“Is this where the maid stays?” she asked.
I caught the innuendo. “No,” I replied nervously. “This is one of our son’s rooms.”
While I continued to worry about the divide between my personal life and work life, my law firm was experiencing its own growing pains. A few years after we opened up in our cramped little suite, Dan Meyers’s father, Sam, the president of the local United Auto Workers (UAW) union, moved it across the street into a small four-story 1840s warehouse building. The UAW rented the second floor. The floors above were set back and about half the size. Henry, Dan, Gretchen, and I pronounced the third floor perfect for a lefty law firm like ours. Long and narrow, it had windows only in the front and rear, and was wide enough for two offices at each end, a reception area in the front behind the offices there, a small library-conference room in the middle, a file room, and even an associate’s office for the law student we had hired. Access was by a creaky freight elevator or stairs. The rent was dirt cheap, so we took a long-term lease.
For almost twenty years I occupied that space. It was a second home. But my law partnerships were short lived. First Gretchen dropped out of the partnership. Then Henry moved to Los Angeles and started a progressive law school called the People’s College of Law. Dan moved out next, and two labor lawyers, Gene Eisner and Richard Levy, rented the front offices.
Gene and Richard represented progressive unions, including District 65 of the Distributive Workers of America and the local Store Workers Union. I joined them in the seventies and got my feet wet representing their organization drives and arbitrations. I also continued working with Dick Bellman, who moved into our office and joined the firm a year later.
Eisner Levy Steel & Bellman broke up in 1981, and Dick and I took over the entire floor, eventually expanding our firm by bringing in Susan Ritz and then Miriam Clark.
In the 1990s Miriam and I represented black corrections officers in a class action against the New Jersey Department of Corrections for condoning and sometimes participating in a pattern of racial harassment. It was a long way from twenty years earlier and the catastrophe at Attica. But now there were black guards who were treated with contempt. They routinely received the worst assignments no matter their seniority. The prison parking lots were full of cars belonging to white guards emblazoned with Ku Klux Klan emblems.
Initially the department’s equal employment opportunity officer, Frank Budd, a black man who had been an Olympic track star and a Philadelphia Eagles football player, had recommended discipline for the most outrageous among the offending white guards, but when he saw that enforcement was not in the cards, he became a much-despised cover-up artist. We had warned our plaintiffs that they should expect retaliation, and they had assured us they could handle whatever was thrown at them. Sadly the pressure got to our lead plaintiff, who committed suicide. Fortunately our guards didn’t blink. After many months, working with a skilled mediator, we entered into a settlement designed to ensure appropriate discipline for racist guards, fair treatment for black guards, and a compensation package for our class as well as our attorneys’ fees for the many long hours we devoted to the case.
Another significant case came to us from Marty Needleman, who ran a federally funded legal office called the Brooklyn Legal Services Corporation. A Hispanic nonprofit organization called the Southside Fair Housing Committee (SFHC) needed representation to fight the takeover of a huge parcel of cleared land in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn by the Hasidic congregation Yetev Lev Satmar, whose adherents were known locally as Satmars. The history of that land takeover stretched back many years. In 1967 New York City designated a huge area of Williamsburg for urban renewal. People of many different nationalities and ethnicities were all squeezed together there in what urban-renewal officials designated as substandard housing, including a large Puerto Rican community and a Hasidic population. The land was condemned and cleared. Then the city began to sell off the parcels. The buyers were all Hasidic groups, including the Satmars, which built yeshivas, or schools, that enrolled only Orthodox Jewish children.
SFHC protested the city’s sale of the last urban-renewal parcel, on which the Satmars planned to build the largest synagogue in the country, another yeshiva for male Orthodox children only, as well as housing for Orthodox yeshiva teachers. Already on that central square were the house and headquarters of the Satmar grand rabbi. The Puerto Rican community, whose children had played on that land until the Satmars fenced it in, said the square was going to become the Hasidic Vatican.
Needleman wanted us to roll back that last city land sale. The job fell to me, with assists from Susan Ritz; a lawyer from Marty’s office; and an attorney from the Puerto Rican Defense and Education Fund. We attacked the land transfer as a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment clause, which prohibited the government from aiding in the establishment of religion, and under the Fourteenth Amendment, because the enclave would be for an entirely white Jewish group. Our federal judge was Eugene Nickerson. As a young man, he had written an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education.
“What luck,” I said to Marty.
“Don’t be too sure,” he replied. “Nickerson was the chief executive in Nassau County before becoming a judge and used urban renewal all the time to move out blacks and Puerto Ricans from county land. He is no friend of ours.”
Worried, I called up Mayor David Dinkins’s corporation counsel, Victor Kovner, whom I knew from my Eugene McCarthy days. Kovner held a meeting in his office for Marty and me and his staff, who were defending the sale to the Satmars. I made the pitch, but Kovner put me off.
“The land has been sold,” he said, and the deal was closed. “If a playground will help the Puerto Rican community to the north of the site, we can arrange that.”
We rejected the offer, thanked him for meeting with us, and left.
“I’m not surprised,” Marty whispered as we walked out. “I didn’t think he would help us any more than Nickerson will.”
