Sarcasm and Public Employment Don’t Mix, Part Deux

GavelBack in my previous blogging life, I wrote about a case by the 11th Circuit, Mitchell v. Hillsborough County, No. 05-12207 (11th Cir., Oct. 31, 2006), which involved a county employee who made satirical remarks about one of the country commissioners, and got fired for it.  In “Swift Would Be Ashamed” from 2006, I wrote about the facts of that case:

Plaintiff Gary Mitchell had a job filming the meetings of his local Board of Commissioners and he also volunteered at the local public access television station. Due to a brouhaha over indecent programming, the Board of Commissioners had proposed to cut public access funding. Commissioner Rhonda Storms was leading the morality crusade, so Mitchell decided to have some fun at her expense. During the open comment period of a supervisors’ meeting, Mitchell took to the podium wearing a beret with a thunderbolt on top and announced that he was a member of a fictitious political support group called the Thunderheads. He then gave a speech praising Storms and concluded with a question: given her preoccupation with women’s body parts, did she prefer the nickname “Vagi” or “Gina”?

I perhaps can understand the efficiency argument in this case (though it is certainly not a slam dunk), but I don’t agree at all that this is not speech on a matter of public concern.  As Robert [Loblaw] points out, that would be like saying Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal was really about cannibalism.

The 11th Circuit found that Mitchell’s speech was not a matter of public concern, and even if it was, the efficiency concerns of the employer in ensuring co-worker harmony outweighed any First Amendment rights Mitchell would have had.

Well, the humor of the federal courts has not improved in three years.  Not even in my hometown. 

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Law Professors Reflect on Brown v. Board of Education

phoebewilliamsThe United States Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education is without question one of the most significant cases in modern constitutional law.  It was also a defining event in the lives of a generation of American law teachers.  Vanderbilt University Press has recently published Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers Brown v. Board of Education (2009). The book, edited by Professors Mildred Robinson and Richard Bonnie of the University of Virginia, contains forty essays, each written by a law professor who discusses the way that his or her life was affected by the Brown decision.

The forty contributors vary considerably by gender, race, and ethnicity.  A majority, but only a majority, grew up in states where legally segregated schools existed at the time of the Brown decision.  Some are old enough to have remembered the day that the decision was handed down; others were born after it was already the law of the land.  But all, to one extent or another, believe that their personal and professional lives have been profoundly shaped by the Brown decision.

I read Law Touched Our Hearts with great interest.

Although I am too young to remember the actual announcing of the Brown decision — it was handed down two weeks before my second birthday — it was clearly a defining event in my life.  In 1956, my family moved from Giles County, Virginia, where I was born, to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.  Two years earlier, after an attempt to integrate the White Sulphur schools in response to Brown, the town and nation witnessed the first post-Brown, anti-integration riot in the United States which led the county school board to cancel the integration experiment after only one week.  In 1956, integration occurred a second time, this time as the result of a federal court order.  My mother started teaching at White Sulphur Elementary that fall, and when I started school there two years later the fate of integrated education seemed anything but certain.  In 1959, we moved back to Virginia where the schools were completely segregated, and I experienced integration a second time in 1964, when Giles County decided to voluntarily close its black schools and incorporate the entire black and white population into a single school system.  (Incredibly, Giles County was the first county in Virginia to do this.)

I was also interested in Law Touched Our Hearts because eight of the contributors are good friends of mine.  I can say, though, without fear of contradiction, that the most moving and most poignant essay in the entire collection is the one written by my Marquette colleague Phoebe Williams.  Phoebe’s essay, titled “Segregation in Memphis,” tells the story of her experiences as an 8-year old school child in segregated Memphis schools when the Brown decision was handed down.  Although the Brown edict was to be adopted with “all deliberate speed,” the “promises of Brown,” as Phoebe puts it “remained unrealized” in Memphis.  There had been no school integration in Memphis when Phoebe graduated from high school in 1963, and there would be none for years to come.  Her first experience with integrated education came when she enrolled at Marquette as an undergraduate.

Phoebe’s essay wonderfully captured the spirit of optimism that arose with the handing down of the Brown decision, as well as the disappointment that accompanied the failure of southern states to live up to its mandates.

I was already familiar with much of Phoebe’s account because of an appearance she made several years ago in a class on the History of the Civil Rights Movement that I was teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences.  I invited Phoebe to come speak to the class about her experiences growing in the era of segregation.  The students in the class were riveted by her presentation, even though most were northerners and had been born more than two decades after the Brown decision.  Many students later told me that Phoebe’s presentation was the highlight of the class.

I strongly recommend Law Touched Our Hearts to anyone interested in the history of civil rights in the United States, but I insist that anyone with any sort of Marquette connection should read Phoebe Williams’ contribution to the collection (pp. 123-134).

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July 20, 1969 … and 1944

225px-bendler_block_memorial_crop2July 20, 1969 was the day of a great human accomplishment. Watching the rebroadcast of bits of Cronkite’s newscast, I was struck by how much we have lost the sense of wonder that was felt around the world that day and abandoned the sense of adventure that made it possible.

But I want to talk about a different thing that happened on July 20.

On July 20, 1944, a group of German military officers and civilians made one last attempt to overthrow the Nazi regime. This one came the closest to success. As we all know, the plan was to kill Hitler and then to use a Nazi contingency plan called Operation Valkyrie (Unternehmen Walküre) to remove resistance from the regime with the regime’s own resources. Once accomplished, a new government would be established. By a series of three misfortunes, Hitler survived and the plan failed. Had any of these three not occurred, he would have died on that day and perhaps the war would have ended nine months before it did, sparing hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of lives and avoiding the forty year Soviet occupation of Germany. 

Continue ReadingJuly 20, 1969 … and 1944