Like many I watched with deep interest Malcolm X’s evolution, which included reaching out to Dr. King, and read with interest his words in The Autobiography of Malcolm X after he visited Mecca in 1964:
During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug)—while praying to the same God—with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the “white” Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan and Ghana.
We were truly all the same (brothers)—because their belief in one God had removed the “white” from their minds, the “white” from their behavior, and the “white” from their attitude.
I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man—and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their “differences” in color.
His assassination in New York City in 1965 cut short the transformation of another hero who gave hope to Black children and to America. His wife and children who witnessed their husband’s and father’s killing carried on. Malcolm X’s transformation to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz left all Americans much to think about if we are to grow beyond racism as he did.
GETTING READY FOR MISSISSIPPI
During my Yale years I shared a platform with Dr. King at Wesleyan University and in August of 1963 stood with uncontained excitement and tears with Bob Moses, Julian Bond, Ella Baker, and over two hundred thousand others as Dr. King told all America about his and our dream at the March on Washington. Renewed and buoyed by that gathering I headed north for my last year of intensive preparation to become a civil rights lawyer.
God was headed south to Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and Louisiana and North Carolina and I went along for the scariest, most exhilarating, most challenging years any human being could hope for. On the way to Mississippi, though, I stopped for a year in New York City to place myself under the tutelage of an extraordinarily gifted and committed band of attorneys at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) headquartered then at 10 Columbus Circle.
Providentially LDF had created the Earl Warren Fellowship Program named after the great Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who had led the high court to unanimously decree public school segregation unconstitutional. The program began the year I graduated from law school to help young attorneys seeking to practice in the South. Julius Chambers and I were the first two Earl Warren Fellows. He was the first Black editor-in-chief of the Law Review at the University of North Carolina Law School, later succeeded Jack Greenberg as head of LDF, and is now chancellor of North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina. We received a year’s rigorous training at LDF’s New York City headquarters under Jack Greenberg, James M. Nabrit, III, Constance Baker Motley, Derrick Bell, Norman Amaker, Leroy Clarke, Mike Meltsner, and Frank Hefron. I learned an enormous amount about practical lawyering from these fine lawyers whose standards of excellence I have not seen bettered. We also were exposed to leading law professors and civil rights lions of the time and adopted into a network of LDF cooperating attorneys throughout the South and country who were litigating civil rights cases in their communities with LDF technical and financial assistance. These relationships nurtured Julius’ and my confidence for the tough battles ahead and became a lifelong community of support and inspiration.
I learned more that year in LDF’s practical school of lawyering about the real workings of the legal system than I had in the prior three years in law school. I also learned that the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slowly. One of my first assignments at LDF was to draft the brief for college students like myself who had been arrested for sitting in at lunch counters throughout the South. Some of these cases had wound their way on appeal up to the U.S. Supreme Court several years later. Their eventual successful resolution lifted the legal cloud hanging over my own head from my arrest on March 15, 1960 for sitting in at the City Hall Cafeteria in Atlanta for which courtly Donald Hollowell was my LDF cooperating attorney. I did not return to that cafeteria until 1988 when I visited Andy Young who was by then mayor of the city of Atlanta.
In the 1960s, there was a demonstrated need for more lawyers to do the trenchwork for civil rights. As moving and important as the Montgomery bus boycott was in emotionally galvanizing a city and a nation to end decades of segregated public buses, the ultimate victory was in the federal courts where such segregation was outlawed. At a time when many movement feet were getting tired after countless days of walking and hitching rides and young Dr. King was becoming discouraged and worn down by incessant White harassment including the bombing of his home and obscene phone threats, the role of lawyers was crucial to the movement’s success.
I was proud to join LDF’s ranks with its trailblazing legal legacy to serve as part of the backup legal machinery for those demonstrating in the streets. My Earl Warren Fellowship provided three years of de-dining support after the year in New York City. A full salary of $7200 for the first year enabled me to live comfortably in Jackson, Mississippi where I opened an office to handle the anticipated onslaught of cases from Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964. I opened up a satellite office in Memphis, Tennessee to service anticipated northern Mississippi cases in the law firm of civil rights attorneys Z. Alexander Looby and Russell Sugarman. Hundreds of White middle-class students soon brought visibility to the too long invisible struggles of local Black citizens for simple justice and the right to vote. I finally was going to witness on a sustained basis the unbelievably courageous efforts of Bob Moses and SNCC workers and local young people like June Johnson, Hollis Watkins, Willie Peacock, and Curtis Hayes to gain the vote; of courageous Black parents like Mae Bertha Carter and sisters Winson and Dovie Hudson and others who risked all to desegregate Mississippi public schools; of Fannie Lou Hamer who let her light shine everywhere she went; of Hartman Turnbow in Holmes County whose elocution of wisdom is not capturable on paper and who took no guff from anybody White or Black; of E. W. “Pops” Steptoe in fearsome Amite County whom I used to visit with Bob Moses; and of Amzie Moore—wise, warm, calm, helpful Amzie—who took youthful freedom fighters into his home and heart and showed us the rounds and rules for survival.
