Not long ago, Justice Tom P. Brady of the Mississippi Supreme Court was worst known as the philosopher of Mississippi's racist white Citizens' Councils and the polemical author of Black Monday, a Negro-baiting tract attacking the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision. Brady, then a state Circuit Court judge, insisted that the decision was "not the law of the land." Said he: "The loveliest and the purest of God's creatures, the nearest thing to an angelic being that treads this terrestrial ball is a well-bred, cultured Southern white woman, or her blue-eyed, golden-haired little girl." By contrast, he added: "The social, political, economic and religious preferences of the Negro remain close to the caterpillar and the cockroach . . . proper food for a chimpanzee."
The Citizens' Councils distributed Black Monday to white Mississippi schoolchildren and awarded $50 prizes for essays blasting the Supreme Court. So eminent was Judge Brady that in 1960 he was selected to nominate Governor Ross Barnett for President at the Democratic National Convention. So pleased was Barnett that in 1963 he appointed Brady to Mississippi's highest court, calling him "widely known as a student of constitutional law."
The student has just demonstrated a remarkable capacity for learning. Before the State Supreme Court were appeals by two Negro girls who tried to use an already integrated Greenville park in 1963. Threatened by whites and arrested for breach of the peace, the girls had been sentenced to $100 fines and 90 days in jail. Speaking for the court, Justice Brady reversed the convictions—and stoutly invoked the U.S Supreme Court as his authority.
"Irrespective of how erroneous it may appear," Justice Brady reminded his fellow Mississippians, "a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court is still the ultimate m judicial determination and is binding on the tribunals and citizens of the respective states in comparable cases. As a self-governing agency, it is imperative that this state operate under law and law alone. The perversion of the law, regardless of the objective, can lead only to confusion, violence and anarchy. Just as water seeks its own level, so absolute law will expose ultimately and punish its long-submerged desecrations, which have been committed in the name of justice."