The Butler's Child

by Lewis M. Steel

  I asked myself whether the article was worth it. Bob’s legal program had suffered what appeared to be a mortal blow, and no one was burning the telephone wires to offer me another job. My fellow staff members would have to scramble to find work.

  Bob quickly accepted a grant from Columbia University, and I left as soon as possible. I helped out on my cases where I could. In New York City the IS 201 and Ocean Hill–Brownsville community school boards had asked me to continue representing them, and I readily agreed. In the Cincinnati school case, I worked with Norris Muldrow to prepare another Supreme Court petition, which the Court refused to accept after I left when it arrived just one day late due to a snowstorm. But most of my cases fell helter-skelter into the laps of local NAACP or American civil liberties attorneys to handle as best they could. It was a terrible ending to my years at the NAACP, made tolerable only by Bob’s support as well as the support and warm words of all our legal staff. You only wrote what we thought, they told me.

  14

  Bill Rutherford Dies and a New Beginning

  While I was at the NAACP, Bill Rutherford died. I don’t even know the date, but it must have been in the spring of 1967. Those were pressure-packed years at the NAACP. The Northern school cases were in full swing, with Deal v. Cincinnati Board of Education losing in the appellate court, but allowing both sides to add additional evidence to the record with regard to our intent claim back at the district-court level, and new school segregation cases starting in Kokomo and South Bend. Some of the big Northern demonstration cases, among them Hartford and Springfield, were tried during this time, as was Ethridge v. Rhodes. There were college demonstration cases, labor cases, and a housing case in 1968.

  I think the real reason I don’t remember exactly when Bill died is that it was such a complicated loss for me, and so much was going on in my life; what with endless cases and a new baby arriving every two years, I was able to blot out the hole his death left in my life. But that is no excuse. I recently asked my brother, John, if he knew where Bill was buried or if we helped make the arrangements, and he didn’t know either. What sticks in my memory is that I remember the pain of Bill slowly pulling back from the easy way we had when I was a child. I remember going from Skippy to Lewis to Mr. Lewis. I remember the hurt I felt when Bill seemed to decide that my metamorphosis was complete, and that I had emerged from the cocoon of Warner wealth as “one of them.” Perhaps that was the way he expressed anger. Or was it just disappointment, or even just a fatalistic sense of the way things were? I was never sure.

  In retrospect it all made perfect sense. Bill started calling me Mr. Lewis because he thought that’s what I was becoming. For all the warmth between us, it was a one-way relationship. I never asked him about his personal life. It seemed as off-limits as that little house he inhabited in the dark copse behind our place at Crail Farm when the war started. I vaguely recall having brought up his time with the Seabees, and hearing about the endless drudgery and heat, but that conversation barely touched the surface.

  Bill would always ask what I was doing, and I would tell him. He knew all about me, but I didn’t even know the basics about him. Had he been married before? I have no idea. Nor did I know what his family was like or how he grew up or if he had any children. All I knew about him was the way he had looked out for me when I was a child, and that he lived with Lorraina in our maid’s room and then at my grandparents’, and that he was a kindly, gentle man.

  I remember rushing to Mt. Sinai Hospital when I heard he had a terrible accident and was in critical condition. When I arrived my parents were already there. My father told me that Bill had died.

  “He’d been drinking,” my father said, “and fell down the back service stairs at the Hampshire House.”

  I had not faced death like that before, and I tried to hold back my tears. I don’t remember what else we said. We didn’t talk about where the funeral would be.

  Although I loved Bill, I felt that neither of us knew how to handle my growing up. I certainly did not know how to keep alive my attachment to him. Instead I allowed the distance to grow between us. It was easier with Lorraina. She was a woman, and I could hug her. But he was a man, and we shook hands until he stopped doing that. For all my sense of what I wanted Bill to call me and how I wanted him to see me—as a civil rights lawyer fighting for him—I obsessed over the idea that I had treated him as if he didn’t count, as if he were only a servant, and in part I did exactly that. But both of us had been prisoners of our generation. For my part I did not know how to treat him as a valued parent figure and show my concern for his welfare as he had shown for mine.

