WARREN BURGER ON DESEGREGATION

I wasn't researching Warren Burger when I came across these books last fall; I just happened to find them while Thomas Nephew and I were killing a little time after some campaign volunteer work. These scattered notes in a handful of mostly obscure books do not reveal anything like a profound intellectual development on Burger's part. But they do provide a glimpse into some of Burger's thinking on a few topics - or at least his style of thinking when he is not, or at least not apparently, writing for an audience.

Until the Burger archives are opened up, aside from those papers of his colleagues that have been cleared for public view (like Harry Blackmun's), there's probably not much else in the way of a comparable collection of documents for researchers interested in describing Burger's private thoughts. That's not a project that interests me too much, but it seemed to me that it would be a shame if the opportunity for such a project were lost to the whims of the clientele in a second-hand book shop.

At left is a margin note that Burger left in Samuel Lubell, The Hidden Crisis in American Politics (1970), page 92. Given the extensive underlining, this seems to have been a work that interested Burger greatly. Here, Burger is taking issue with Lubell's description of the failure of school desegregation efforts in the 1960s.

Lubell writes: "Officially the goal remains intact, and school busing and other efforts still are pushed, but effective integration appears to have collapsed. Streets on which whites and blacks have lived together for any length of time are rare." Burger writes, simply, "Not so." Was he reading this book while he wrote the Supreme Court's school desegregation opinion in Swann?