Looking back.

In reporting on "The Last Unlikely Hero" (March 2006) among Southern judges who moved with all deliberate speed to bring order to racial desegregation in the schools after Brown v. Board of Education, William Jung has done an excellent job of rewriting Florida's legal history.

Looking back with little apparent knowledge of the times, Jung apparently tries to conform the past to the modern view in the sunshine state of race relations, especially in the legal profession. Regardless of evidence to the contrary, lawyers are constantly informed that they have been steadily improving after the initial shock more than 50 years ago.

To Jung, Judge G. B. Tjoflat deserves being placed on a pedastal for "enforcing the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Swann v. Charlotte Mecklenberg Board of Education in 1971. The high court had grown tired of waiting for communities to adjust to the changes demanded 15-16 years earlier.

But to understand the decision, one has to reflect on both the history of the judge and the context of the decision. Judge Tjoflat's education through law school appears to have been in racially segregated environments. He became a member of The Florida Bar only two years after Brown v. Board of Education.

As a Bar member, in private practice for a decade in Jacksonville, he swore to uphold a state constitution which required Negroes to attend schools separate from whites. He practiced in an era when Florida governors Farris Bryant (1961-65) and Haydon Burns (1965-67) were said to have turned back the clock on race relations which Gov. Leroy Collins (1956-61) had tried to move forward unsuccessfully.

But by 1971, another progressive governor, Reubin Askew, took over. The Florida Constitution had been changed and the state finally accepted the concept of one person, one vote. That shifted the political balance from the rural segregationist north to urban areas--primarily south of Interstate 4.

Last but not least, the United States also lost patience with Florida's foot-dragging. The U.S. Dept. of Health, Education & Welfare threatened to cut off federal funding for school districts that refused to comply. What happened next was remarkable.

Staunch segregationists on school boards and in school attorney positions began to be threatened by the Ku Klux Klan when they acted to avoid loss of funding for their districts for the white children.

Judge Tjoflat acted in that context. In that light, Judge Tjoflat's desegregation order followed the higher court mandate, but he did so to preserve the peace, not to further anyone's civil rights.

Judge Tjoflat himself in 2003 was asked whether he would have acted as his more renowned predecessors had done. He answered modestly:

"In answering this question, one must bear in mind that the composition of the civil rights docket over the past 30 years has changed considerably. When I came to the bench in 1970, the district courts were flooded with school desegregation cases, class actions challenging the conditions of state jails and prisons and state mental institutions, and voting rights cases--cases that received a great deal of public attention for lots of masons, one being that they challenged long-standing societal structures.

"Those cases have all but disappeared from our dockets, the changes they sought having been accomplished. Court observers say that the judges responsible for those changes were 'liberal.' I would say that the judges were simply good judges, who approached the task at hand with considerable courage and the desire to follow the law." Judge Tjoflat added that when the judicial center of gravity takes such dramatic turns, "My experience has been that when a judge seemingly leans far to the left or to the right, someone leans in the opposition direction--such that the center of gravity tends to move one way or the other, perhaps a tad or two."

What Judge Tjoflat did in 1971 was exactly that. He moved Florida a tad or two in what may have seemed to have been the right direction. That hardly seems worth mentioning 35 years and many bitter lessons later.

GABE KAIMOWITZ, Gainesville