In some parts of the country, one is likely to find more black judges on television than in a federal courthouse.

As news has spread of the political firings of eight U.S. attorneys by the Bush administration, another issue related to the integrity of the justice system went all but unnoticed in the news media: during his six year tenure as president, Bush has appointed only 18 African American judges out of 263 appointments to the federal court system.

Throughout the South in particular, the picture is bleak. In nine of 11 states in the South, Bush failed to nominate a single black judge for the 62 vacancies. That includes Texas, where not a single black candidate has been nominated out of the 18 names sent to the Senate since 2001.

Mississippi and Alabama have not had a federal judge of African descent appointed in 20 years. All nine of Bush's appointees in Alabama have been white.

The federal appellate courts — particularly the 4th, 5th and 11th U.S. circuit courts — have been equally disappointing. Out of 75 nominations in these three circuits, not one black judge has emerged in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.

This means that courthouses of the South are not unlike the days of Jim Crow segregation. It is possible for some lawyers never to come before a judge of color over the course of their career.

Latinos, now America's largest minority group, have not fared any better. Bush nominated 11 Hispanics to district court positions in Texas, Florida and Mississippi and one to the 5th Circuit.

One should not be particularly surprised that the GOP displays such antipathy and outright hostility towards people of color in the judiciary. Nevertheless, it is alarming, given that many of the appointees of President Carter are retiring or dying and are not being replaced. During the Carter years, 28 African Americans became district judges, and nine became appellate judges, more than all pervious presidencies combined. This was a time when the judiciary opened up to women, people of color, and those who were previously barred from the process on the whole. While Reagan appointed only seven Black judges to the federal bench, and George H. W. Bush chose 13, Clinton appointed a total of 46.

But there are other factors at play here. Conservative forces are waging a multi-faceted assault on diversity in the legal profession. They are trying to keep people of color and women out of the law schools, out of the law firms, off the bench and out of the profession. Antagonistic towards the gains of the civil rights movement and the Brown decision, and suspicious of the intellectual capabilities of blacks and Latinos, the conservative movement seeks to eliminate affirmative action state by state.

One of the movement's most dependable water boys, Ward Connerly, has decided to wage a "Super Tuesday for equality", targeting nine states—Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma, Nevada, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming and Utah. Five of these states will be targeted for anti-affirmative action ballot propositions in the spirit of California's Prop 209, and Michigan's Prop 2, which eliminated affirmative action in public education, hiring and contracting. Connerly and his wealthy benefactors — including the Scaife, Bradley and Olin Foundations — want to take us back to a time when people of color and women were denied opportunity and kept out of the process. The proof is in the precipitous drop in black and Latino student enrollment at the University of California system following the passage of Prop 209.

Since 209 went into effect a decade ago, at University of California law schools, black and Latino enrollment languishes at just above 3 percent for blacks, down from 6 percent in 1996, and under 8 percent for Latinos, down from 12 percent in 1996. Meanwhile, although California's population is 53 percent people of color, only 17 percent of California attorneys are of color. Yet 71 percent of California's adult prison population is of color, and 85 percent of the juvenile inmates are of color.

And conservative think tanks promote the sham social-scientific propaganda of individuals such as Curt Levey, a conservative activist whose research suggests law firms may violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the federal law prohibiting employment discrimination, if they give minorities special preferences in hiring. And Richard Sander, a UCLA law professor, suggests that elite law firms do themselves a disservice by hiring unqualified minority lawyers.

In this environment, the Federalist Society, the Republican Party and others, have orchestrated a takeover of the courts by pro-corporate, anti-labor, anti-environment, anti-women's rights and anti-civil rights jurists. Sadly, this often means that thoughtful, sensitive legal minds — whether white or of color — need not apply.

And the few conservative judges of color that are allowed through the gates — selected for their obedience to their GOP sponsors and zealous adherence to a regressive political philosophy rather than their qualifications — are often outrageous, radical and out of the mainstream. One could argue that Clarence Thomas, who was selected by Bush I to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, and will never begin to fill his predecessor's shoes, was not even the most qualified black conservative candidate. Yet, Thomas was rewarded, as he built his career doing his part to dismantle the monuments of the civil rights movement.