  After Bill died, Lorraina worked for my grandparents for a few months, then returned to her family in North Carolina. I don’t know whose idea that was, or whether she received any retirement money. I was more than content to hide behind my second-son status in the family and not ask those hard questions. That said, ours was an emotional good-bye. Kitty and I corresponded with her for a few years—again the flow of information was generally one-sided. We sent her pictures of our children, but there were never pictures of Duby and Sister Baby sent back. Nor did we ask for them. It was that tacit contract between the help and the helped. She didn’t send them, and we didn’t ask her to. Then Lorraina wrote to say she had remarried—a prosperous gentleman. She seemed content with her new life, volunteering at her church. When Grandma Bessie died a few years later, I was upset to find that she had left only a pittance to Lorraina in her will, so I engineered an improvement, but whatever the amount was, I knew it was not nearly enough for all that Bill and Lorraina had done for our family, much less for the love they had given me. But family loyalty—to my family—won out, and I was unwilling to make too much of a fuss about it. Lorraina wrote that she appreciated being considered in the will. Soon afterward our relationship slipped away.

  * * *

  “Don’t take it personally.” That’s what John Morsell had said about my being fired.

  It was hard not to take it personally. Not only was I cast out, I lost my opportunity to argue in the Supreme Court for the first time. The case was Hunter v. Erickson. I learned about it while preparing a school case for trial in Columbus, Ohio.

  An Ohio supreme court seven-to-nothing decision had upheld an amendment to Akron’s city charter requiring majority voter approval on any ordinance that regulated real estate transactions on the basis of race, religion, national origin, or ancestry. That meant that a 1964 local fair-housing ordinance was no longer effective, which was how a real estate agent felt safe refusing to show one of the plaintiffs a house the owners said they wouldn’t sell to a black buyer. As I saw it, the Akron ordinance violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, because it only required voter approval of Akron’s ordinances when fair housing was involved, making blacks face a double legislative process.

  Bob Carter agreed when I told him about the case. He told me I could argue it if the Supreme Court decided to review the decision. After I got fired, Bob said there was no way the NAACP would allow me to argue Hunter. So in November 1968, we traveled to Washington, DC, together, and I sat next to Bob while he argued.

  Mulling over my prospects, I wondered if I would ever again get the opportunity to argue before the Supreme Court. Two months later after the argument, on January 20, 1969, the Court announced its decision. We had won, eight to one.

  In the weeks and months that followed my departure from the NAACP, I tried to write a book, working in a little former maid’s room on the first floor of our apartment building, I wrote about my work at the NAACP. But my writing lacked distance, and was mostly an explosion of frustration at how judges treated our cases. At the same time I worked as a volunteer on a few cases. One involved the IS 201 complex of public schools. After the parents and administrators were ordered to stay out of the IS 201 schools, I had appealed. The appeal was heard in the court where I was sworn into the bar and where Bob had argued Gaynor v. Rockefeller. I had asked the court to
rule that we were entitled to present witnesses at a court hearing before the judge had entered a final order locking my clients out. But at the argument the appellate judges made it clear that was not going to happen. The bored stares mixed with frowns among the five judges pushed me to escalate my complaints: “To accept the statements of white administrators without a hearing while refusing to listen to blacks is racist,” I goaded them.

  “What does race have to do with it?” one of the judges demanded.

  “There is no other reason why the trial judge favored one side over the other without holding a hearing,” I answered.

  The judge responded with a dismissive shrug, and something snapped inside me. I pointed to the ceiling where Chief Justice Taney still floated above the proceedings: “In any courtroom that honors the man who wrote the Dred Scott decision, I am entitled to raise the issue of racism,” I argued.

  My sister-in-law Mary Duffy was in the courtroom.

  “Does he always do that?” she asked Kitty.

  Kitty knew this was not one of my better moments. She just smiled.

