Hon. Julius Waties Waring

Julius Waties Waring (July 27, 1880 – January 11, 1968) was a United States federal judge who played an important role in the early legal battles of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Biographical notes

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Waties_Waring

Waring was born in Charleston, South Carolina, to Edward Perry Waring and Anna Thomasine Waties. He graduated second in his class with an A.B. from College of Charleston in 1900. He married his first wife, Annie Gammel, in 1913. Their only daughter was Anne Waring Warren, who died without children. The couple moved into a house at 61 Meeting St. in 1915. Waring became an assistant United States attorney and then lead counsel of the City of Charleston in 1930 under Mayor Burnet R. Maybank. Later, Waring founded a law firm with D.A. Brockington.

He served as a Federal Judge assigned to the US District Court in Charleston, South Carolina, from 1942 to 1952 and heard several pivotal civil rights cases. He had been nominated to the bench by President Franklin Roosevelt and was initially supported by the establishment of Charleston. After divorcing his first wife and marrying the Northern socialite Elizabeth Avery, Judge Waring quickly transitioned from a racial moderate to a proponent of radical change. Speaking at a Harlem church, he proclaimed: "The cancer of segregation will never be cured by the sedative of gradualism." Political, editorial and social leaders in South Carolina criticized and shunned Judge Waring and his wife to the point where, in 1952, he assumed senior status, left Charleston altogether, and moved to New York, where he died in office in 1968 at the age of 87. He is buried in the Waring family plot at Magnolia Cemetery in Charleston.

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https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/waring-julius-waties/

Jurist. Waring was born in Charleston on July 27, 1880, the son of Edward Perry Waring, Charleston County superintendent of education, and Anna Thomasine Waties. Following primary and secondary schooling at Charleston’s private University School and an undergraduate education at the College of Charleston, he read law with the trial attorney J. P. Kennedy Bryan, a friend of his father. Waring passed the bar and began law practice in his native city. On October 30, 1913, Waring married Annie Gammell, a well-connected woman a year his senior. Two years later they moved into Annie Waring’s house at 61 Meeting Street in the elite section of Charleston south of Broad Street. The marriage produced one daughter.

Waring’s involvement in Democratic politics earned him an appointment in 1914 as assistant U.S. attorney for South Carolina’s eastern district, a post he held for the balance of the Woodrow Wilson administration. He then formed a law partnership with David A. Brockinton, which thrived in the 1920s but fell on relatively hard times during the Depression. Following the election of his political ally Burnet Rhett Maybank as Charleston’s mayor in 1931, Waring won appointment as corporation counsel, or city attorney.

In that position, Waring continued to maintain close political ties with Maybank, U.S. senator Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith, and other powerful Democratic politicians. In late 1941, when the U.S. district judgeship became vacant in Charleston, Maybank, by now a U.S. senator, helped to engineer President Franklin Roosevelt’s nomination of Waring for the position. “Cotton Ed” also supported Waring, and on January 20, 1942, the Senate confirmed the choice without objection.

Waring’s first two years as judge of the federal district court for South Carolina’s eastern district were largely uneventful. In 1944, however, he began handing down decisions equalizing the salaries of black and white teachers, ordering the state to desegregate its law school or create an equal facility for blacks, and rebuffing South Carolina’s efforts to salvage its all-white Democratic primary. The judge’s rulings angered white South Carolinians. In addition, his 1945 divorce from his wife of more than thirty years, followed almost immediately by his marriage to Elizabeth Hoffman, a twice-divorced northern matron, enraged his family and former friends.

Waring later attributed what he called his growing “passion for justice” to his new wife’s liberalizing influence and the increased awareness of southern racism he acquired on the federal bench. But white Charlestonians, including his nephew Tom, the editor of the Charleston News and Courier, contended that the judge was simply seeking revenge against a society that had refused to accept his divorce and second wife.

Whatever Waring’s motivation, he and Elizabeth broke completely with his segregationist past. They entertained prominent blacks in the Meeting Street house the judge had purchased from Annie Waring, spoke to African American and racially mixed audiences in Charleston and throughout the nation, and scorned the “decadence” of the white southern “slavocracy.” Unabashed racists were not the only targets of their wrath. Most southern liberals favored improvement in the economic conditions of blacks as a prelude to desegregation. Such “gradualists,” the Warings charged, were even worse than avowed segregationists. When two members of a three-judge district court, in Briggs v. Elliott (1951), rejected a challenge to South Carolina’s segregated public schools, Judge Waring registered a vehement dissent, declaring, several years before the Supreme Court’s Brown ruling, that segregation was “per se inequality.”

Well before his Briggs dissent, the Warings had become pariahs in his native state. Responding to petitions from thousands of constituents, L. Mendel Rivers and other members of South Carolina’s congressional delegation campaigned unsuccessfully for the judge’s impeachment. A cross was burned on their lawn and their house stoned in incidents that white Charlestonians attributed to teenage pranksters but that the judge and Elizabeth–taunted as the “witch of Meeting Street” by locals–declared to be the work of the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1952 Judge Waring–eligible for retirement at full pay and increasingly disenchanted at the prospects for southern racial reform–retired from the bench, and he and Elizabeth departed Charleston for a life of “exile” in New York City. There they enjoyed for a time the adulation denied them by most white South Carolinians and were active in a variety of civil rights efforts. But they also remained contemptuous of the fainthearted in such struggles.

