NEW ORLEANS -- A court decision upholding the nation's only racial classification law and blocking a light-skinned family from legally declaring they are white is 'a perpetuation of a long-standing segregationist attitude,' their attorney says.
Orleans Parish Civil District Judge Frederick Ellis declared Louisiana's 1-32nd 'Negro blood' law constitutional and ruled Wednesday it is valid to classify people by race.
Attorney Brian Begue, who represented Susie Guillory Phipps and her siblings in challenging the law, said he planned to file an appeal by Friday.
He said Mrs. Phipps, after hearing the ruling, was 'stunned, disappointed, disbelieving.'
'It's merely a perpetuation of a long-standing segregationist attitude, which was born after the Civil War and still lives in our state today,' Begue said.
'It's business as usual in the state of Louisiana. He (Ellis) applied the law that has developed over the last 100 years. He's bound by law to do that.'
Begue said five of the siblings he represented, including Mrs. Phipps, wanted their birth certificates changed from black to white, and two who lacked birth certificates wanted ones issued with a white classification.
'There is absolutely no valid reason for designating a person black or white and disregarding their appearance,' Begue said. 'The state of Louisiana's law is designed to keep them (blacks) and us (whites) separate.' Begue said Ellis relied on previous cases in Louisiana, including one in which the state Supreme Court upheld the race classification law.
The 1-32nd law was approved by the Legislature in 1970 in an attempt to replace Louisiana case law that classified people as black if they had a single Negro ancestor.
During a trial last fall, the state said the Guillorys' black ancestor was a slave named Margarita, who bore four mulatto children by the husband of her white owner.
Mrs. Phipps, 48, of Carlyss, La., discovered the classification 'col.' on her birth certificate when she applied for a passport. She took the matter to court after the state refused to alter the designation.
Attorneys for the state said the information on Mrs. Phipps' birth certificate, and those of her siblings, was supplied by the family and merely maintained by the state.
Begue said Mrs. Phipps' mother was illiterate and the race was supplied by a midwife who knew, from word of mouth, that the Guillory family had a black ancestor and therefore was a 'colored' family.
