Fearless Rulings of Judges Buchmeyer, Sanders Changed the Face of Dallas
When he graduated law school in 1994, David McAtee II was blue-chip all the way. The son of a prominent Dallas lawyer, he graduated cum laude from Duke University, edited the University of Texas law review and was destined for the cerebral world of antitrust and securities law.
But for one memorable year before private practice, Mr. McAtee wanted to snag a clerkship with one of two federal judges — Jerry Buchmeyer or Barefoot Sanders.
The young lawyer sensed — correctly, it turned out — that the judges’ rulings in three pending civil rights lawsuits would transform some of the city’s largest institutions. At issue was segregation in Dallas: in the schools, public housing and City Hall itself.
The cases, which lasted for decades, left the judges with complex legacies of pride, and perhaps a measure of contempt in some quarters.
"What really sticks out to me is their absolute lack of fear when it comes to deciding a difficult case," Mr. McAtee said. "When you have a case that has so many emotions involved … it’s very tempting, I’m sure, to shy away from the tricky issues."
Now, their blazing careers on the federal bench are coming to a close. Judge Buchmeyer, 74, recently said he will join Judge Sanders, 82, on "inactive" status. The days of running their own courtrooms are over. They will not hear any new cases. Their replacements have been named.
"It really is the end of an era," said Tom Melsheimer, a former assistant U.S. attorney.
The road to a federal judgeship is typically circumspect, since nominees must get U.S. Senate confirmation. The Dallas judges took different routes to the Earle Cabell Federal Building downtown, but both got a nudge from U.S. Sen. Lloyd Bentsen and were appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
Judge Sanders was a familiar fixture in political circles, having served as legislative counsel to President Lyndon Johnson, as an assistant Texas attorney general, as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, and as a member of the Texas Legislature during the 1950s.
A photo of Mr. Johnson and a young, dark-haired Sanders still hangs on an office wall. It reads: "To Barefoot Sanders — From his devoted friend."
Judge Sanders said that working on federal voting rights legislation in Washington was the highlight of his career but that he is proud to have had a role in ending institutional segregation in Dallas.
"I’m not going to say racism is completely removed from the public arena," he said recently. "Dallas did well. We were very slow to get there, but we came along."
Judge Buchmeyer, meanwhile, spent two decades at Thompson & Knight downtown, and he is former president of the Dallas Bar Association.
On the bench, he occasionally showed a quirky sense of humor, once writing an entire legal opinion in verse to rhyme with a LeAnn Rimes song when the singer had a case in his court.
He has been less sanguine about the circumstances of a 2003 incident in which he was briefly hospitalized after neighbors and police found him disoriented and without his trousers outside his Old East Dallas home. He took off more than a month but never said what caused the situation.
Judge Buchmeyer declined through a spokesman to be interviewed for this story. Shortly after the incident, he took senior status, which allowed him to work a reduced caseload.
3 blockbuster cases
Though their careers span more than five decades, the judges will probably be remembered most for their long oversight of three blockbuster cases. In each, a lawsuit filed by black plaintiffs forced the government to abandon historic patterns of segregation.
– Sam Tasby sued the Dallas school district in 1970, and the case remained in court for 33 years. Judge Sanders oversaw the district’s gradual transformation from a segregated system to one that embraced novel concepts, such as magnet schools and learning centers, to speed the process of integration.
– Deborah Walker was one of seven poor black women who successfully sued the Dallas Housing Authority — and later the city of Dallas and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development — for illegally segregating tenants. Judge Buchmeyer ruled that all three government entities participated in the segregation.
– Roy Williams and Marvin Crenshaw sued the city of Dallas, saying the election system diluted minority voting strength because some City Council members were elected to "at-large" seats. Judge Buchmeyer agreed that the costs of campaigning for citywide seats effectively kept the council disproportionately white. He ordered elections under an all single-member district system.
Time after time, the judges’ opinions documented what most minorities already knew: Dallas officials made little effort to integrate public facilities, long after federal law required them to do so.
Mr. Tasby, a black plumber, walked into a legal services office more than 15 years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education that segregation was illegal. His two school-age sons were still forced to pass white schools near their home to attend classes in West Dallas.
Ed Cloutman, the lawyer who represented Mr. Tasby in the case, said: "It wasn’t hard to show just how segregated Dallas was. Even in 1970, the district’s attitude was, ‘Go to hell. You’ll never get us in court.’ "
Early on, Judge Sanders found that the district’s efforts to comply with the Brown decision were "almost nonexistent and grudging at best."
He said the collective attachment to segregation ran deep.
"The more vehement of those folks felt mixing of the races was inherently bad — which was nonsense," Judge Sanders said recently. "They were afraid it would bring down the white race. Segregation was such an attitude. It was deeply fixed with a great number of people."
The court proceedings kept both judges in the limelight for years, but few observers believe they were the envy of their peers.
Mike Daniel, the lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in the Walker and Williams lawsuits, said the judges must have known that their decisions would have implications for their own careers.
"They know the decisions that need to be made are going to cost them," Mr. Daniel said.
Dallas attorney Adelfa Callejo agreed, saying: "They got criticized, they were considered ultra-liberals, but they went on and it didn’t matter."
‘Publicly owned slum’
In the Walker public housing case, Judge Buchmeyer chronicled the steps that city leaders took to create what one DHA official later called a "publicly owned slum," looking not only at the conditions of the West Dallas apartments, but also at violence in the neighborhood.
He found that residents there were five times more likely to be killed than people in other parts of the city, and six times more likely to be raped.
At one point, the weight of evidence led Judge Buchmeyer to remark that the West Dallas housing projects were a "gigantic monument to segregation and neglect."
That touched off a firestorm.
"What Buchmeyer did, I feared for his life," former Dallas City Council member Al Lipscomb said. "He was hitting the bedrock."