Judge Waring died on January 11, 1968. Elizabeth died in late October of that year. His body was returned to Charleston for burial, which was attended by more than two hundred blacks but fewer than a dozen whites. But time and politics healed wounds and blurred memories. White politicians began vying for black votes, and some of the Warings’ African American friends became active in the community’s civic affairs. In 1981 a sculpture honoring Judge Waring’s memory was placed in the city council chamber, overlooking the federal courthouse in which he had once presided.

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From Law.sc.edu. (2017). The Honorable Julius Waties Waring (1880–1968) : Memory Hold The Door : School of Law | University of South Carolina. [online] Available at: http://www.law.sc.edu/memory/2004/waringjw.shtml [Accessed 17 Jan. 2017].

The Honorable Julius Waties Waring (1880–1968)

Julius Waties Waring was born on July 27, 1880 to Edward Perry Waring and Anna Thomasine Waties. He graduated from the College of Charleston with honors, second in his class in 1900. He read law in the offices of J.P. Kennedy Bryan in Charleston and passed the South Carolina Bar Examination in 1902.

Judge Waring began practicing law in 1902 in the offices of J.P. Kennedy Bryan in Charleston. He then practiced on his own until 1914 when he became partner with Von Kolnitz and Waring. He was Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of South Carolina, practiced in the firm of Waring and Brockinton, was City Attorney for Charleston, and later became the United States District Judge for the Eastern District of South Carolina until 1952.

The highlight of Judge Waring’s public service career was writing a dissenting opinion as part of a three Federal Judge panel reviewing Briggs vs. Elliott, et al. (Clarendon County Board of Education) in which Thurgood Marshall, later a U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice, represented the NAACP and Robert McFigg, later the Dean of the University of South Carolina School of Law, represented the School Board; the case was heard with four others by the U.S. Supreme Court, and is known by the name of the first case, Brown vs. Board of Education in which the Supreme Court adopted Judge Waring’s words “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”

He was a member of St. George’s Society, St. Cecilia Society, Charleston Club, The South Carolina Society, St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, National Urban League, and Captain of Charleston Light Dragoons.

Judge Waring was married to Elizabeth Avery Waring, who also died in 1968. He had one child from his first marriage, Anne Waring Warren, who died without children. His collateral survivors include: Mary Randolph Waring Berretta (great–niece), Mrs. Ann Hyde (step–daughter), Katherine B. Salmons (great great–niece), Richard Waring Salmons (great great–nephew), Bradish J. Waring, Esq. (cousin), Charles W. Waring, Jr. (great–nephew), and Thomas Waring, Esq. (great–nephew).

From http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/04/10/301432659/how-the...

How The Son Of A Confederate Soldier Became A Civil Rights Hero

U.S. District Judge J. Waties Waring was the son of a Confederate soldier but later became a hero of the civil rights movement — though he was vilified for his views. On Friday — more than 60 years after Waring was one of the first in the Deep South to declare that forced segregation was unconstitutional — Charleston, S.C., will honor him with a life-sized statue.

Waring was first appointed to the bench in 1942. Nine years later, in a landmark school segregation case Briggs v. Elliott, Waring denounced segregation as an "evil that must be eradicated."

In a forceful dissent, he wrote that segregation was "per se inequality." This made him the first federal judge to take that position on "separate but equal" since Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. His dissent helped pave the way for the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954.

U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel, who today presides in the same courtroom where Waring sat more than a half century ago, has done exhaustive research into Waring's life and career, poring over the rich trove of personal papers that Waring left behind.

Gergel has struggled to understand how a man who grew up in a family devoted to the "Lost Cause" of the Confederacy could come to embrace such divergent views on civil rights.

"I think when he took office in January 1942, the last person who would have guessed that he would be a great civil rights warrior and leader would have been J. Waties Waring," Gergel said in an interview with All Things Considered host Melissa Block. "It was the furthest concept from his experience in his first 61 years of life."

Gergel has come to believe that Waring's views evolved as a result of his time on the bench, that the weight of responsibility he assumed as a federal judge changed him. He points to a number of cases Waring presided over before Briggs.

A 1944 case involved an African-American teacher who sought equal pay with white teachers, who were paid a third more than blacks. Until then, no black plaintiff had ever won a civil rights case in a federal district court in the Deep South. In court, Judge Waring pressed a school board lawyer about the inequities, citing an earlier court decision that had already found race-based pay scales unconstitutional.

No one was more shocked than the plaintiff's lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, who would later describe the case as "the only [one] I ever tried with my mouth hanging open half the time."

In 1947, Waring presided over a voting rights case that challenged the South Carolina Democratic Party's prohibition on black participation. Waring ruled that the Democratic Party was not a private club and therefore not exempt from 14th Amendment. In his ruling, he stated that it was time for South Carolina to rejoin the Union and "adopt the American way of conducting elections."