Marty was right. Nickerson gave us a quick trial. To him the key facts were that the Puerto Rican community didn’t have the money to buy land, the Satmars did, and the sale had taken place. Knowing how strongly the Puerto Rican community felt about the loss of at least a share of the land, we appealed. Once again, however, property rights won out over constitutional rights.
* * *
Two of our most disturbing losses resulted from Dick Bellman’s attempts to incorporate into the New York zoning laws a concept that he and a few like-minded New Jersey lawyers had persuaded the New Jersey Supreme Court to accept: that under the state’s due process and equal protection constitutional mandates, local zoning authorities had to consider the need for low- and moderate-income housing throughout the state, and to ensure that a “fair share” of available land in their jurisdictions was zoned for that purpose. Underlying the New Jersey rulings on a series of cases involving the township of Mount Laurel was the concept that exclusionary zoning that blocked housing for low-income people—and inevitably people of color—was contrary to the overriding purpose of zoning, which was to provide for the public good, not just for the more prosperous classes of the public. Later the New Jersey legislature watered down the state supreme court’s ruling, but at least the final result paid lip service to the “fair share” concept.
To test New York’s zoning laws, Dick teamed up again with Suffolk Housing Services to challenge the town of Brookhaven’s zoning. The town kept all its available land in parcels designated for agricultural use. Any building permit on purchased land required the local zoning authorities to rezone it into the appropriate category. SHS wanted the law changed so that builders would know in advance that they could construct low- and medium-income multifamily housing. Brookhaven had never made any provisions for such housing, so this was a good test case. After Dick lost in the state’s trial court and at the appellate level, I helped him write his brief to the state’s highest court and went to Albany wit
h him for his argument one spring day in 1987. We knew the case was a long shot, as many of New York’s suburban towns practiced economic segregation through zoning and had filed briefs asking the court to reject our arguments. But we thought some judges would ask tough questions, and at least some would have open minds. We were mistaken. The chief judge lectured Dick before he opened his mouth about how wrong our theory was, and the other judges listened in silence when Dick tried to explain. Soon afterward all the judges voted against us, with the one black judge declining to join the majority opinion but writing a narrow concurrence.
One of the court’s main justifications for its ruling was that SHS did not own specific parcels of land it wanted rezoned. So Dick tried again. He represented a group called the Interreligious Coalition on Housing that did have an option on two Brookhaven parcels it wanted rezoned for subsidized garden apartments. The local trial court judge ruled for Dick on one parcel and against him on the other. Dick thought he had a sure winner when both sides appealed to the intermediate appellate court. The appellate division did not agree, and he lost on both parcels.
In the meantime I had become tired of legal commentators opining that the New York Court of Appeals was a liberal court. When it came to civil rights enforcement, it had impeded public school desegregation, blocked substantial damage awards to victims of racial discrimination, ruled against Dick in his fair-share case, and against peaceful demonstrators seeking to picket in shopping malls. To my mind this was not a liberal court. Out came my pen and paper, and on May 12, 1990, the New York Times published my op-ed, “N.Y.’s Backward High Court.” The piece was a New York State–focused short version of the “Nine Men in Black” article that had gotten me fired from the NAACP. Again the reaction was swift. My neighbor and friend Judith Kaye, who was a judge on the court of appeals, snubbed me. The few letters following up on my article said that I didn’t understand the legal process. Dick worried that my op-ed might reduce our chances of having his latest loss in the appellate division reviewed by the court of appeals.
The court of appeals did refuse to review our second Brookhaven case. But I was convinced that my article was not the reason. Again money and privilege had won out. The judges were not about to challenge America’s class structure any more than I was about to give up my house in Sag Harbor or my apartment overlooking Central Park. Years later, after Judge Kaye had written some fine opinions herself and had been appointed the court’s chief judge, we exchanged letters and resumed our friendship. Both of us, of course, continue to live in our high-class apartment building in our virtually all-white neighborhood. And both are happy to be here, a stone’s throw from the opera house we both love.
* * *
In 1999 our firm moved to new digs at 225 Broadway across the street from Trinity Church, with its ancient graveyard, a block away from the World Trade Center. Our suite was up on the twenty-fifth floor and was large for our four partners, one or two associates—depending on the month—one legal secretary, and a paralegal-receptionist, so we became landlords and rented out some space. Looking out of the large old-fashioned windows of my corner office, I could see City Hall and its small adjacent park. Lower Broadway stretched right below us. Behind my desk rose the Woolworth Building with its elaborate facing and griffins and gargoyles. To my left I could see three bridges spanning the East River. The view was breathtaking. The river shimmered in the sunlight. Tugs, barges, small freighters, sightseeing boats, and, in the summer, sailboats and yachts plied the waters up and down as helicopters darted around. At night the skyscrapers lit up, and the strings of lights on the bridges sparkled. I had my doubts about this new luxury. After all, as I had protested years ago, “I’m a civil rights lawyer.”