Things became even more tense when Judge Buchmeyer ordered the DHA to move black public housing tenants to predominantly white neighborhoods in North Dallas.
Dallas County Commissioner John Wiley Price said: "Nothing sets a community off more than housing. The place went crazy."
After the housing lawsuit was settled, a group of homeowners in a predominantly white North Dallas neighborhood sued to block a Buchmeyer court order to build public housing near their homes.
"Obviously, we thought the judge had gone too far and ended up using racial requirements improperly in putting these developments in white neighborhoods," said Mr. Melsheimer, who represented the homeowners. "We thought he went too far in trying to correct the obvious wrongs [of past segregation]."
The ruling was overturned on appeal, but the DHA was successful on a second attempt to build in North Dallas. Today, one site has been built and another is under construction.
West Dallas is still home to some public housing tenants, but the dilapidated buildings have been replaced and the neighborhoods are generally cleaner and safer.
Proud legacy
The current chief district judge, Sidney A. Fitzwater, said he inherited a proud legacy.
"My impression of these two judges is that they were independent, courageous and did what they believed the law and the facts required, regardless of the consequences," Judge Fitzwater said. "We who are currently on the court view these judges as giants."
Those qualities bred intense loyalty from former law clerks like Mr. McAtee.
"They both lived by a professional code and a real sense of collegiality that marks their era," he said. "If every person knew a lawyer like Judge Sanders or Judge Buchmeyer, there wouldn’t be any lawyer jokes."
JUDGE BAREFOOT SANDERS
Career: Associate, Storey, Sanders et al, Dallas, 1950-52; partner, Sanders, Lefkowitz & Green, 1952-61; member, Texas House of Representatives, 1952-58; U.S. attorney, Northern District of Texas, 1961-65; assistant deputy attorney general, 1965-66; assistant attorney general, 1966-67; legislative counsel to President Lyndon Johnson, 1967-69; partner, Clark, West, Keller, Sanders & Butler, 1969-79; appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter, 1979; retired, 2006
Education: Bachelor’s degree, University of Texas, 1949; law degree, University of Texas School of Law, 1950
Memberships: American Bar Association, Dallas Bar Association, American Judicature Society, Dallas Bar Foundation, Federal Bar Association, State Bar of Texas, Texas Bar Foundation
JUDGE JERRY BUCHMEYER
Career: Partner, Thompson & Knight, Dallas, 1958-79; appointed to the bench by President Jimmy Carter, 1979; chief judge of the Northern District of Texas, 1995-2001; took senior status, 2003
Education: Associate’s degree, Kilgore College, 1953; bachelor’s degree, University of Texas, 1956; law degree, University of Texas School of Law, 1957
Memberships: American Bar Association, Dallas Bar Association, Committee on Codes of Conduct of the Judicial Conference of the United States, State Bar of Texas, Texas Bar Foundation, Dallas Bar Foundation
TIMELINE
Judge Jerry Buchmeyer and Judge Barefoot Sanders presided over cases involving the desegregation of Dallas’ largest institutions.
Housing
1950 — Joint report on black housing finds a critical shortage and the threat of a move into white areas.
1955 — West Dallas housing projects open.
1985 — Seven women sue the Dallas Housing Authority, contending that thousands of federally subsidized apartments in Dallas remained segregated by race and were unequal in condition. The city of Dallas and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development are later added as defendants.
1995 — Judge Jerry Buchmeyer agrees that the city’s public housing is discriminatory and orders the DHA to provide 3,205 homes for black families in predominantly white neighborhoods. He also says 474 planned housing units have to be built in predominantly white areas.
1999 — The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans rules that race cannot be used as a factor in determining where to build the new units, but one of the units was later built in North Dallas and a second is under construction.
2004 — Judge Buchmeyer approves a final settlement, saying the DHA fulfilled court orders to rebuild the West Dallas housing projects and move thousands of black families into predominantly white neighborhoods.
Schools
1970 — Sam Tasby sues the Dallas Independent School District because his children were forced to attend black schools that were further from his neighborhood than white schools.
1971 — U.S. District Judge William M. Taylor declares "a dual system still exists" and orders DISD leaders to come up with a new plan to desegregate.
1981 — Judge Taylor removes himself from the case and Judge Barefoot Sanders is assigned. Judge Sanders finds that DISD continued to show signs of segregation but that additional busing would not solve the problem.
1985-86 — Judge Sanders oversees creation of local learning centers, bond initiatives and new magnet schools that he hopes will be alternatives to busing.
2003 — Judge Sanders ends court oversight of DISD, saying segregation no longer exists.
Voting Rights
1988 — Roy Williams and Marvin Crenshaw file a federal voting rights lawsuit, contending that the city’s election system dilutes minority voting strength. The Ledbetter Neighborhood Association, representing Hispanic residents, joins the plaintiffs. Since 1975, the city had used an 8-3 system, under which the mayor and two City Council members run citywide and eight others run in single-member districts.
1989 — Voters approve a 10-4-1 election system, which provides for 10 single-member districts and four regional seats, with the mayor elected at large. Most minorities oppose it and the U.S. Justice Department does not approve the plan. Elections are not held under it.
1990 — In a harshly worded opinion, Judge Buchmeyer writes that minority participation in Dallas politics has been a question of "what blacks and Hispanics have been permitted to do by the white majority." He strikes down the city’s 8-3 election system.
1991 — Both sides agree to settle the lawsuit, and Judge Buchmeyer orders elections to be held under a 14-1 plan, in which only the mayor is elected citywide and 14 council members come from single-member districts. The first elections under it are held. Since then, the 14-1 system has elected more minority council members in each election than were ever elected under the 8-3 system.
SOURCE: Dallas Morning News research
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