Bill advances courthouse renaming

Federal complex in Helena would honor 1900s judge

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House approved legislation Thursday to rename the Helena-West Helena federal courthouse complex for a federal judge who took on a white supremacy group in the 1900s.

More than 60 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Jacob Trieber ruled citizens couldn’t be blocked from employment on the basis of their race. He was also the nation’s first Jewish federal judge, serving from 1900 until his death in 1927.

Because the U.S. Senate approved the legislation in August, it next goes to President Barack Obama. It would name the federal complex at 617 Walnut St. in Helena-West Helena as the Jacob Trieber Federal Building, United States Post Office, and United States Court House.

U.S. Rep. Rick Crawford, R-Ark., said he hopes the 1st Congressional District will give the renaming ceremony “adequate fanfare that is equal to his status in history.”

“I don’t want this thing to be just glossed over,” he said. “I think people in the area and the region really need to recognize his contribution, and I feel certain that there will be a lot of attention paid to this and that he will be given his due. He certainly deserves that.”

Arkansas’ congressional delegation supported the legislation, which was inspired by a group of current and former Helena-West Helena residents who wanted to recognize Trieber with a marker at the courthouse.

“We owe this honor to Judge Trieber who was a well- respected leader in Phillips County,” U. S. Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., said in a statement. “This is a great tribute that symbolizes the important work he did for the community and in pursuit of justice as the nation’s first Jewish federal judge.”

Born in Prussia in 1853, Jacob Trieber moved with his parents to St. Louis in 1866 before relocating to Helena in 1868, according to the Arkansas History Commission. Trieber studied law, became a member of the Arkansas Bar in 1876 and practiced law in Helena.

He was appointed U. S. attorney for the Eastern Arkansas District in 1897. President William McKinley appointed him to the federal bench in Little Rock in 1900.

Trieber is best known for two 1903 rulings involving the “white cappers,” a group similar to the Ku Klux Klan. In United States v. Hodges, 15 white cappers pressured companies to f ire black workers from a sawmill in Poinsett County. United States v. Morris involved white cappers harassing white landowners who employed black workers in Cross County.

After the Civil War, Congress passed legislation making it a federal crime for two or more people to “conspire to injure, oppress, threaten or intimidate any citizen in the free exercise of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States.”

Trieber ruled that the 13th Amendment, which was ratified in 1865 to protect the rights of newly freed slaves, means that all citizens have the right to enter into contracts, such as work, and the white cappers had violated the law.

In 1906, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Trieber’s decision in the Hodges case, stating that the 13th Amendment didn’t protect the right to earn a living. For decades, the decision was used to keep the federal government from intervening when racial discrimination occurred.

Eventually, in 1968, the U. S. Supreme Court overturned its decision in the Hodges case in a footnote of Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., a case dealing with equal access to housing.

“He was way ahead of his time, and I hope that people today will recognize what he did that laid a foundation for the Civil Rights Act that followed in the ’60s,” Crawford said. “His contemporaries didn’t appreciate his perspective, and it took 60odd years almost before he was vindicated and he was shown to be right.”