During the 1980s, when Clarence Thomas headed the EEOC under President Reagan, traditional remedies to discrimination were forsaken. Hiring goals and timetables were eliminated. The agency, whose budget was cut in half at that time, allowed 13,000 age discrimination cases to lapse by failing to investigate them within the legal time limit. And in keeping with the administration's aversion to affirmative action and civil rights enforcement in general, the use of class action suits — which relied on statistical evidence of discrimination — was abandoned.

Although we know of his humble beginnings and Gullah-Geechee roots in rural coastal Georgia, we fail to take from Thomas' narrative any sense of responsibility to his community, any desire to bring down the ladder to allow the rest of us to climb up. He cynically exploited racial imagery during his nomination hearings by claiming to be a victim of a "high-tech lynching". And his record shows no sense of a commitment to racial or social justice (with the exception of his role as co-founder of the Black Student Union at the College of Holy Cross). Today, all four of Justice Thomas' law clerks are white men.

Janice Rodgers Brown, the daughter of a sharecropper in segregated Alabama, was an associate on the California Supreme Court before Bush II appointed her to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. When nominated to California's high court, she was rated "unqualified" by three-fourths of the state bar's examiners.

And her views are extreme. Brown believes that 1937 court decisions upholding minimum-wage laws and New Deal programs marked "the triumph of our own socialist revolution", the culmination of "a particularly skewed view of human nature" that could be "traced from the Enlightenment, through the Terror, to Marx and Engels, to the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937." She once remarked that "today's senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much 'free' stuff as the political system will permit them to extract." Brown told a meeting of the Federalist Society that "where government moves in, community retreats [and] civil society disintegrates." In her view, government leads to "families under siege, war in the streets."

Brown's outrageous viewpoints are reflected in her decisions. In Aguilar v. Avis Rent A Car Systems, Brown's dissent would have sanctioned the use of racial epithets in the workplace, even when they constituted illegal racial harassment under the First Amendment.

In other court opinions, Brown would have barred administrative agencies from awarding compensatory damages in race discrimination cases, and would have struck down a law requiring paint companies to help fund treatment of children exposed to lead paint.

Black jurists such as Thomas and Rodgers succeed because they distance themselves from the communities that produced them. Adherents to the up-from-the-bootstraps mentality favored by their Republican masters, they believe that they made it on their own, and owe nothing to the countless individuals who came before them, the ones who struggled, withstood water hoses, police dogs and billy clubs, and were sometimes martyred to bring about change in American society.

Such individuals stand in marked contrast to the Hon. Thelton Henderson. The first black attorney in Kennedy's justice department, Henderson was sent to the South in the 1960s to monitor civil rights abuses. After Henderson became a federal judge in the Northern District of California, a Carter appointee in 1980, he refused to recuse himself in cases involving racial discrimination amid allegations that a black judge could not be objective in cases involving black plaintiffs.

In the landmark 1995 civil rights case, Madrid v. Gomez, Henderson found that the physical abuse and poor medical care at the infamous Pelican Bay State Prison was unconstitutional. And in 1997, he struck down Prop 209, although the decision was overturned by an appeals court a year later. Following Henderson's Prop 209 ruling, some Republican members of Congress wanted his head on a platter, and made calls for his impeachment. "We've had judges impeached for public drunkenness", said then-Republican House leader and former exterminator Tom DeLay. "Why can't we impeach judges that are drunk with power?"

People such as Judge Henderson are part of a dying breed, noted for their commitment to fairness and justice for the disenfranchised rather than the protection of the powerful and endorsement of the status quo. Henderson's experiences have provided a badly needed perspective on the bench. Without such perspectives, we get the Dred Scott and Plessy decisions. This is why a diverse bench is important, and why Bush and the GOP are whitewashing the courts.

The notion of a neutral and objective judiciary, after all, is a fallacy. Every judge comes to the table with his or her own world view. The question is whether our judges will all have the same demographic, or will reflect the complexities of the nation as a whole. A diverse judiciary ensures that justice is dispensed fairly. Anything less is nothing more than a colonial court.

One can only hope that once the current occupant of the White House has left the building, we can begin the hard work of repairing the damaged institution that is the federal court system, and restore diversity to the judicial branch of government.

David A. Love is an attorney and writer based in Philadelphia who writes for the Progressive Media Project and McClatchy-Tribune News Service. He served as a law clerk to two black federal judges.