Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. - 1937-2005

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-cochran30mar30,0,6388220.story?coll=la-home-headlines
JOHNNIE L. COCHRAN JR. 1937-2005

Flashy, Deft Lawyer Known Worldwide

Famous for heading Simpson 'Dream Team,' he was proudest of freeing Geronimo Pratt.

By Carla Hall

Times Staff Writer

March 30, 2005

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., the masterful attorney who gained prominence as an early advocate for victims of police abuse then achieved worldwide fame for successfully defending football star O.J. Simpson against murder charges, died Tuesday. He was 67.
Cochran died of an inoperable brain tumor at his home in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles, said his brother-in-law Bill Baker. The tumor was diagnosed in December 2003, Baker said.
Initially, Cochran, his family and colleagues were secretive about his illness to protect the attorney's privacy as well as the network of Cochran law offices, which largely draw their cachet from his presence. But Cochran confirmed in a September 2004 interview with The Times that neurosurgeon Keith Black at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles was treating him.
Simpson praised Cochran on Tuesday from his home in Florida.
"I've got to say, I don't think I'd be home today without Johnnie," the Hall of Famer told Associated Press. "Johnnie is what's good about the law. He loved the system. I always tell people, if your kids or your loved ones got in trouble, you would want Johnnie. Even his adversaries respected him."
Long before his defense of Simpson, Cochran challenged what many viewed as the Los Angeles Police Department's misconduct toward people under arrest, at a time when the court system still ignored that behavior and victims took it for granted.
From the 1960s on, when he represented the widow of Leonard Deadwyler, a black motorist killed during a police stop in Los Angeles, Cochran took brutality cases to court. He won historic financial settlements and helped bring about lasting changes in police procedure.
His clients weren't always black: He unsuccessfully represented Reginald O. Denny, the white trucker beaten by a mob during the 1992 riots after the not-guilty verdicts in the Rodney G. King beating were announced.
Instead of arguing, as he often did, that police had been brutal on the job, Cochran contended that the trucker's civil rights had been violated when police failed to do their jobs at all upon being ordered to withdraw from the intersection of Florence Avenue and Normandie Street, a flash point of the riots where Denny was pulled from his big rig and attacked.
By the time Simpson was accused of murder in 1994, Cochran was "larger than life" in the city's black community, said Kerman Maddox, a political consultant and longtime L.A. resident. After the Simpson case, that profile would expand, earning him new admirers, as well as new detractors who considered him a racially polarizing force.
His successful defense of Simpson against charges of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Lyle Goldman, a waiter and casual friend of hers, vaulted him to the rank of celebrity, beseeched by autograph-seekers and parodied on "Saturday Night Live" and "Seinfeld." His name was invoked by movie characters, one of whom boasted in the 1997 film "Jackie Brown" that his lawyer was so good, "he's my own personal Johnnie Cochran."
Ever aware of his public image, the attorney delighted in the attention and even played along, showing up in the occasional movie or TV show in a cameo role as himself.
Resplendently tailored and silky-voiced, clever and genteel, Cochran came to epitomize the formidable litigator, sought after by the famous and wealthy, the obscure and struggling, all believing that they were victims of the system in one way or another.
He was able to connect with any jury, and in his most famous case, the Simpson trial, he delivered an eloquent, even lilting closing argument.
He famously cast doubt on the prosecution's theory of the case, saying: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." The line — actually conceived by co-consul Gerald F. Uelmen during a strategy session — referred to the defense's overall assessment of the evidence.
But it most evoked the moment in the trial when Simpson appeared to struggle to put on what were presumed to be the murderer's bloody gloves — one of which was found at the crime scene, the other outside Simpson's house."
He could walk into court and charm the pants off a jury," said Leslie Abramson, a leading defense attorney now retired. "But it wasn't snake oil. He could figure out the essence of the case — of how ordinary people would view the law, the facts — and the equity, the sense of justice. He always had it figured out. And he had it figured out in Simpson. And the prosecutors never did."
Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky agreed. "I think you could have given that case to a lot of talented lawyers and O.J. would have been convicted," he told The Times in late 2004.
Cochran inspired law students and attained a level of stardom rare for a lawyer and even rarer for a black lawyer. One of his most important legacies was the transforming effect of an African American man achieving that degree of success."
Clients of all races are now no longer hesitant to retain black lawyers to represent them in significant cases," said Winston Kevin McKesson, a black criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles. "That was not the case 25 or 30 years ago. We couldn't even get African Americans in our community to trust us. He's a historic figure."