All of these great Black foot soldiers in the army of justice awaited me on arrival in Mississippi and sustained me all the while I lived there.
The White lawyers were not as welcoming.
8
THE MISSISSIPPI YEARS
WHEN I FIRST WALKED into federal court in Jackson, Mississippi in 1964, not a single one of the stony-faced White men sitting around the table would shake my hand as I went around the table to greet them in segregationist Federal District Judge Harold Cox’s chambers. Their shock at my presence and the strained silence made me feel I’d stumbled into forbidden territory and a closed club. And I had. But I was uncertain whether it was my gender or race or the combination that struck these men speechless and immobile. Although Constance Baker Motley had blazed the way earlier, I never saw another local female attorney during my four years of practice in Mississippi.
Over the next months and years as the initial shock at my presence wore off some of these men tried to hold on to dying ideologies and modes of control and to fit me into a comfortable niche. I was surprised a few months after my chilly federal courthouse welcome to answer a knock on my front door one evening and to see an opposing prosecuting attorney grinning sheepishly, there to pay what he announced was a personal visit. He wrongly assumed that the sexual interest of an older, unattractive, married professional White opponent would be welcomed by a twenty-four-year-old Black female lawyer whose mind was stayed on freedom and justice and certainly not on adultery or him. He was not invited into my home. Other White lawyers,
judges, and law enforcement officials attempted to separate me from my poor Black clients with “you and them” comments at counsel table. Still others pretended I simply did not exist which required regularly choreographed dances of combat. Grenada, Mississippi Sheriff Suggs Ingram would lock his jail doors if he saw me coming to visit or to get a client out of jail and let me ring and ring with his back turned to me through the glass front door. I’d have to resort to a telephone call to angrily insist I be allowed to enter and visit my clients.
Over time and after many trials before him federal Judge Harold Cox thawed a bit. However, I never forgave him for ordering Neshoba County Sheriff Rainey and Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, convicted of conspiring to kill civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in the summer of 1964, to sit down next to me at my counsel table in his Meridian courtroom. I was there waiting to defend Ebony magazine against a libel charge brought by a young White Mississippian incorrectly identified in the magazine as having attended an interracial gathering. Perhaps Judge Cox thought he was chastening Rainey and Price by sitting them with me or simply did not think about how I would feel at all. I was outraged and felt ashamed of the hatred they provoked in me. I felt their evil well up in me and realized that I was capable of wanting to see them harmed. I profoundly oppose capital punishment not only because there is no definitive proof that it is a deterrent and because it has been disproportionately applied against Blacks and the poor and has taken the lives of innocent people, but because “vengeance is mine” saith the Lord. I was ashamed and scared of my vengeful spirit.
I’ll never forget the day I visited a young Black death row client in a rural Georgia prison accused of killing a White farmer. Coming off the elevator I nearly bumped into the ugly white wooden electric chair never out of sight of those on death row awaiting final judgment. Hours later I was in the library of an Atlanta courthouse researching how many Blacks and Whites had been executed in Georgia’s history when a loud, rude White man burst in grinning and shouting, “Hot damn, they got him.” He was referring to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas. I rushed with others to the nearest television set and could hardly get away quickly enough from the hateful glee of some of those surrounding me.
Being the first Black woman lawyer in Mississippi had its advantages as well as drawbacks. It allowed me to speak in tones to White sheriffs and policemen that most Black males never could have dared and gotten away with. My three brave brother attorneys—R, Jess Brown, Carsie Hall, and Jack Young—for years the only legal assistance available for Mississippi Black citizens seeking to challenge the status quo—tolerantly guided my fearless youthful steps. My admiration for their endurance and survival skills and commitment deepened as I pondered their years of chipping away at the walls of segregation without the glare of outside media or much compensation. They are among the many unsung heroes and heroines who sowed seeds of racial justice that led to gardens of righteous change all over our nation. Among the hundreds of cooperating civil rights attorneys melded together by the Legal Defense Fund to challenge segregation, Jess, Jack, Carsie, and Arkansas lawyer Wiley Branton, whose ancestors helped found Leflore County, Mississippi (the county seat of which is Greenwood), taught me how to survive and navigate the intricacies of Mississippi’s feudal legal system which no textbook could teach and instructed me in the social etiquette of lawyering.
Mississippi had a long residency requirement (fifteen months) designed to keep “outsiders” like me from practicing in the state. You were automatically admitted to the Bar if you had attended the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”) Law School. I technically served as Jess’s, Jack’s, and Carsie’s law clerk in order not to be charged with illegally practicing law without a license while I fulfilled my residency. I did a huge amount of work aided by volunteer lawyers who visited during the hot summer of 1964 including Ed Koch and kind Harvard law professor Mark de Wolfe Howe. Jess, Jack, and Carsie signed all the papers and appeared with me in court to introduce me as their colleague. Brilliant University of Pennsylvania law professor Tony Amsterdam (now at New York University Law School) would drive down to Mississippi, write a slew of briefs, give wise counsel about legal strategies, and drive back to Philadelphia.
