On a balmy day in November 1962, a Republican activist set up shop in a poor precinct in South Phoenix. He wasn’t there to vote or volunteer with the nonpartisan poll workers. He came to harass Black voters. The man—who was white and tall—quizzed would-be voters about their backgrounds and demanded they recite the Constitution to him. “You are not able to read, are you?” he reportedly asked Black people as they queued up to vote outside an elementary school. “You have no business being in this line trying to vote. I would ask you to leave.”
Multiple witnesses identified the rangy man as William Rehnquist. In 1962, that name didn’t carry much weight beyond the arid desert town yet to boom from an influx of industry and affordable air conditioning. Phoenix politicos saw him as a partisan gadfly, not a power broker. Local civil rights activists had long complained about his obnoxious buzzing, which came in his Election Day visits to minority neighborhoods and his obstreperous opposition to desegregation laws. (Rehnquist once ranted that a modest local proposal to ban racial discrimination by public-facing businesses was a “drastic” “assault” on “a man’s private property” and “the historic right of the owner of a drug store, lunch counter or theater to choose his own customers.”) He was, a leader in the Arizona NAACP noted, “the only major person of stature in the state who opposed the Arizona civil rights bill,” his legal pedigree and polish standing out in the morass of cranks, Birchers, and avowed racists who advocated for keeping segregation legal.
In less than a decade, Rehnquist would go from a local antagonist to a conservative avatar on the Supreme Court. From his lofty perch as a justice (and later, chief justice), he led a swashbuckling counterrevolution against the equality vision of the liberal Warren court. He would reshape the Constitution that he once wielded as a weapon of voter suppression, bolstering states’ rights at the expense of individual liberties.
With the Supreme Court back in session, Rehnquist’s legacy looms over the conservative majority. Perhaps more than any other figure, he embodies the fervor and tensions of the Roberts court. Today’s Republican-appointed justices share similar allegiances: to a lost Constitution, unmarred by the reforms of Reconstruction, the New Deal, and the Warren court; to the Republican Party and its situational needs; to a muscular and unapologetic judiciary that imposes conservative change on the country.