However, the Simpson criminal trial defined Cochran's career for better and for worse. While it made him a household name and offered him access to virtually every high-profile criminal case, it also changed his life "drastically and forever," he wrote in "A Lawyer's Life." "It obscured everything I had done previously."
More galling and perplexing to him was the criticism that rained down after the Simpson verdicts. Though many legal experts marveled at Cochran's skill, a parade of critics — TV pundits and newspaper columnists, California's then-governor, Republican Pete Wilson, and even the attorney's own co-counsel Robert Shapiro — denounced a legal strategy that put the competence and character of the LAPD on trial."
Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck," Shapiro said in a national TV interview after a jury of nine African Americans, two whites and one Latino, all but two of them women, acquitted Simpson.
During the trial, Cochran and the rest of the defense team excoriated criminalists for sloppy work that compromised blood evidence and claimed that the police prejudged Simpson. Cochran and his "Dream Team," as the defense attorneys were known, revealed that Det. Mark Fuhrman, who collected key evidence in the case, had a history of making racist remarks. Everything about the Simpson case came to personify the excess of Los Angeles. A combustible combination of murder, sex and race, the extravagantly lengthy trial was carried live on television, making it probably the first high-profile reality TV show.
When it was finally over and the jury had acquitted Simpson, many in the public had not. A Times poll indicated that half the American public disagreed with the verdict. And the majority believed that the defense had used the race issue inappropriately to help free a defendant whose controversial saga began when he fled police in a nationally televised slow freeway chase.
Chemerinsky said Cochran did nothing more than discharge his duty as a zealous advocate in defending Simpson.
"I think Johnnie Cochran did a superb job," Chemerinsky said. "He ultimately put the LAPD and the racism of the LAPD on trial, and that worked with that jury."
Cochran spent two post-trial memoirs trying to dispel the criticism."
The charge that I could convince black jurors to vote to acquit a man they believed to be guilty of two murders because he is black is an insult to all African Americans," he wrote in "A Lawyer's Life."
It wasn't that Cochran believed the police had conspired to frame Simpson. It was more that their racism had led to a "rush to judgment" and a willingness to "adjust the physical evidence slightly," he wrote.
"He got an awful rap in the white community after the Simpson trial," said Stuart Hanlon, a white attorney who was a longtime criminal defense collaborator with Cochran.
"All he did was do a great job as a lawyer — which is what we're supposed to do — and beat some inept prosecutor. For him to get vilified for it just shows the racism in our community. I really think if O.J.'s lawyer had been white, that wouldn't have happened…. If I had done that trial and won, no one would hate me."
Ironically, up to that time, Cochran had spent most of his life not as a racially polarizing force but as the integrator, the black man gliding easily through white conference rooms, dinner parties and neighborhoods.
In the September 2004 phone interview with The Times, Cochran said he still would have taken the case had he known it would change his life. "I thought it was the right thing to do," he said.
Cochran continued to support Simpson's version of his activities the night his former wife and Goldman were found knifed to death outside her Brentwood townhouse.
"I still believe he's innocent of those charges," Cochran said in the September interview. "Even after all this time."
Although the Simpson case might have been Cochran's bravura moment on the public stage, he did not consider it his most important case. It was the long and twisted legal saga of Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt that for Cochran marked, at different points, the nadir and the pinnacle of his career.
Authorities contended that Pratt, a former Black Panther leader and Vietnam War veteran, robbed and shot a young white couple on a public tennis court in Santa Monica in December 1968. The woman died, but her husband survived and identified Pratt in a lineup two years after the shootings.
Cochran said his biggest disappointment was watching his client, Pratt, convicted of murder in 1972. And his greatest triumph came when a judge in Orange County reversed that conviction 25 years later.
Pratt, who now calls himself Geronimo ji Jaga, told The Times on Tuesday that Cochran was "truly a soldier fully dedicated to making sure that the rights of the oppressed be defended."
The course of Cochran's four-decade career zigzagged across the legal landscape, starting in the Los Angeles city attorney's office, where he eagerly prosecuted drunk-driving cases, and ending in a private practice that earned him wealth and fame.
His law firm sprouted 14 offices outside California, devoted to personal-injury law and other civil litigation. But Cochran remained rooted not just to Los Angeles but to Wilshire Boulevard, maintaining his legal headquarters there even as the street's glamour faded. For rising black professionals of his generation, a Wilshire address was the ultimate aspiration.
The eldest child of four, Cochran was born in a charity hospital in Shreveport, La. He was, he wrote, the great-grandson of slaves and the grandson of a sharecropper. His ambitious father, Johnnie L. Cochran Sr., moved the family halfway across the country to California and began an upward climb from working as a pipe fitter in San Francisco Bay Area shipyards to selling insurance for Golden State Mutual, the state's leading black-owned insurance company.
