Despite an article by a distinguished law professor estimating that there are thirty thousand innocent persons in prison today, and other articles, including ours, as to what could be done to ameliorate that massive injustice, we have gotten no traction for a demonstration project to test any of the ideas. To me that remains unfinished business.
Equally unfinished is another idea triggered by my many years of work. In America today thousands of attorneys work for federal, state, or local governments, and many are prosecutors. All are public lawyers. But in my practice few have consistently represented the public interest as I would define it. Certainly the public should want to see the innocent exonerated, and just as certainly the public should not want its public agencies, like the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and the New Jersey Department of Corrections, engaging in systematic racial discrimination. Just as certainly, police departments should discipline cops who treat brutally the citizens they are supposed to protect. Otherwise we will see many more confrontations like those we have recently seen in American cities, and polarizing racial attitudes. Similarly, when a city’s corporation counsel settles police brutality cases, invariably they do nothing to see that the offending cop is brought before a disciplinary board. Yet brutal cops threaten the peace of entire cities. And for sure, governments should be helping former convicts to get work rather than creating insurmountable barriers to their employment, as the Census Bureau has done.
To study the problem and teach a law school seminar with me, I enlisted my good friend the law professor Larry Grosberg. Larry thought he could go on the Internet and come up with courses like I was talking about to lighten our workload. Unfortunately he found very little. Larry also researched the profession’s legal precepts and cases interpreting those principles, and found very little to distinguish public from private law practice. It goes without saying that private attorneys have a duty of loyalty to their clients that is very firm and very clear. But with regard to the public lawyer, the question arises: Who is the client? For example, when the city’s corporation counsel defends a massive racial discrimination case against the parks department, do the public attorneys involved have a duty to the parks commissioner, or the mayor, or to the citizens of the city who pay their salaries when they pay their taxes? Essentially that question is rarely discussed, let alone answered. Instead the public attorneys defend public agencies and do whatever they can to get the case dismissed, no matter how overt the discriminatory conduct. To say the least, new ethical standards for public lawyers are necessary.
The Huntington case Dick and I began thirty-five years ago is also unfinished business. According to Bob Ralph, a mainstay at Housing Help, the nonprofit sponsor of the project’s 140 garden apartments and community center, groundbreaking is just around the corner. To get the project this far, Dick and I had to litigate a second federal case against the town of Huntington and New York State’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal to secure the project’s funding. And Bob Ralph, who is now ninety-one years old, tells me there is still resistance from local residents. Now the fight is over who will live there, with the old guard doing whatever it can to ensure that the applicant pool will include as many whites as possible. As Alabama’s former governor in the 1960s, George Wallace, used to say, “Segregation, now and forever.” But you only have to look at the Crimson Tide, the University of Alabama’s football team, to realize that some things actually do change. My bet is that that will happen in Huntington too. The town may not need football players, but it sure does need low- and middle-income housing for the teachers, firefighters, and service workers who keep it functioning.
Until we die, of course, there will always be unfinished business. Those close to me made it through the first decade of the twenty-first century, but the second has not been so kind. Derrick Bell died in 2011. He was eighty years old.
Although Derrick and I broke bread together from time to time, through no fault of his own he triggered my racial insecurities. I wanted Derrick to see me as an equal but was never confident that he did. I always wanted to close the distance, but I didn’t know how. Time and contact helped, but Derrick’s death ended the possibility. But there, I’ve said it. I felt badly for myself as well as for Janet and their family. There is good news, however. Kitty and Janet Bell, who are both extraordinary women, are now bonding and pulling me along. And Janet, who is a civil rights activist herself and received her doctorate last year, was with Derrick every step of the way.
Bob Carter passed away in January 2012 at the ripe old age of ninety-four. Along with his sons, close friends, and Kitty, I regularly visited with him as he slowly declined. We had so many memories together and so much to talk about that race slowly fell away. The memory I treasured most was formed only a few years earlier.
In November 2008, we had an election-night party at his apartment. When the votes were counted and the first network announced that Barack Obama had been elected president of the United States, tears welled up in Bob’s eyes.
“I never thought I would live to see this day,” he said.
Sitting next to him, I teared up too.
Bob’s sons, John and David, did me the honor of asking me to deliver the eulogy at the Riverside Church memorial. Jessye Norman flew from Europe to sing farewell to her dear old friend. It was a grand occasion. I miss Bob, but our relationship was complete.
Dick Bellman passed away on April 18, 2012. He died on the way to work. He was seventy-four. Kitty called to tell me. I choked up when I heard the news. Dick was like a brother to me. From our first days together at the NAACP, we had worked together seamlessly. I was honored to be one of the speakers at Dick’s funeral. I told the gathering what a great civil rights lawyer and what a caring, kind, and principled man he was, and what a force of nature he was in court. I keep a picture of the two of us together in my office and miss him every day.
