Don't forget this story from last year
Md. Attorney General Frosh Overrules 22 Racist Opinions of Predecessors
The 22 rulings, previously rendered unconstitutional by courts, had enabled state agencies to uphold segregation, discriminate against people of color, and deny marriage licenses based on race. While Frosh’s office noted the opinions are not legal, formally overruling them "helps Maryland atone for generations of racist policies." Read his new opinion here.
“The laws were abhorrent and ultimately held to be unconstitutional,” Frosh (D) commented. “We hope that our opinion today will help remove the stain of those earlier, harmful and erroneous works. We will continue to fight to stamp out racism and hate in all of our work for Maryland.”
He started the effort to review these old legal opinions after Virginia’s outgoing attorney general, Democrat Mark Herring, in 2022 overturned 58 legal opinions upholding racial discrimination issued by past attorney generals. Maryland's Office looked at opinions as old as 1916, the first year they were compiled in published volume. “As much as we might prefer otherwise, our research showed that the Office of the Maryland Attorney General was sometimes complicit in the State’s history of racial discrimination,” Frosh wrote.
Some examples of the overruled opinions are: (1) After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled schools could not be segregated by race under the “separate but equal” doctrine, one argued that Maryland could separate Black and White children in trouble with the law and assigned by courts to remedial boarding schools known as “training schools;” and (2) In 1928, Maryland’s attorney general opined a clerk should deny a marriage license to a White man and a woman whose paternal grandparents were Black.
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