While all of us belonged to the National Lawyers Guild and supported the most progressive Democratic Party candidates, there was nothing resembling a progressive, much less a radical, movement in the country for a firm like ours to support. We were all married and had children, and my partners needed to work hard to support their families in an increasingly expensive city, and that would be easier to accomplish in a space that looked like a real law firm. Also, our practice had grown. In the race, sex, and age discrimination matters we handled, our clients rarely had any interest in expanding the law. They just wanted money or the resolution of whatever issue they faced—or both. Additionally, we were trying to expand our negligence practice and represent tenants in conflict with their landlords. I hadn’t worked on a criminal case since the last days of representing John Artis, and I had no interest in ever showing my face in a criminal court again. Dick kept us focused on meaningful civil rights work, as he was still handling housing discrimination cases. Together we were still struggling to get the Huntington garden apartments built. But much of our work was routine.
That left me with a feeling of deep unease. My career, with its origins in my relationship with Bill and Lorraina, had always been defined by a sense of mission, and that only deepened as Bob Carter and Kitty and I drew ever closer over the years. Now my “home away from home” was like my Central Park West apartment. Also, I had long since banned Tony Maynard from coming around because he would appear without calling, looking like the street person he was, sometimes wet and soggy, driving our receptionist and my partners nuts. Wondering what Tony was up to and how he was surviving grated on my mind. But at least I had some peace, and I assumed he could take care of himself.
Fortunately Myron Beldock had asked me if I wanted to join his firm in a class-action racial discrimination case against the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. It was a strong case. White workers with lesser qualifications and education were being promoted over blacks and Latinos. The parks commissioner, Henry Stern, had instituted a program he called “Class Of.” It recruited new employees at elite colleges—twenty or thirty graduates each year—with the promise that they would be doing public service work, occupy positions of responsibility, and receive a five-thousand-dollar raise after the first year. Yet our black and Latino clients had to train these entry-level employees, virtually all of them white, to fill the middle-level positions that they themselves had been trying to get for years.
You would think such a case would be a slam dunk, but it wasn’t. Henry Stern had been a powerful New York City councilman and was a key figure in the state’s Liberal Party, which at times held the balance of power between the Democratic and Republican Parties. Stern was close with the city’s power brokers, including former mayor Ed Koch, and he was a favorite of the mayor at that time, Rudy Giuliani. As a result, even when we broke the story to the New York Times and made the front page, the city decided on massive resistance. Nor did it matter that the Justice Department later joined our lawsuit. The city’s Office of the Corporation Counsel even recruited volunteer lawyers from the city’s major firms to aid its already large staff on a pro bono basis.
We were up to the challenge, however, with Myron’s firm doing most of the financing, and assigning two fine lawyers, Cynthia Rollings and Jody Yetzer, to the case, and along with some needed help from the Justice Department lawyers, we bulled our way forward.
Taking deposition after deposition of the parks department’s key higher-ups, including Henry Stern and his deputies, I became obsessed with the case. After a few years of steady progress, however, the financial and manpower drain on our firms became a major problem. Fortunately the NAACP Legal Defense Fund saw the case’s merit and joined our team. It helped with our finances and supplied us with one of its best lawyers, Robert Stroup.
Our position strengthened after we persuaded Judge Denny Chin to grant us class-action status and later to deny the city’s attempt to have our case dismissed without a trial. In a long and detailed opinion, the judge ruled that we had presented significant evidence of racial discrimination, including statements I had pried from Stern at a deposition. The judge also rejected the city’s attack on our three experts—a statistician to testify about the racial impact of the parks department’s
policies, as well as an organizational psychologist and a sociologist. At the judge’s urging the city finally entered into a mediation process that lasted a year before it threw in the towel.
Even then, however, after paying out twenty million dollars and agreeing to injunctive provisions designed to open up promotions to blacks and Latinos, and monitoring provisions designed to ensure enforcement, the mayor under whom the case was finally settled, Michael Bloomberg, issued a press release stating that the city had long ago mended its ways and had no further racial discrimination class actions against it.
That blatant misstatement galled me, so I called the New York Times reporter covering the case and set him straight. The resulting story noted that the city was engaged in an even more bitter struggle with blacks who were trying to integrate the fire department. Having fought Mayors Wagner, Lindsay, Giuliani, and Bloomberg, and even Mayor Dinkins, over issues of discrimination for more than thirty years, I was left with few illusions about how liberal New York City was when it came to racial matters. Like virtually all politicians, they would twist the facts to fit their political needs.
Equally frustrating to me in our parks department case, Judge Chin had ruled against us on a major issue that remains an open sore in the city to this day. We had claimed that an additional reason that blacks and Latinos received so few promotions was the result of their assignments to parks in the most impoverished and segregated sections of the city, which were allocated the least funds for their upkeep. Worse, those are the very areas of the city that need the parks most to allow their residents some respite from their crowded housing and clogged streets. Perhaps Mayor Bill De Blasio, who was elected on the backs of black and Latino voters, will attempt to ameliorate this situation, which Judge Chin left untouched. Living next to beautifully manicured Central Park—which is supported by millions of dollars of private funding from its affluent residential neighborhoods and the city’s real estate interests—and knowing the value of such a great open space, I can only hope that will happen.
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