"Judge Richard T. Rives, a native of Montgomery, Alabama, was a member of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit during the tumultuous years of the modern civil rights movement. A former Klansman, like US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, Rives became an unexpected but ardent defender of equal rights for all citizens under the law. His southern familial heritage, as well as his temporal and geographic proximity to the Civil War, uniquely situated him to address civil rights issues, leading him to write numerous decisions on behalf of the court that extended the logic of racial desegregation derived from the US Supreme Courts Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to many other areas of the law. Ushering Civil Rights into Law by Pat Arneson elucidates Rives judicial philosophy, one that led to majority decisions related to racial desegregation. Although he did not identify himself as an activist, he made clear over the course of his career that the US Constitution demands that all citizens, regardless of race, be treated equally under the law. In so doing, he pushed back against the social racism and institutional segregation of the Jim Crow era.

This project seeks to shine a light on his legacy, one kept in the dark for far too long. While the careers of many other civil rights jurists have been examined and documented in depth, little attention has been paid to Rives life and work, which laid the groundwork for even more noteworthy rulings to come. As Arneson notes, Judge Rives did not have a perfect record in support of civil rights throughout his career, in the way a strict judicial activist would. But he worked humbly in his position as a circuit judge and his thinking and judicial philosophy constantly evolved. That evolution began while he was a lawyer at a firm that served both white and Black clients. A politically active man, Rives recognized the disconnect between the US Constitution and the legislatively proposed Boswell Amendment to the Alabama Constitution, which was crafted to prohibit Black citizens from registering to vote. This led to a personal state-wide campaign in which he tried to persuade voters not to pass the amendment. Conversations he had with his son about the equality of all men serving in the military further influenced the evolution of his views.

But Rives crossed the Rubicon in writing the three-judge panel decision on behalf of himself and his protégé, Frank M. Johnson Jr., in Browder v. Gayle (1956), which ended the Montgomery bus protest. Upheld by the US Supreme Court, that decision addressed the conflict between state and federal laws regarding the racial segregation of public facilities. Rives later decisions ordered the racial desegregation of primary, secondary, and higher education; the reapportionment of voting districts; equality in voting rights; and the juror selection process. Despite momentous opposition from some white citizens, Rives stood firm in his determination that the law treat all citizens equally, thereby abolishing the legal foundations of Jim Crow. Each chapter serves as a case study that validates the importance of Judge Rives judicial leadership.

His common-law interpretation of justice was guided by the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights--along with federal legislation, legal precedent, and a commonsense approach to fairness and individual equality. The phrase We the people, included in the preamble to the Constitution, guided much of his decision-making and facilitated his extension of the Brown decision throughout the public sphere. Arnesons account examines the intersections of rhetoric and history, drawing on archival research as well as primary and secondary sources to illuminate the dominant claims of the time, the complexity of the social context in which Rives heard cases, and the role of legal narratives in both establishing and dismantling the legal frameworks in question. The result is a long overdue account and assessment of a lesser-known--but utterly consequential--figure in the establishment of equality as central to contemporary justice and jurisprudence"--.