Court Opinion

ID: 9423120
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:06:05.830521+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:42.402152
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Black,
dissenting.
I find nothing in the United States Constitution that compels any city or other state subdivision to hold title to property it does not want or to act as trustee under a will when it chooses not to do so. And I had supposed until now that the narrow question of whether a city could resign such a trusteeship and whether a state court could appoint successor trustees depended entirely on state law. Here, however, the Court assumes that federal power exists to reverse the Supreme Court of Georgia for affirming a Georgia trial court’s decree which, as the State Supreme Court held, did only these “two things: (1) Accepted the resignation of the City of Macon as trustee of Baconsfield; and (2) appointed new trustees.” 220 Ga. 280, 284; 138 S. E. 2d 573, 576.
The State Supreme Court’s interpretation of the scope and effect of this Georgia decree should be binding upon us unless the State Supreme Court has somehow lost its power to control and limit the scope and effect of Georgia trial court decrees relating to Georgia wills creating Georgia trusts of Georgia property. A holding that ignores this state power would be so destructive of our state judicial systems that it could find no support, I think, in our Federal Constitution or in any of this Court’s prior decisions. For myself, I therefore accept the decision of the Georgia Supreme Court as holding-only what it declared it held, namely, that the trial court committed no error under Georgia law in accepting the City of Macon’s resignation as trustee and in appointing successor trustees to execute the Bacon trust.
I am not sure that the Court is passing at all on the only two questions the Georgia Supreme Court decided *313in approving the city’s resignation as trustee and the appointment of successors. If the Court is holding that a State is without these powers, it is certainly a drastic departure from settled constitutional doctrine and a vastly important one which, I cannot refrain from saying, deserves a clearer explication than it is given. Ambiguity cannot, however, conceal the revolutionary nature of such a holding, if this is the Court’s holding, nor successfully obscure the tremendous lopping off of power heretofore uniformly conceded by all to belong to the States. This ambiguous and confusing disposition of such highly important questions is particularly disturbing to me because the Court’s discussion of the constitutional status of the park comes in the nature of an advisory opinion on federal constitutional questions the Georgia Supreme Court did not decide. Consequently, for all the foregoing reasons and particularly since the Georgia courts decided no federal constitutional question, I agree with my Brother Harlan that the writ of certiorari should have been dismissed as improvidently granted.
Questions of this Court’s jurisdiction would be different, of course, if either the mere resignation or appointment of trustees under a will was prohibited by some federal constitutional provision. But there is none. The Court implies, however, that the city’s resignation and the state court’s appointment of new trustees amounted to “state-sponsored racial inequality,” which, of course, if correct, would present a federal constitutional question. This suggestion rests on a further implication by the Court that the Georgia court’s decree would result in the operation of Baconsfield Park on a racially segregated basis. The record here, for several reasons, can support no such implications: (1) the State Supreme Court specifically limited the effect of the decree it affirmed to approval of the city’s resignation as trustee and the appointment of new ones; (2) the new *314trustees were not directed to operate the park on a discriminatory basis; and (3) there is no indication that they have done so. Furthermore, where a valid law makes a certain use of property held in trust illegal, responsibility for its illegal use cannot be escaped by putting it in the hands of new trustees. Cf., e. g., Mormon Church v. United States, 136 U. S. 1, 47-48.
The ambiguous language used by the Court even casts doubt upon Georgia’s power to hold that the trust property here can revert to the heirs of Senator Bacon if the conditions upon which he created the trust should become impossible to carry out. The heirs of Senator Bacon raised the issue of reversion below, but neither court reached it. So far as I have been able to find, the power of a State to decide such a question has been taken for granted in every prior opinion this Court has ever written touching this subject. I believe that Georgia’s complete power to decide this question is so clear that no doubt should be cast on it as I think the Court’s opinion does. But if this Court is to exercise jurisdiction in this case and hold, despite the fact that the state court’s decree did not adjudicate any such question, that the new successor trustees cannot constitutionally operate the park in accordance with Senator Bacon’s will, then I think that the Court should explicitly state that the question of reversion to his heirs is controlled by state law and remand the case to the Georgia Supreme Court to decide that question.
Nothing that I have said is to be taken as implying that Baconsfield Park could at this time be operated by successor trustees on a racially discriminatory basis. Questions of equal protection of all people without discrimination on account of color are of paramount importance in this Government dedicated to equal justice for all. We can accord that esteemed principle the respect *315it is due, however, without distorting the constitutional structure of our Government by taking away from the States that which is their due.