The family settled in Los Angeles in 1949. There, Cochran's father ran an insurance district office, bought a house in a well-tended neighborhood on West 28th Street and took his family to Second Baptist Church.
Like other members of the mid-century's burgeoning black middle class in America, the senior Cochran and his wife, Hattie, expected much of themselves and more of their children. In "A Lawyer's Life" the attorney wrote that his father stressed education and working hard "to reach our fullest potential. And he seemed to think our fullest potential was always a little fuller than we did."
Cochran grew up wanting to be a lawyer, he surmises, because he loved to debate, a skill he honed at the dinner table and at Los Angeles High School. Dazzled by the natty attire of many classmates and their late-model convertibles, Cochran began developing a taste for stylish clothing and a love of fine cars.
After graduating from UCLA, he earned a degree from Loyola Law School in 1962. The summer after his first year at Loyola, he married Barbara Berry.
The couple eventually had two girls — Melodie and Tiffany — but the marriage began to crumble. Before they divorced, he had a relationship with Patricia Sikora, who bore him his only son, Jonathan, now a California Highway Patrol officer — something Cochran loved reminding critics who said he hated all peace officers.
As a college-age man, Cochran wrestled with his feelings about a white world that saw him as black before anything else, a concept of duality that he said writer and black liberationist W.E.B. Dubois best described as "two-ness."
"The concept of 'two-ness' is one that has eternally intrigued me," the attorney wrote in "Journey to Justice," his first memoir. " … We were never viewed as just teachers, doctors, lawyers, scientists and writers. We were perceived as black teachers, black doctors, black lawyers, black scientists and black writers."
But that distinction was inescapable as he made his way in Los Angeles. In the fall of 1961, during his last year in law school, he became the first black law clerk in the office of the city attorney. In early 1963, he became a deputy city attorney.
He enjoyed trial work, but he grew uncomfortable prosecuting people — usually black men — who had allegedly resisted arrest. And he grew wary of the police, since many of those people showed signs of severe beatings.
"By the mid-1960s, the problem of unchecked police misconduct was the defining issue among black Angelenos of every social class," he wrote in "Journey to Justice."
He left the city attorney's office in 1965 for private practice.
It was a case of alleged police misconduct in May 1966 that first thrust Cochran into the spotlight. Deadwyler, speeding his pregnant wife to the hospital, was pulled over by police, then shot to death. The officer who stopped him said later that he had reached into the car to grab the ignition key and that the car had lurched forward, causing the gun to discharge accidentally.
The shooting outraged a black community still emotionally smoldering from the Watts riots less than a year earlier. Cochran represented Deadwyler's widow, Barbara, at a coroner's inquest. As TV cameras rolled, viewers saw the deputy district attorney consulting with Cochran and often prefacing questions to witnesses with "Mr. Cochran wants to know…. "
A majority of jurors found the shooting of Deadwyler accidental, but Cochran's presence offered an indelible image of a black attorney as an important player.
"If you talk to African American professionals between 40 and 50, it was a powerful moment when they were young," said Maddox, who was one of those youngsters.
In the two decades after the inquest, Cochran took on other cases that challenged Los Angeles juries and police policies.
But he was devastated when Pratt was convicted in July 1972 of murder. Although the husband of Caroline Olsen, the murdered woman, had identified Pratt as the assailant and although a former Black Panther Party rival, Julius Butler, had testified against Pratt, Cochran had been confident that the system would exonerate his client.
Only years later would he learn that Butler had been an informant for the government, including the district attorney's office. Butler had denied that on the stand. If Cochran had known at the time, it would have been a different case.
"I had learned that prosecutors and law enforcement officials, convinced of their own righteousness, would do anything to make the system yield the 'right result,' " he wrote.
Years later, Cochran would suggest that the LAPD did just that to make its case against Simpson — and others would accuse Cochran of using similar methods to defend his client.
The attorney continued to represent the families of people he believed to be victims of police abuse and was able to extract from the city of Los Angeles the first cash settlement — $25,000 — in a wrongful-death suit stemming from a police shooting.
In 1978, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. John K. Van de Kamp chose Cochran to be assistant district attorney, the No. 3 position in the office, and suggested that he change the system from the inside. Cochran left his $300,000-a-year practice for the $49,000 salaried job, becoming the first African American to hold it.
But change came slowly. He lost a debate with his bosses over filing manslaughter charges against police officers who killed Eulia Love, a black woman they said had threatened them with a knife. The police had been called to her home after Love, overdue on her gas bill, allegedly used a shovel to shoo away gas company employees.