  I was shaking as I walked out of the courtroom. I had acted badly and knew we were going to lose. Immediately I felt a wave of something like remorse overcome me. “They” were whites like me, and I had not helped the cause by allowing my emotions to control my tongue. A few weeks after the argument, the judges rejected my appeal in a five-to-nothing decision without writing a word of explanation. That same year, 1969, the state legislature passed new community-control legislation with the blessings of the UFT. The new law watered down the authority of the local school boards so drastically that meaningful community control became a dead issue in New York City for at least a decade.

  In the fall Bob and his wife, Gloria, invited Kitty and me to a cocktail party at their co-op, which was in a middle-class Harlem development. There Bob introduced me to Henry diSuvero. Hank, as he was often called, was a civil liberties lawyer who had been butting heads with prosecutors in Newark following a massive explosion of black anger that erupted there in 1967, leaving scores dead and the city occupied by the National Guard.

  Hank wanted to start a radical law firm, and we talked late into the night, drawn to each other. We decided to join forces. It all happened very fast. Two other recruits, Gretchen Oberman and Daniel Meyers, were ready to join. We would represent Vietnam draft resisters, take on the criminal defense of political demonstrators, war critics, draft dodgers, and anyone else who espoused our politics and was willing to pay a fee. Sometimes, we agreed, our clients would not need to pay a fee if they could not afford it.

  The infant law firm of diSuvero Meyers Oberman & Steel set up shop in a cramped two-room suite a block west of the criminal courthouse. We agreed to allocate pay based on need—that is, if there was anything left after paying the rent and a shared secretary’s salary.

  This was precisely the change I needed. At the NAACP the cases generally dragged on and on; with the appeals, we often ended up on the losing side. Prior to taking the leap, I had not thought about what it meant to migrate from being a civil rights lawyer entirely focused on racial issues to becoming a criminal lawyer focused on war-related as well as racial issues, and other matters that might come in the door.

  Little did I foresee where getting my feet wet in the criminal courts would lead me. Long after the utopian law firm of diSuvero Meyers Oberman & Steel was history, I would still be immersed in high-visibility criminal cases, many involving black defendants charged with murder.

  * * *

  Not that joining the di Suvero firm, however, meant abandoning a more traditional civil rights model based on trying to expand the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in the field of housing. Far from it.

  My NAACP colleague and close friend Dick Bellman had become general counsel to a nonprofit organization called the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (NCDH), which was set up by two friends of Bob Carter—Jack Woods and Ed Routledge—a black-white team with expertise in the field. Their mission was to open up the suburbs to African Americans. Dick’s main job was to file lawsuits in the federal courts against municipalities that employed their authority over land use to block the construction of racially integrated subsidized-housing projects. Soon Dick had started lawsuits around the country, and he was desperate for help. I became his sidekick, working with him on cases from coast to coast, getting paid a nominal amount for each day I worked.

  While working on Dick’s housing cases, I was still functioning in a legal world I knew. Like most federal courts, whether tucked away in the upstairs floors of central city art deco post office buildings built as public works projects during the 1930s Depression years, or in newer stand-alone U.S. courthouses, all were well-appointed polished wood and gleaming marble temples to the dignified practice of law.

  In the fall of 1969 the di Suvero firm opened its doors. Mary Kaufman, who ran the city National Lawyers Guild (NLG) mass defense office, which coordinated volunteers defending militant community groups, asked if we would represent a group called the Young Lords. The Lords were a newly formed militant Puerto Rican group taking a page from the Black Panther form of civil rights activism. They were using direct-action tactics, trying to organize East Harlem. One of their goals was to get the city’s sanitation department to remove mountains of garbage that were often left to rot. The Young Lords also started a free breakfast program for local children. Needing a place to operate, they focused on the First Spanish Methodist Church on 111th Street. The minister who ran the church, however, objected, and when the Young Lords became insistent, he called the police. A short time later the Lords took over the church and started using it for its breakfast program as well as a day-care center, and a free clothing box. Again the minister called the police. When they surrounded the building, a standoff ensued.

