News-Record.com

If Jawn Sandifer had said yes to that bully of a caddy master,he likely wouldn't have become the lawyer who won a major civil rights case in 1950 outlawing passenger train dining car segregation.

The caddy master for one of the country clubs - it was either the Greensboro Country Club or Sedgefield, Sandifer's wife says - stood outside the black school Sandifer attended and angrily urged the boys to skip school to caddy.

"My husband always said 'no,'" says Elsa Kruger Sandifer. "As a result, the caddy master always called him 'school boy.'"

Sandifer, who grew up a short walk from N.C. A&T State University, wanted out of Greensboro after finishing in the first class to graduate from Dudley High School in the early 1930s.

He went to Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte and then Howard Law School in Washington and never returned to Greensboro except for occasional visits to see family.

His wife says he was bitter about the segregation he endured in Greensboro, especially walking a distance to school with school buses passing him loaded with white children. Or being able to select only from the meager number of books housed in the Carnegie Negro Library that black people were required to use.

Sandifer, who later became a judge in New York City, died last week at 92 in Saratoga, Fla., where he lived in retirement. Death was unexpected because he had remained active. Doctors found a small tumor on his colon, removed it and thought he would be fine. But a heart attack killed him just as he was preparing to leave the hospital.

He lived in Saratoga on Golf Course Road and played golf twice a week with his wife until the week before he died. That was the one positive influence the caddy master had on him. Totting bags for well-to-do white men introduced him to golf.

In the Henderson vs. United State railroad case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandifer pointed out the humiliation that black passengers suffered once they crossed the Mason-Dixon line.

"Even if a black person bought in New York a first-class ticket on a train that included dining car privileges," he told the New York Times in a 1995 interview, "once that train left Washington and went south, he or she could not eat in the dining car. You could walk in, every seat could be empty, and there was no room for you. At best, they'd put you beind a curtain."

The High Court agreed, voting unamimously to strike down the law. Four years later, the same court cited Henderson versus U.S. as a precedent in its Brown versus Board of Education case, which abolished public school segregation.

In Greensboro, Sandifer was known as "John," but he didn't like being just another John, his widow says. He changed the spelling to Jawn while at Johnson C. Smith.

His father, Charles, died when Sandifer was four, leaving his wife, Nettie, a chambermaid at a downtown hotel, with eight children. She had help raising them from her oldest child, Herbert, a hotel baker.

Kruger-Sandifer says as best as she can recollect all but one sibling, Edgar, finished college. And Edgar made good, acquiring considerable amounts of land in the Greensboro area.

Sandifer's brother, Paul, led Dudley to its first divisional football championship in 1937 and later became well known as a referee of area high school football and basketball games and an umpire in baseball. Paul Sandifer's feats earned him a place in the Dudley Sports Hall of Fame. He died in 2004.