Speaking of brothers, my relationship with John, the “golden boy” of my childhood, has much improved from the times recounted earlier when the women from the Weather Underground invaded his Bridgehampton house and I “machine-gunned” his guests. Now married to Bunny Freidus, he has become politically very progressive. John and Bunny have lived for many years in Telluride, Colorado, where he was the mayor and successfully opposed both the local mining and real estate interests. He is involved with the Institute for Policies Studies (IPS), a progressive think tank, whose longtime general counsel I have been. As an expert in tax law, John suggests to the IPS ways to shift the tax burden to the financial markets and the rich, and writes op-eds that it distributes to local newspapers.
When I think of John, I often think of Bill Rutherford and how I saw him as my protector. My children did not have a Bill, but for four years they did have a Joyce McKenzie, who fortunately has lived in a better time than Bill did. Best of all, my children don’t have to search their memories to conjure up her image. Joyce became a practical nurse and a homeowner. Kitty, Joyce, and I remain close friends, and Janine and Joyce, who lives in Atlanta, talk regularly. Joyce’s children live productive lives. Her daughter Pauline’s three children have all graduated from elite colleges, and one, Alexis, earned her Ph.D. at Duke and is a noted poet, activist, and scholar.
Rubin Carter was seventy-six when he died in 2014. After his release from prison he moved to Canada and married (and later divorced) Lisa Peters, the leader of the commune that came to his aid. He became a spokesperson for two organizations seeking the release of the wrongfully convicted. Even though President Bill Clinton hailed him as a survivor of a flawed criminal justice system, the president signed antiterrorism legislation including an attached provision that significantly limited the authority of the federal courts, under what has been called the “great writ” of habeas corpus, to review factual findings in state court criminal matters. Under that law Judge Sarokin would not have been able independently to evaluate the facts of Rubin’s case, and he would have died in prison. Someday I hope Congress will res
tore the great writ to its rightful place as a safeguard of liberty. As for John Artis, he moved to Toronto to take care of Rubin as his cancer worsened. John is a stand-up, no-nonsense man, and he has my respect.
Thinking of long-term relationships, I inevitably return to Tony. Half street person, half gentleman dreamer, always wanting to be free but never quite able to free himself from the restraints that this world places on everyone, he presents multiple images to everyone around him and I am sure to himself as well.
Tony and I resumed our relationship shortly after a team of National Lawyers Guild attorneys, led by the indomitable Liz Fink, and including my old partner and friend Dan Meyers, settled a twenty-five-year struggle in the federal courts to get some compensation for the killed and wounded “brothers” who were shot and beaten on that September day in the Attica yard. Tony testified about the wounds and beating he received and was awarded thirty thousand dollars out of the eight-million-dollar fund. Along with what Tony received from the Baldwin book deal and his wrongful conviction case, that money soon evaporated and Tony was again in need of financial help. Why I have continued to help support him remains an unresolved question of this memoir. I can trace my doing so back to Bill Rutherford and my inability to come to his rescue. But there must be something more to it than that.
Tony’s travails have never stopped. He has been arrested for driving while black in Maryland. (Cops stop black drivers constantly, search their cars, and arrest them, for whatever they find.) He has been evicted from a Bay of Biscayne beach in Florida where he had wintered in the open air. He has tried to enter Honduras in his jeep without paying whatever fees, taxes, and bribes the local authorities demanded, prompting me to rescue him after receiving a call from an assistant United States consul assigned to that region. Innumerable times repair shops have called seeking money to fix his jeep. A Pennsylvania cop called to tell me he would have to evict Tony from a Walmart parking lot, where his jeep had been towed after breaking down. Most recently he had been arrested for criminal trespass for shopping while black at an auto parts shop. (Storekeepers are quick to accuse black customers of trying to steal.) Those charges have been dismissed, but Tony spent the night in jail before going to court.
Recently, when Tony visited me in my office, still rail straight and strong at seventy-nine, he gave me his business card listing himself as “Djata Samod, Holistic Healer and Spiritual Advisor.” Perhaps that may be part of the answer: Tony, by his very presence, may have been healing me. I told him he would turn eighty next year and could not continue to live outside forever, especially up here in the North. I suggested he talk to his sister. But Tony said, “I’m a Maynard, and the Maynards come from Nevis, and I will go there and be welcome.” “Good idea,” I said.
Then we entered into one of our few conversations about our lives. Tony said, “My passion before that happened to me was to be an actor. After I was released my passion was to always be free, to live free without any restraints, and that is what I have done.” Then he said, “And your passion has been to set people free. We have both lived our passion.”
Perhaps there was some truth to that. My privileged lifestyle locks me in just as Tony believes that our forty-five-year relationship, with all its twists and turns, places an obligation on me to come to his aid so that he may escape from the reality that living places on all but a privileged few and live out his life just as he wants, complete with the hardships and beauty of forever being a wanderer.