  In the winter of 1969 I went to the church with a small group of NLG lawyers, crossing the police lines. We met with the young leadership committee, which included two men who went on to notable careers in television—Felipe Luciano and Pablo Guzmán. Also present was another leader, Juan Gonzales. Because there had already been deadly cop shoot-outs with the Black Panthers and the place was surrounded, we warned the leadership that weapons possession risked the police attacking with overwhelming force. It was only a matter of time before the police would tire of the stalemate and take back the church, we said, and we hoped there would be no bloodshed.

  Shortly after our visit the cops did retake the church. The Young Lords leadership was arrested and charged with assaults on the police and resisting arrest. Fulfilling our promise, we formed a team, including among others Jerry Rivera—later to become the TV personality Geraldo—to provide representation. Because I had trial experience as an NAACP lawyer, I played a principal role. As luck would have it, the case was assigned to a progressive Hispanic judge, who allowed us to engage in lengthy cross-examinations of the arresting police officers at what was called a preliminary hearing to determine whether there was enough evidence to hold any of the Young Lords on felony or misdemeanor charges.

  The hearings took place in a dingy courtroom of the ground floor of the multistory Manhattan criminal courthouse at 100 Centre Street, which was swarming with people charged with crimes, their friends and families, cops, assistant district attorneys, as well as court personnel and other hangers-on. Almost everyone in the building who was not in uniform or wearing a suit was a person of color, either black or brown. They spilled into crowded bathrooms, grabbed a bite in a pathetic little alcove that served what passed for food, and mostly waited for their cases to be called.

  The cops had done a lousy job of documenting whom they had arrested and why, and after a few days of our legal team questioning the arresting officers, the judge threw out most of the charges, allowing only low-level misdemeanors. A few plea bargains later all the cases were disposed of, with no one serving any jail time. As NLG lawyers we had done a fine job. From my perspective I had gotten my f
eet wet in New York’s criminal courts and come away thinking I could handle its rough-and-tumble. As for the Young Lords, they were out on the streets again, but their movement had been weakened. Perhaps, however, that was not such a bad thing for its members, as the FBI and local police forces began to crack down and wipe out the Black Panthers. Like the Weather Underground and other more violence-prone organizations such as the Black Liberation Army—some of whose members engaged in open warfare with the police until they were killed or captured—they had utterly misjudged their ability either to gain widespread support or to withstand the power of the country’s law enforcement agencies. In the end, therefore, the few lawyers representing the members of such groups could do little more than try to save or lessen the sentences of those that survived.

  15

  Tony Maynard

  At around four in the morning of April 3, 1967, a white Marine sergeant, Michael Kroll, dressed in his uniform and recently back from the Vietnam War, sought to start a fight with a black man and his white companion in a seedy area of New York City’s Greenwich Village. He was blown away by a shotgun blast and died instantly.

  The killing was big news. Mayor John Lindsay latched on to the shooting. Kroll was a hero. New York was crime city. Lindsay had bad poll numbers and a reputation for being soft on crime. Voicing outrage, the mayor demanded that the police quickly apprehend the killer and bring him to justice.

  That, however, was not so easy. The cops had no weapon, no fingerprints, and no suspects. Here is what they knew: A short time before Kroll was shot, a white navy boatswain’s mate, Robert Crist, also in uniform, had a confrontation in Greenwich Village with a black man, John Barnhardt. According to Crist, who later described himself as intoxicated, Barnhardt propositioned him. Crist was outraged. Barnhardt attempted to get away. Crist chased him and knocked him down near the Blue Onion, a joint on West Third Street. As Crist walked away he was approached by another black man, who was with a white companion. The black man, whom Crist later described as being eighteen to twenty years old, of medium build, and five feet ten or eleven inches tall, berated him for striking an older and smaller man. Knoll drove up as the black and white men walked away. Crist got into Kroll’s car, and the pair decided to seek out the black and white men and finish the argument. When they caught up to the two men, the Marine jumped out of the car and confronted the black man who had berated Crist, Kroll disregarded the black man’s warning to stay away, and was hit by a shotgun blast to his face. The only other description of the black man who fired the shot by the Village nightlife characters in the area was that the killer looked like Martin Luther King, Jr.