William Rehnquist's pro-segregation views continued into the 1990s

Justice John Paul Stevens's papers have revealed that Rehnquist continued to oppose the interpretation that the 14th Amendment required integration even in the 1990s. Notably, Rehnquist wrote a memo while a SCOTUS clerk urging his boss, Justice Robert Jackson, to uphold Plessy v. Ferguson and rule against the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education. Rehnquist later claimed that the memo wasn't his view, but his later actions (and Justice Jackson's own actions) undermine that claim (as does the writing style in the memo).
There’s Unsettling New Evidence About William Rehnquist’s Views on Segregation
The late chief justice, who long sought to turn the 14th Amendment on its head, notoriously drafted a 1952 memo as a Supreme Court clerk that defended racial segregation in the South and the disastrous Plessy v. Ferguson decision on which the institution’s legality was based. While Rehnquist denied during his confirmation hearings that the memo reflected his own views—saying they were meant to reflect those of the justice he was clerking for in 1952, Robert H. Jackson—a newly-released court document, not previously reported, lays bare Rehnquist’s abhorrent true position on segregation as late as 1993.

That year, the then-chief justice was still defending the logic of Plessy in no uncertain terms and using his position as a justice to block the court from acknowledging that the 14th Amendment barred segregation. “The Fourteenth Amendment prohibits discrimination; it does not require integration, and I think it is a mistake to intimate that it does even as a ‘goal,’” Rehnquist wrote in a memo to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor as part of an effort to have her remove a passage from an election decision. (For good measure, Rehnquist also requested O’Connor remove a suggestion that the Civil War was fought in part to secure voting rights for Black people.)

 

Fair point. We went from having a Chief who supported segregation to a Chief who merely supports suppressing the votes of Black people. That is progress of a sort.