But, despite the brutal winter of 2014–2015, Tony was not ready to retreat to Nevis. Instead he wintered in Florida again and returned to New York in the spring, taking up his old “residence” under the Verrazano Bridge connecting Staten Island to Brooklyn. He had just come from Baltimore, where he had spent a week with his sister, Valerie. Tony told me she had just finished renovating her studio. “It’s magnificent,” he said. “She has five houses. Her artwork is all over the city. You must come down to Baltimore to see her.” I told Tony I would do that, as he left my office after having almost hugged the breath out of me.
Thinking about Tony after he left, my irritation at the role he assigned to me in our mutual lives melted away. His passion about Valarie’s accomplishments was real. And perhaps there was a hidden message there. If he could care about her, he could care about me. Sure, he is vain and self-absorbed. But so are all of us, and the little help I have given him was paltry compared to what my white world had taken away. White guilt, lingering there in the corner of my mind? Perhaps. But so what. A little white guilt never hurt anyone. As for what Tony had said my passion was when we were last together, I had never defined it. There are way too many parts.
Would I never have changed a day in my life, as Kitty likes to say? Not if that meant changing how I lived my life. But I sure could have done without the Tony Maynard and Hurricane Carter–John Artis verdicts, suffering the losses of some of my other cases, and being fired for writing “Nine Men in Black Who Think White.” Then again, Kitty would certainly have wished away her little brother’s tragic death. But that is not what she meant. As Kitty puts it, “I would not have changed a day of my life if that meant being other than who I am now.” I agree.
Never changing a day of my life means having been born into the Warner family. Having drifted away from those roots, I decided while visiting the Muldoon-Duffy family in West Covina, California, not too long ago to take up an offer from John Rogovin, a good friend of my son Patrick. John, who had just become the general counsel of Warner Bros., invited Kitty and me to visit the studio in Burbank. We drove there one chilly day. The place was just as I remembered it more than sixty-five years ago. The water tower with the company’s logo, the low-slung executives’ offices along a well-manicured driveway, the imposing sound studios, the back lots with Western towns, New York City brownstones, and even a little jungle—it was all there. Kitty and I also visited the Warner museum, filled with costumes and photographs. There was Doris Day. I have a picture of us together when I was eleven years old.
“What a great thing to do for a day,” I said to Kitty.
Thinking now of my reaction to visiting the Burbank studios, I detect a little of that “look at me” satisfaction in the choices I have made. Then my mind swivels to other Warner grandchildren. There is my brother, of course, who also went his own way but maintained some connection to the Warner family, as he was Major’s lawyer and trustee for some of the other Warner children. Then there was Warner LeRoy, who became one of New York City’s most illustrious restaurateurs. Finally I think of Warner’s sister, Linda LeRoy Janklow. Two years ago Kitty and I attended a benefit dinner for Arts Connection, an organization Linda established, whose moving force she has been for many years. Reading the program describing Arts Connection, listening to Linda make her presentation, as well as the students and teachers who accompanied her, I knew that her efforts were critical to the survival of art education in New York City’s public schools. Going home, I thought there was more than one way for a Warner grandchild to contribute to the well-being of our society. That made me feel better about my roots.
Bob Carter had no problem with my Warner connection, nor did he have any problem with class privileges. Years ago, shortly before he became a judge, his wife, Gloria, died, struck down by a rare neurological disease. Gloria had once said about Bob during a political discussion, “He’s just a race man. That’s all he is.” Bob had replied, “That’s right. I’m just a race man.” Obviously, however, he was much more. While he focused on issues that denied equality to African Americans and marginalized their lives and had a well-tuned ear for racial insults, Bob was a strong advocate of equal opportunity for all people, whatever their race, nationality, or gender. That said, Bob liked the good life. He moved down to my Central Park neighborhood. He traveled the world, loved fine restaurants, the opera, and the theater. He abandoned Brooks Brothers for a finer men’s clothing store. And of course he enjoyed a fine villa in the Caribbean. Sure, he was a liberal Democrat, but so wer
e FDR, the Kennedys, and untold liberal millionaires. Bob was certainly entitled to that good life, much more so than I, who rode the wave of family privilege, and stayed afloat to enjoy the pleasures of this life.
I have written in this memoir that I loved Bob and that I am certain I occupied a special place in his heart. Following Bob’s example, I have tried to live up to his faith in me as I attempted to honor the memory of Bill Rutherford. Never let the possibility of defeat deter you, was Bob’s unspoken motto. Always see racism for what it is, and never ignore it. But Bob would also let me know, with a twinkle in his eyes: By all means enjoy your life.
Index
The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below.
1968
Adamo, John
Akron, Ohio, case
Alberta, Paul
Alexander, Clifford
Ali, Muhammad
Alito, Samuel, Jr.
Anti-Discrimination Center
anti-Semitism
Artis, Dolly
Artis, John
Arts Connection
Attica Prison
Auburn Correctional Facility
Auburn Six
Badillo, Herman
Baker, Wallace
Bakken, Tim
Baldwin, James
Barkin, Irwin
Barnhardt, John
Baton Rouge, La.
Battle, Kathleen
Beamer, George
Beck, Bobbie
Beirne, C. R.
Beldock, Myron
The Butler's Child Page 35
