Supreme Court Rules 7-1 Against Hasidim on Voting Districts Issue

A 7-1 decision by the Supreme Court today quashed an attempt by 30,000 Hasidic Jews in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn to reverse a 1974 realignment of voting districts by the New York State Legislature which they claimed infringed upon their rights as a religious voting bloc.

The decision, from which only Chief Justice Warren Burger dissented, ruled that it was constitutional to create voting districts aimed at ensuring the numerical superiority of a racial group provided that it could be shown that past election procedures had resulted in racial discrimination.

The realignment, which established a number of districts with Black or Hispanic majorities, divided the district in which the Hasidim had been in the majority. Earlier, the U.S. District Court and the Court of Appeals both ruled that the Constitution did not protect the rights of specific religious groups. At that point, the Hasidim appealed to the Supreme Court on grounds that their rights as whites had been infringed.

The Supreme Court noted in its decision that even after realignment, most voting districts in Brooklyn had white majorities. An investigation undertaken by the Justice Department after the voter turn-out in the 1968 Presidential elections fell below 50 percent in some areas of Brooklyn found that literacy tests had kept down the number of Black and Hispanic registrants.

In his dissent, Justice Burger argued that mathematical devices to remedy past discrimination could only lead to a ghetto mentality. He said “This retreat from the ideal of the American melting pot is curiously out of step with recent political history.” Justice William Brennan, who went along with the majority, warned, nevertheless, that the decision went further than any other to apply a racial solution to remedy past discrimination. Justice Thurgood Marshal did not participate in the case.