingham.
Fields, 52, now Manhattan borough president, was swept up in the mass arrest that ended the march and spent five days in the Birmingham City Jail, where King wrote his now-famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
“We all believed so much in his leadership,” she said. “We felt that he was going in the right direction, and after so many earlier attempt to desegregate the schools and the lunch counters had failed. With his leadership and his mass action, we just felt a renewed sense of excitement, of energy.”
African-Americans had endured the horrors of some 300 years of slavery to arrive at the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 free, but with few rights of citizenship. But by the end of World War II, black patriots returned from their service with the sense of a rightful place at the table as members of the American family.
In the years that followed, a migration of blacks from the rural South to the cities gave birth to a sizable black middle class—and the civil rights movement.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, established in 1909, attracted funding from new members made up largely of educated blacks in the North. Many of these included young lawyers who, through the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, methodically waged court challenges that clarified and expanded the rights of African-Americans.
In one such case, the 1954 Supreme Court allowed Linda Brown to attend Summer Elementary School, an all-white school near her home in Topeka, Kan., paving the way for desegregated schools and many of the civil rights gains to come.
Resistance in the South to the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling would propel the fledgling civil rights movement in its struggle to bring down many of the barriers to black participation in American life.
The battle gave the nation generations of African-American leaders, including King, who as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference would go on to captivate America and the world.
Percy Sutton, who in 1966 had been elected Manhattan borough president, marched with King a week before he was killed.
“He was a quiet and effective revolutionary in bringing about changes in the human condition here in America,” Sutton said.
Julian Bond and the group he co-founded, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, joined other young people from the SCLC, the Congress of Racial Equality and the NAACP to stage sit-ins, boycotts,
marches and freedom rides to test the enforcement of desegregation. Weeks ago, Bond was elected chairman of the NAACP.
Bond said he is old enough to know that things are better now, but he also admits, “There are some indices of black life in America that are abysmal.”
Sutton said the battle to solve current problems of black life would have to be waged without a towering figure like King.
“Dr. King was the last of the singular civil rights leaders.” Sutton said. “The day of the singular leader is gone.”
“Now in every city, or every town there is a man or a woman who stands up for the rights of minorities who is that leader in that town in that factory, in that bus line, in that community. They are all leaders,” Sutton said.
Johnson Cook carries on the struggle in her work in the church, in her community and especially on the President’s race-relations panel.
“What I’ve seen in the two short years I’ve been here (in the Bronx) is a complete transformation of a people who are reclaiming our sense of community that we all learned as kids but lost,” she said.
Johnson Cook said the discussion on race has also changed from the time of the civil rights movement, when the issue was largely getting social justice for black Americans. Today, 33 years of immigration have changed the face of America.
“We are always wrestling with the issue of whether we should forget the black-white struggle and move on to the diversity question,” Johnson Cook said.
She said the chapter is not closed yet on that struggle because blacks are still fighting for justice in this society. At the same time, other minorities have their voices in the debate now, she said.
“The question we are asking is, ‘Can we be one America in the 21st century?’ And the strong implication in that question is that, in many ways, we are not,” Johnson Cook said.