That decision was the catalyst for attacks on Judge Waring so intense that he required 24-hour security. Crosses were burned in his yard. Rocks were thrown through his windows. Waring was alienated from most of white Charleston. A local magazine described him as the lonesomest man in town. ....

From "Love Stories". Charleston SC - Charleston Magazine, 2010, http://www.charlestonmag.com/charleston_magazine/feature/love_stories

Love Stories

When J. Waties Waring, a federal judge with strong ties to secessionist politics, met Detroit native Elizabeth Avery Hoffman in 1943, it was unthinkable that they would fall in love, divorce their spouses, and eventually help pave the way for America’s civil rights movement. But the couple did just that, relinquishing social standing and personal safety for the advancement of racial equality. ....

Waties died in January 1968, Elizabeth following him just nine months later. Both were buried in Magnolia Cemetery, but not in the Waring family plot. His funeral was attended by 200 African Americans who paid homage to his achievements on behalf of racial equality. After his death, his daughter planted a magnolia sapling by his grave, but vandals uprooted the tree and cast it aside. Only nine people came to Elizabeth’s service.

From Find A Grave Memorial - SmartCopy: Jan 16 2017, 23:21:12 UTC

United States Federal Judge. Waring attended the Charleston County schools and graduated from the College of Charleston in 1900, ranking second in his class. He passed the bar exam in 1902 and began his law practice the same year. He practiced law in Charleston through 1942 including a term as Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of South Carolina. On December 18, 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated Waring to serve as a federal judge of the United States District Court of the Eastern District of South Carolina. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on January 20, 1942, and received his commission on January 23, 1942. He served as chief judge from 1948 to 1952 and assumed senior status on February 15, 1952. As chief, Waring ended segregated seating in his courtroom and chose a black bailiff. His most memorable case was being a part of a panel of three Federal Judges reviewing Briggs vs Elliott filed in Clarendon County, South Carolina. Briggs vs. Elliott would later be consolidated with Brown vs. Board of Education. Thurgood Marshall, later a U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice, represented the NAACP and Robert McFigg, later the Dean of the University of South Carolina School of Law, represented the School Board. Though the NAACP lost the case two to one, Waring was the dissenter claiming "Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," which was later adopted by the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court to reverse the lower court's ruling. The decision was an enormous victory for the civil rights movement and Waring's support was paramount to the ultimate decision in their favor.

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From Waring, P. & Waring, P. (2017). Charleston Mercury - Perspective on Judge J. Waties Waring. Charlestonmercury.com. Retrieved 17 January 2017, from http://www.charlestonmercury.com/index.php/en/history/240-perspecti...

Scandal on Meeting Street (61 Meeting Street)

Number 61 Meeting Street, located diagonally south of the South Carolina Hall, is the converted stable of the Bradford-Horry house. For many years this attractive, unassuming stucco home was the residence of Federal Judge Julius Waties Waring.

Judge Waring had impeccable social and professional credentials. He was a member of one of Charleston’s finest families. Born in 1880, he was the son of Edward Perry Waring, a veteran of the War Between the States, having marched southward as a Citadel cadet to defend Charleston from Sherman’s army. A quiet man who paid attention to detail, Waring served as attorney for the City of Charleston and handled himself well. He had the reputation as a local kingmaker, as he was chairman of the Charleston County Democratic Party. When he was nominated to the federal bench, his nomination was supported by all who knew him. In spite of his age, Waring was easily confirmed by the US Senate and became the local federal judge. He was sixty-one, and his wife was justly proud of his appointment.

Waring had married Annie Gammell in 1913, and two years later the couple moved into the house she owned at 61 Meeting Street. She was considered a good wife and a good mother.

Prior to their marriage Annie Gammell had studied drama in New York where she became infatuated with the celebrated actress Sarah Bernhard. At the actress’ invitation, she spent four winters in Paris enjoying the theatre and being included Bernhardt’s household activities.

The Waties Warings appeared to be the ideal couple. As part of Charleston’s elite, they had a nice circle of friends. They entertained often at their Meeting Street home. An invitation to their New Year’s Eve party was a social must. Waring’s daughter made her début at the St. Cecilia Society in 1937.

Then the Hoffmans came to town! ....

• Residence: 1920 - Charleston, South Carolina, USA
• Race: White
• Ethnicity: American
  • Reference: 1920 United States Federal Census - SmartCopy: Jan 17 2017, 2:06:41 UTC
• Residence: 1910 - Charleston Ward 7, , South Carolina
• Residence: 1920 - Charleston Ward 1, Charleston, South Carolina, United States
• Residence: 1930 - Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina
  • Reference: FamilySearch Family Tree - SmartCopy: Jan 17 2017, 2:23:47 UTC

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• ROSEN, B. (2014). Waring bravely moved ahead of his time for racial justice. [online] Post and Courier. Available at: http://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/waring-bravely-moved-ahead-of... [Accessed 17 Jan. 2017].