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September 30, 2007
Bill Murphy, RIP
Teacher, Target of Attacks, Resigns in Mississippi
OXFORD, Miss., Aug. 5 (UPI)
-- A University of Mississippi law professor who has been the target of segregationists for several years has resigned to take a better position at the University of Missouri.
William P. Murphy, attacked by legislators and others because he is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, will become a full professor of law at Missouri Sept. 1. He has been at Mississippi since 1953.
His resignation came after the State College Board had refused to renew his contract.
The professor first came under attack in 1959. That year, however, the College Board rehired him. In 1960, an unsuccessful attempt was made in the Legislature to cut off state funds to anyone belonging to the Civil Liberties Union.
Bill Murphy, my colleague and friend, died yesterday in Chapel Hill at the age of 87. He was absolutely everything any law professor might aspire to be -- erudite, passionate about justice and fairness, and equally engaged in the worlds of ideas and action.
The New York Times doesn't mention it, but the "offense" that got Bill Murphy(effectively) fired at Ole Miss was his insistence on teaching that Brown v. Board of Education was the law of the land and should be followed rather than resisted. As Bill himself explained in a 1978 oral history,
I never really thought of it in terms of taking a stand on anything. It all started because I was teaching the course in Constitutional Law. And I taught the course basically the way it was taught all over the country, the way I would have taught it anywhere else in the country, and that assumes that Supreme Court decisions are law and at some point, to some extent, ought to be complied with. And so I never really consciously took a stand on anything. I started out just teaching a normal Constitutional Law course. And the only thing that made that unusual or got me in hot water was that that normal approach toward constitutional law and the authority of the Supreme Court was contrary to the basic approach which these Citizens Council types took. And that was that the Supreme Court didn't have the authority, and that there wasn't any duty to comply. So I started out, really, in complete innocence, just doing what a constitutional law professor would have done anywhere in the country, and the only thing that made it unusual was the time and the place. They apparently wanted the Con Law course taught kind of like it would have been taught at a Citizens Council rally.
... I had no earthly idea that it would end up the way it did when I began to pursue my teaching and my writing activities. It just happened that the way I taught and what I wrote turned out to be directly contrary to what many influential Mississippians believed, and so they decided they had to get rid of me. And I had to decide whether I was going to keep on writing and teaching the way that I thought I ought to, or whether I was going to knuckle under to these people, and at that point I did have to take a stand.
Take a stand he did, but the segregationists ultimately proved too powerful for Bill, and so he resigned in 1962. When the trustees at Vanderbilt were pressured not to act on a visiting position for Bill that the law faculty there had voted, he landed at the University of Missouri.
While at Missouri, Bill published his chef d'oeuvre, The Triumph of Nationalism: State Sovereignty, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of the Constitution (1967). In 1970 he came to UNC, where he was still in the office as an emeritus every day when I arrived in 1998. By then he was busy doing labor arbitrations all over the country, and had served a term as president of the National Academy of Arbitrators. He continued this work until just a few years ago, when health problems finally slowed him down -- physically, at least. Up until the very end, he remained keenly interested in goings-on in the worlds of law and politics. Just a couple of weeks ago, at Bill's request, I packaged up a couple of annual Con Law casebook supplements for Bill and sent them home to him so that he could read up on last Term's developments at the Supreme Court.
The legal academy has lost a brave prince. We'll miss you, Bill.
Posted by Eric at September 30, 2007 10:47 PM