Later, however, Cochran and Gil Garcetti, then a deputy district attorney, changed the way prosecutors investigated police shootings. They initiated the policy of having a prosecutor and a district attorney's investigator go immediately to the scene of every police shooting, a move designed to make the investigation impartial. No longer would the government rely entirely on police investigations of their own shootings.
Cochran left the district attorney's office in 1981 and soon took on another case that would become a benchmark for the Los Angeles area.
After a traffic stop, police in Signal Hill booked Cal State Long Beach football player Ron Settles on suspicion of resisting arrest, possession of cocaine and assault on a police officer. However, the validity of the charges would never be tested in court — a few hours later, just before his bail was posted, Settles was found dead in his cell. Police said he had apparently hanged himself.
Cochran and attorney Mike Mitchell, representing Settles' parents at the coroner's inquest, contended that the athlete died as a result of a police chokehold. Although the jury never specified how he was killed, it did issue a majority verdict that Settles had not killed himself but "died at the hands of another." Cochran also helped the Settles family win a $760,000 judgment.
Later, in Los Angeles, Cochran was part of a group that successfully argued before the Police Commission that the bar-arm chokehold should be banned.
In the 1980s, he worked on burnishing his reputation as a premier attorney and player in Los Angeles. Mayor Tom Bradley, his mentor and Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity brother, appointed him to the Airport Commission, which oversaw expansion of Los Angeles International Airport and the awarding of contracts to run it.
And in court, Cochran was winning millions of dollars in awards for people injured or killed by the police. Most notably, he and law partner Eric Ferrer secured a $9.2-million judgment for Patty Diaz, a 13-year-old Latina sexually assaulted in her home by an LAPD officer. At the time it was the largest award resulting from LAPD misconduct ever granted by a trial jury, although the plaintiff later agreed to the reduced sum of $4.5 million.
In the middle of his rise as an attorney, Cochran's personal life took a turn. As airport commissioner, he was attending a 1981 conference when he met Dale Mason, an executive for an Atlanta-based concessionaire. He and Mason, 13 years his junior, were married at the Bel-Air Hotel in 1985.
Dale Mason Cochran survives him, as do his son, Jonathan; daughters, Tiffany Cochran Edwards and Melodie Cochran; sisters, Pearl Baker and Martha Jean Sherrard; and father, Johnnie L. Cochran Sr.
The attorney also cultivated a clientele of celebrities in trouble. In 1993, he represented pop superstar Michael Jackson during his first battle against accusations of sexual molestation. A year later, Simpson called Cochran from jail begging him to join his defense team.
After victory in that trial, there was hardly a prominent civil rights or police abuse case that Cochran was not connected to in some way. But his impact was diluted by the sheer volume of what he undertook. He jetted between coasts, tried his hand at being co-host of a syndicated television legal show and dipped in and out of numerous cases.
"At any given time, I am actively involved in about 50 different cases," he wrote in "A Lawyer's Life." That didn't always sit well with clients. The mother of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed immigrant whose fatal 1999 shooting by New York police in the Bronx stirred national outrage, retained Cochran to represent her but fired him when she felt he didn't have enough time for her.
"Maybe I did a few too many cases," he mused in the September 2004 phone interview. "I handled a lot, and they were real tough cases."
Cochran gave up the stressful and time-consuming practice of criminal law after successfully defending rap music mogul Sean Combs on weapons charges in New York in 2000. Last Tuesday, Cochran was at the center of a case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court after a former client picketed his law offices with signs accusing him of being a crook and a liar. Cochran sued for defamation.
A California court had found for Cochran and barred the defendant, Ulysses Tory, from orally making any statements about Cochran, a judgment that Tory argued violated his 1st Amendment rights. Chemerinsky, one of Tory's attorneys, argued the case before the high court.
The one case Cochran stayed involved with more than two decades was Pratt's.
"Some people would say that Cochran abandoned the case. I know better," said Hanlon, who spent 23 years on the matter. "He was always there when I needed to talk to him."
Not only did Cochran lend his expertise when they finally got a hearing on whether Pratt's conviction should be overturned, but he also lent his credit card to the effort. "We were broke," Hanlon said.
Because the court hearing was transferred from L.A. to the Orange County courtroom of a conservative judge, Cochran's presence was key.
"I was a known radical," Hanlon said. "He brought a credibility to the courtroom that I couldn't bring.
Pratt's murder conviction was overturned in May 1997, and he was freed after 27 years behind bars. The Los Angeles County district attorney declined to retry him. Cochran helped Pratt secure the $4.5-million settlement of a false-imprisonment suit.
"There are so many cases I believe in," said Cochran in the 2004 phone interview. "Probably the biggest was Pratt…. Just getting him free — I remember that day down in Orange County; that was probably the happiest day for me in my whole career."
Services are pending.*

