William C. Keady papers

Judge William Colbert Keady was a native of Greenville, Mississippi. He attended college and law school at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, before returning to Greenville to practice law. In 1940 he was elected to the Mississippi State Legislature, serving three years in the State House of Representatives followed by two years in the State Senate. He returned to practicing law in Greenville in 1946. There, he remained involved in Democratic politics, serving as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1960. In 1968, he was nominated by President Lyndon B. Johnson to serve as a U.S. District Court Judge for the Northern District of Mississippi, where he served until his death. In his first years on the federal bench, Keady had the contentious task of enforcing the Supreme Court's plans for school desegregation. However, Keady is best known for his role in a landmark 1972 prison reform court case, Gates v. Collier, a class action lawsuit filed on behalf of the inmates of the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, MS, against the state of Mississippi. Throughout much of the 20th century, Parchman was seen as one of the last vestiges of slavery in the Post-Civil War South, where inmates were segregated by race, forced to perform brutal penal farm work under the abusive trusty system, and live in extremely poor conditions. Keady ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding that the abhorrent living conditions at Parchman were a violation of the inmates' constitutional rights under the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment." In an appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Circuit Court upheld Keady's ruling. The decision had a wide impact on the penal system across the Southeast. The trusty system was abolished at Parchman and at similar prisons across the South, as was racial segregation of inmates. Keady published a memoir of his years on the federal bench called All Rise and died in Jackson in 1989.