Segregation in the Field of Public and Private Law
This is the only known copy of the legal analysis that was used to justify the desegregation of Tulane University . The Louisiana Research Collection has digitized it and placed it online . As a Tulane law student, David Lee Campbell clerked for the firm of Jones, Walker, Waechter, Poitevent, Carrère & Denègre L.L.P. The firm’s founder, Joseph Merrick Jones, Jr. (who was also President of the Board of Administrators of Tulane University), asked Campbell to work on a private, secret project reporting only to him. That project led to Campbell’s report, “Segregation in the Field of Public and Private Law—Status of the Tulane University of Louisiana,” which he delivered on September 4, 1959. The sixty-page report covered a wide swath of research into desegregation law, including areas to which it applied (jury cases, housing, the right to vote, restrictive covenants, labor unions, etc.), the Fourteenth Amendment, whether Tulane University was a private or public corporation, an...