Some notable cases

Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. was already well known in Southern California when he successfully defended O.J. Simpson in the renowned 1994 murder case. Here are some other notable cases handled by Cochran:

1972: Unsuccessfully represents Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt in a murder case. The former Black Panther Party leader and Vietnam veteran's case is reversed in 1997. Cochran later helps Pratt settle a false-imprisonment suit for $4.5 million.

1981: Represents family of Cal State Long Beach football star Ron Settles, maintaining that he died as a result of a chokehold while in Signal Hill police custody. The coroner's inquest finds that Settles died at the hand of another.

1992: His firm wins a $9.2-million judgment in the sexual assault of 13-year-old Patty Diaz by an LAPD officer. It was then the largest jury award for LAPD misconduct. It was later reduced to $4.5 million.

1993: Helps pop star Michael Jackson settle the initial molestation allegation.

1993: Represents Reginald O. Denny in an unsuccessful suit against the LAPD for failure to protect the white truck driver who was beaten at the start of the 1992 riots.

2001: Represents Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant brutally assaulted by New York City police. Louima wins an $8.75-million settlement from the city.

2001: Wins acquittal of rap star Sean Combs on weapons and bribery charges.

2003: Wins a record-setting $700-million environmental pollution settlement against Monsanto, Pharmacia and Solutia for exposing about 18,000 Anniston, Ala., residents to PCBs, which are toxic.

Sources: Times research, http://www.thetennessee/ tribune.com, http://www.cochranfirm.com/ , Tobin & Associates.Los Angeles Times

Average Income for African Americans with a Bachelor's Degree

From Times Wire Reports

March 28, 2005

Black and Asian women with bachelor's degrees earn slightly more than similarly educated white women, and white men with comparable degrees make more than anyone else.A white woman with a bachelor's degree typically earned about $37,800 in 2003, compared with about $43,700 for a college-educated Asian woman and $41,100 for a college-educated black woman, according to data being released today by the Census Bureau. Hispanic women took home $37,600 a year.
A white male with a college diploma earns far more than any similarly educated man or woman — more than $66,000 a year, according to the Census Bureau. Among men with bachelor's degrees, Asians earned more than $52,000 a year, Hispanics earned $49,000 and blacks earned more than $45,000.