After the residency period—and a three-day exam for which there was no course and in which one could be asked to state verbatim any statute among the many volumes of the Mississippi code—I did get into the Bar. Happily I had a secret angel in the form of one of Judge Cox’s law clerks, Ed Wright, a Harvard Law School graduate who shared his notes and intelligence about the most frequently asked questions, issues, and statutes.
I began to understand on my first visit to Greenwood that I played a role beyond what I perceived. I did not realize how much I carried in my persona the dreams, expectations, and hopes of young and old Black citizens of Mississippi. I’ll never forget the disappointed looks of those who heard there was a Black lady lawyer in town (I was actually only a law student) and who came to look for and at me. When they saw me in blue jeans and an old sweatshirt they were crestfallen. I never wore jeans in public again in Mississippi and made it a point to try to meet the expectations of poor Black Mississippians of how a proper lady lawyer should dress and act. I wanted them to be proud of me and cared enough about them to look my best, prepare my best, and fight for them as hard as I could.
Practicing law in Mississippi during the extraordinary years between 1964 and 1968 taught me about the enormously high costs of social change in violence, economic reprisals, harassment, fear, and lives lost.
I grew up next door to the Morris Funeral Home which I hated. I was traumatized at a very young age by a cruel older woman who pulled me inside the embalming room to view cadavers before they had been prepared for public viewing. The long-term nightmares this provoked were not repeated until a day in Jackson in 1964 when a sheet was pulled back in a mortuary revealing the body of a young Black man-child shot to death.
Slight of build, an innocent who had arrived in Jackson looking for work, the young man, around twenty, was walking down the street at the wrong time in the wrong skin and was picked up allegedly in a police dragnet hauling in Black males. He was jailed and allegedly slain in self-defense by a bullet at close range, by several White police officers in a tiny jail cell I later visited with disbelieving eyes, mind, and heart. They alleged he attacked them and could not be otherwise subdued although he was unarmed and outnumbered.
I had not expected this experience when asked by a local NAACP official if I would accompany the young dead man’s parents to view him and take burial clothes. Outraged by the story I was told about the senseless snuffing out of this young life, I readily agreed to go, but assumed I would sit in the waiting room. There are times though when one cannot sit outside. How could I say to these trembling, shocked, scared poor parents or to that all-business mortician that I did not want to go further—that I was afraid?
I did not feel again the chill of unjust death I experienced that day until I visited Auschwitz about four years later with my husband. I could not stop shaking from the sense of stark cold evil as I stood before the mounds of eyeglasses and toys and hair that had once belonged to living sacred human beings including children.
In my early Mississippi lawyering days, it was not an unusual experience to visit jailed civil rights clients and to find them beaten or abused, or to hear bombs go off in Jackson. I never cranked up my car in the morning without leaving the driver’s door open having been instructed that if a bomb had been planted you had a chance that way of being thrown from the car injured rather than killed. The occasional random bullet I realized had whizzed by into the wall I’d just passed was somehow reassuring and motivating rather than paralyzing—for me proof of a higher presence to which I could submit come what may. I remembered Miz Tee’s “When it’s your time, it’s your time, when it’s not, it’s not.”
I marveled at the courage of those who faced violence and threats
every day. As if yesterday, I see Hosea Williams, a Vietnam veteran on Dr. King’s staff, climbing atop a car in Grenada, Mississippi near nightfall when civil rights demonstrations had been met by a feverish pitch of White violence and resistance. I looked out at the White police mob on one side of the street and at the mob of White citizens on the other surrounding the Black demonstrators (I chose to stand closer to the citizen mob) while Hosea sang and made us sing away our fears with “This Little Light of Mine, I’m Gonna Let It Shine.”
Lessons learned about not being paralyzed by fear or deterred by violence were not the only ones. Practicing law in Mississippi taught me the essential interplay between local empowerment strategies and strong national legal frameworks which had to be well enforced to ensure equal opportunity in the face of entrenched, resistant state bureaucracies. It taught the inextricable nexus between race and poverty and the limitations of political power without economic power. It taught the importance of follow-through and tenacity. My job as a lawyer could not end when I got a child into a “desegregated” school if his or her parents’ names were tacked up in flyers on the telephone posts the next day and their houses were shot into, their jobs and credit lost, their sharecropper shacks and food commodities taken away from them, or their children suspended from or harassed in school. These lessons led to the founding of the parent body of the Children’s Defense Fund.
But the biggest lessons I learned in Mississippi which I wish everyone could get as forcefully as I did were positive. They were about the strength and resiliency of the human spirit and the ability of determined people to resist and overcome evil through personal and collective will. Never have I felt the company of such a great cloud of witnesses for divine and human justice willing to risk life and limb and shelter so that their children could be free and better educated. I thank God for Medgar Evers and Bob Moses and Fannie Lou Hamer and Vernon Dahmer, for Mae Bertha Carter and Winson and Dovie Hudson, and Aaron Henry, Annie Devine, and Victoria Gray, Jake Ayers, and a legion of others who put a bigger cause ahead of self.
Lanterns Page 10
