50-year members.

A recent letter suggests that Florida lawyers should not be honored as 50-year members of The Florida Bar if they swore allegiance to the Florida Constitution of 1885, which remained in effect until January 7, 1969. Leaving entirely aside the question of what practical alternative these lawyers had at the time, I think such views are wrong.

Of course, I am aware that the 1885 Constitution expressly required segregated public schools, Fla. Const. of 1885, Art. XII, [section]12, and explicitly prohibited interracial marriage. Id. Art. XVI, [section]24. Our society today rightly rejects such provisions, and it is justifiably disturbed that they were once part of the fundamental law of Florida. We must recall, however, for most of the time the 1885 Constitution was in effect, those provisions were in complete harmony with the United States Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States.

On at least six occasions, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld or declined to reconsider the "separate but equal" doctrine. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896); Cummings v. County Board of Education, 175 U.S. 528 (1899); Berea College v. Kentucky, 211 U.S. 45 (1908); Gong Lum v. Rice, 275 U.S. 78 (1927); Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938); Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950). Included among the justices who concurred in the view that "separate but equal" was constitutional were such luminaries as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, and William Howard Taft.

In Pace v. Alabama, 106 U.S. 583 (1883), the Supreme Court upheld a state statutory scheme that prohibited adultery and fornication and increased the penalty if those acts were committed by an interracial couple. Pace was not overruled until 1964. See McLaughlin v. Florida, 379 U.S. 184 (1964). The anti-miscegenation statutes were not limited to the South. For example, interracial marriage...