Black Marriage

By Jabari Asim

Monday, March 21, 2005; 10:24 AM

WASHINGTON -- "We will laud the bold and brave couples around the country that have committed to each other until death do they part," Nisa Islam Muhammad's Web site declares. "We want to acknowledge their bravery because in a world where it is far easier to break up a family than it is to get help to stay together, it takes sheer courage to fight for your marriage and resist divorce."
She is referring to Black Marriage Day, which will be observed March 27. The event, founded by Muhammad three years ago, continues to gather steam. Last year's activities included workshops and programs in about 70 cities. In churches and community centers, couples gathered to renew their vows and recite a black marriage pledge. Muhammad hopes to involve 150 cities in this year's commemoration. She writes, "much of what we hear about marriage in the black community is a blues song about low (marriage) rates, out-of-wedlock births, escalating divorces and how somebody done somebody wrong."
I share Muhammad's distress. The rates to which she refers are, in the words of the African American Healthy Marriage Initiative, "crisis-level statistics." While 62 percent of adult whites and 60 percent of adult Hispanics are married, only 41 percent of adult African-Americans are. There are 23 divorces per 1,000 black couples per year, compared to 19 for whites. The number of unmarried women having children is high for whites and Hispanics as well (25 percent and 42 percent, respectively), but astronomical for African-Americans: 69 percent.
While black communities are allegedly more opposed to gay marriage than other populations, one can look at those numbers and wonder if African-Americans are beginning to lose faith in marriage of any kind. Wedded bliss once attracted considerably more esteem from African-Americans, especially in the years following emancipation, when blacks were able to marry legally for the first time.
According to Betty DeRamus, between 1890 and 1940, a slightly higher percentage of black adults than whites married.
DeRamus is the author of "Forbidden Fruit: Love Stories From the Underground Railroad." She pored over unpublished memoirs, Civil War records and other materials to document the efforts of couples (some interracial, most of them black) who risked life and limb to be together. She told me she began the book after researching a couple whose descendants live in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Her investigations led her "to believe that there must be other stories about people who made extraordinary efforts to get married despite all these forces arrayed against them."
Foremost among those forces were slave owners who, DeRamus writes, "justified splitting up plantation couples by claiming that slaves felt little pain at losing a mate and cared nothing about lasting relationships." She quotes the wife of an Alabama minister who contended, "Not one in a thousand, I suppose, of those poor creatures have any conception whatever of the sanctity of marriage."
DeRamus' book, like others before it, exposes the fallacy of such outrageous claims. Among many remarkable accounts in "Forbidden Fruit," I was most affected by the tale of John Little who, during an arduous escape to Canada, often carried his sickly wife on his back. They reached the Canadian wilderness with "nothing but two axes, one suit of clothes, an iron pot, a Dutch oven, a few plates and forks, some pork and flour." They built a home there amid wolves and bears, DeRamus writes, and raised wheat and potatoes. Compare that to modern couples of any race, who spend an average of $24,000 on their weddings only to likely divorce, according to statistics, within 15 years.
Meanwhile, word of Black Marriage Day is spreading slowly. DeRamus hadn't heard of the observance but understood its purpose. "Sociologists could give you a zillion reasons why the family is in shambles," she said. "I'm not saying single parents can't raise their kids but it has to be harder." DeRamus fondly recalls her dad reading to her each night and combing her hair on Sunday mornings before sending her off to church. "He was such an important part of my life that I have to think we're all the poorer when we don't have that," she said.
DeRamus' talk of growing up in a two-parent household led me to recall a sage observation from the actress Ruby Dee. "The divorce rate would be lower if instead of marrying for better or worse people would marry for good," she once said. Good words to keep in mind on March 27, or any day.

