Covering SCOTUS

The Supreme Court of the United States

With coverage of the 1970 Virginia General Assembly session under my belt, I looked forward to reporting on more Virginia politics. But in those days, unlike today, there were great lulls in political news between elections and between General Assembly sessions.

To keep me busy, the station added local, state and federal courts to my beat. I quickly found it to be another arena I enjoyed covering.

Over the next few years, I covered two local cases that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court -- one I covered from the beginning of the end and another I covered from the beginning to the end. Plus, I covered the nomination of an intelligent, thoughtful and extremely able local attorney to a seat on the nation's highest court.

It was Richmond's annexation of 23 square miles -- and 47,000 residents -- of Chesterfield County that provided my first taste of justice at its highest levels. Richmond had grown over the centuries by annexing portions of the neighboring counties. In 1965, the city went after a chunk of Chesterfield. The annexation took effect January 1, 1970, just as I rejoined the WTVR staff.

A group of black Richmonders promptly filed suit claiming a violation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, saying their voting power had been deliberately diluted by the city. Richmond's white leaders, the plaintiffs said, had conspired in drawing the annexation map to deliberately add white voters. The facts seemed to be on their side. Before the annexation, the city's population was 52 percent black. After the annexation took effect, the city's black population was 42 percent.

The case went all the way to the Supreme Court. Previously, Richmond City Council's nine members were elected at-large. The city capitulated and effectively nullified the drop in the black population percentage by agreeing to a ward system. The wards were drawn so that four would contain a majority black population, four would contain a majority white population, and one would be racially even. The Supreme Court Justices ruled that the new system guaranteed that black voters would be represented fairly.

The second time I filed reports from the Supreme Court was at the end of what became known as the Richmond School Consolidation case. It, too, was about a merger. The city's school system sued in Federal Court to force a consolidation of its mostly black schools with the mostly white schools in Henrico and Chesterfield. The city's top educators held that children learn better in a racially mixed classroom. U.S. District Court Judge Robert R. Merhige ordered consolidation. The counties appealed, and the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond overturned the decision. The city School Board appealed to the Supreme Court, and once again I covered arguments there. The Supreme Court, in June 1972, upheld the appeals court ruling, and the prospect of school consolidation was dead.

Filing reports from the Supreme Court was not easy in the early 1970s. WTVR had no microwave or satellite technology. There was also no videotape -- just film. So a cameraman and I would drive to D.C. We'd film a standup open and close in Washington and then race to get the film on a 1 p.m. bus for Richmond. After legal arguments before the court ended, I'd write a story to go in the middle of the two standups and phone it back to the studio, where my audio would be combined with my standups and file film for the evening news. Then I'd film another standup open and close in front of the court, and we'd drive back to Richmond with that film. At the studio, I'd write the middle of the story and record it for use at 11 p.m.

It was an awkward system, and it made for very long days. But none of the other Richmond stations were sending reporters to D.C., so we had the only coverage from Washington.

My only other brush with the Supreme Court came when President Nixon nominated a Richmonder, Lewis F. Powell Jr., to a seat on the court. When the nomination was approved by the U.S. Senate in late 1971, Powell held an afternoon news conference at his downtown office. The local newspapers, the AP and the national TV networks were all on hand.

Powell had been watching my reports from the Supreme Court and my coverage of Virginia politics, and he greeted me by name when he walked into the room. The national reporters' jaws dropped, including Bernie Shaw's. (Shaw was then working for CBS but would later join CNN and become famous for his live coverage from Baghdad as the city was bombed during the Gulf War.)

After the news conference, I raced back to the station to write it up for WTVR's evening news. Shaw did the same for the Cronkite broadcast on CBS, filing his report from our studio. We both watched our stories unfold in the WTVR conference room. As the Cronkite broadcast ended, Shaw said, "I guess I should file something for CBS radio."

"Don't worry," I said. "I fed them a story about 90 minutes ago."

Shaw was pissed. "You know you just screwed me out of a $75 fee!" he said.

"Yeah," I said. "That's what it's about: being first."

I used the check from CBS radio to buy a dining room table for my tiny apartment.