In 1952, however, no decision was made on this landmark case. Legendary Justice Felix Frankfurter, sensing that the case had little chance before a court more interested in constitutional tradition than in good causes, maneuvered for its postponement.

Within a year, however, Chief Justice Fred Vinson died, to be replaced by a Republican California governor name of Earl Warren. As a politician, Warren knew a winning issue when he saw one. As a former chief executive, he knew how to get things done. Meanwhile, in the judicial equivalent of insider trading, Frankfurter conspired with Philip Elman of Eisenhower’s Justice Department to bring Ike in on the side of righteousness: “a cause,” as Elman put it, “that transcended ordinary notions about propriety in litigation.”

From the beginning, Brown was hailed as a great moral victory. On the front pages, if not always on the editorial pages--and TV had no editorial page--the media were quick to champion emotional issues over constitutional ones. Activists came to see that their causes could be advanced more swifty and surely in the measured calm of a sympathetic court than in the democratic hurly-burly of a legislature. Judges began to respond to the streams of praise and the surge of power. And inexorably, dramatically even, the political culture shifted.

Meanwhile, Russell Clark was back in Springfield living the simple life, as Benson tells it, “up at 5 A.M. to feed the cows, in his law office by 6:30, home at 4:00 for nine quick holes of golf and in bed by 8:00.” For the next twenty five years, Russell worked hard and well for a small Springfield firm specializing in defense litigation. If there really were a legal revolution afoot, it seemed to be passing him by. As longtime friend and partner Ray Whiteaker attests, Clark “was no wild-eyed liberal carrying a banner.”

But as Benson notes too, Clark “moved slowly, always moved slowly.” In a way, though, so did Harry Truman. Neither married until their 30’s. Clark, in fact, was 34 when he married Jerry Burrows, a nurse at St. John’s Hospital in Springfield. In archetypal 50’s fashion, she quit work to raise their two children, a boy and a girl of course, Vincent and Viki. For Russell Clark, it was back to work and back to golf--his 5 handicap suggesting nearly as much interest in the latter as the former.

In 1976 an event took place that would unexpectedly but inalterably change the course of Russell Clark’s life: Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president. For years, Clark had worked in various campaigns on behalf of his good friend and fellow Democrat, Tom Eagleton. Now a U.S. Senator of some clout, Eagleton rewarded Clark by securing for him the firsst judgeship open in the Western District Federal Court, an honor that the diffident Clark had not sought. Like Truman again, Judge Russell Clark was well into his 50’s before he made his own reluctant debut in “the bigs.” (Jimmy Carter, by the way, holds the third spot on Clark’s office wall--more as payback, Clark implies, than homage.)

Once more, the timing was crucial. Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses. Party activists, almost to a person, had come to support a loosely defined “living constitution.” And well they might have. In the years since Brown, the Supreme Court had harnessed its power to advance a wide range of liberal issues that congress and most state legislatures would likely have rejected--for pornography, against school prayer, for uniform criminal rights, against the death penalty (later reversed), for abortion rights.

To achieve “racial balance,” a new concept, the Court had shifted over the years from prohibiting discrimination to insisting upon it. Warren Burger, “Nixon’s Chief Justice,” wrote the opinion for the majority in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the first case to require the forced bussing of school students as a constitutional remedy. Indeed, by 1977, when Russell Clark became a Federal Judge, the momentum of the courts was so strong, and its direction so defined, that few in either party cared--or dared--to get in its way.

Here, fate intervened again. Clark was on the court but for a few months when the Kansas City school desegregation case--Jenkins v. Missouri--was “dropped on his plate.” He did not seek it out. But he did not shy away from it either. Clark brought to the task an activist’s faith in the moral power of the courts and a residual guilt over the nation’s imperfect racial history.

Even Clark’s critics acknowledge that the case was a sympathetic one. Before Brown , the state of Missouri mandated school segregation. After Brown, the state "permitted" local districts to integrate. The Kansas City, Missouri School District (KCMSD) took the hint and its own sweet time, redrawing attendance boundaries throughout the fifties and sixties partly to keep black students in black schools. By 1969, black students had become the majority in the District, but the voting majority remained white. For a mix of reasons, some of them quite likely racist, voters rejected one initiative after another to fix up the schools. Buildings were crumbling, test scores were dropping, and white kids were leaving. This was not the District’s--nor democracy’s--finest hour.

It is impossible to say, of course, what FDR would have done, or HST, but Clark proved to be an unapologetic improviser in their take-charge mold. Says he matter-of-factly of the era’s judicial power grab, “We did not do anything that Congress should not have done.”

Lacking sufficient proof to hold the suburban districts liable, Judge Clark chose an alternate plan, one put forward by the plaintiffs' "educational and desegregation experts": he would desegregate the KCMSD by attracting white students from the suburbs. In theory at least, this scheme seemed a less divisive remedy than forced bussing. Two minor problems. One, to attract the suburban kids, the KCMSD would have to create high voltage magnet schools. Two, to build the schools, the state and the District would have to bust their bank accounts and foot at least a billion dollar bill.

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