© 2005 washingtonpost.com

Once Excluded From Va. College, Black Professor Takes a Top Post

By Susan Kinzie
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 21, 2005; Page A01

LEXINGTON, Va. -- Theodore DeLaney walked to the front of the chapel where Civil War Gen. Robert E. Lee is buried, past the narrow white pews filled with the Washington and Lee University faculty.
He was a bundle of nerves. He was about to deliver the Founders' Day address honoring an 18th-century alumnus rarely mentioned in the days of the Old South: John Chavis, perhaps the first black man to graduate from an American college.
DeLaney got to the podium on unsteady legs, and before he had said a word, the faculty members stood and applauded. It was a moment in which DeLaney, overwhelmed, could see just how far he had come: from his childhood in the racially split college town in the 1950s to his early days at Washington and Lee working as a janitor and technician to a scholar at the liberal-arts college getting a standing ovation from his colleagues.
"I never dreamed I'd be in that spot," he said recently.
In the fall, the history professor will head the new African American studies program at Washington and Lee. It has been a long time coming -- some universities have had similar programs 30 years or more. But change came slowly to this place saturated in the history and traditions of the South. DeLaney is leading students on a research project about school desegregation in western Virginia, interviewing people who lived through the changes, listening to their stories about race and education and opportunity.
He knows this history: It's intertwined with his own.
DeLaney grew up in Lexington, close enough to Washington and Lee to fall asleep listening to the music from fraternity parties drifting through the warm night air. He dreamed of going to college there, but back then, the small Shenandoah Valley town was divided. Washington and Lee and the Virginia Military Institute, the two universities on the hill, were places where white southern gentlemen studied, and where African Americans worked -- as cooks, as maids and as gardeners.
DeLaney went to a school with black children and black teachers, and if he went to the movies, he sat in the balcony. If he bought a soda, he had to drink it outside the shop. "In Virginia, genteel as it was . . . there were people fighting like hell to keep it segregated," he said.
In 1961, when he graduated from high school, few African Americans had college degrees. DeLaney was offered a United Negro College Fund scholarship to Morehouse College, but his mother, a divorced barber with five children, worried about money and the early violence of the civil rights movement. She forbade him to go to Atlanta, so he resigned himself to staying in Lexington to help support the family.
For months, no one would hire him.
Finally, he got part-time work tending gardens for well-to-do white families. He considered the priesthood. Then he went to work at Washington and Lee as a janitor.
The professors in the biology department he cleaned soon saw how quickly he learned. After a year they asked him to be a lab technician.
Meanwhile change was coming -- slowly -- to Virginia schools. Years after the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, DeLaney's younger brother and sisters went to integrated schools. And in the mid-1960s, black students came to Washington and Lee.
DeLaney had gotten married, and his wife kept encouraging him to take classes. So did the professors with whom he worked. "He had this desire to learn," said Tom Nye, a retired biology professor.
But DeLaney was scared. So he kept working, taking care of the greenhouse and the animals, setting up labs. His son Damien remembers visiting the lab as a toddler, watching his dad feed a mouse to a snake. Students in the lab remember DeLaney's friendliness, his practical jokes and his kindness: One, just when he had run out of money, found a big bag of groceries on his kitchen table.
In 1979, DeLaney finally got the courage to sign up for a class. Four years later, when he was 40, he quit his job and became a full-time student at Washington and Lee. His wife, the treasurer of Lexington, supported them financially while he took lots of art and biology classes, avoided math and researched John Chavis while studying history. Often he and his son, then in elementary school, would sit across the table, both doing lessons.
One day after he had graduated from college and started teaching high school in North Carolina, DeLaney opened a letter from Washington and Lee while standing in line at a drug store. A professor he knew had written to urge him to go back to school to get his doctorate.
DeLaney was so shocked he dropped the letter.
But he did it. DeLaney defended his dissertation in summer 1995 at the College of William and Mary with Damien watching -- just months before he started as a freshman there. Then DeLaney went home to Lexington, to the sweeping lawns and patterned brick paths of Washington and Lee.
"We got Ted back -- it's one of the smartest things the school's ever done," said Holt Merchant, chairman of the history department.
There's still a southern gentility to the school, where students smile and drawl hello to strangers, drop purses without worrying about theft and sometimes wear jackets and ties to class in the white-columned buildings. The school still has a hard time recruiting black students, several professors said, to a place where the Old South and Civil War linger. People make pilgrimages to Lee's tomb and to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson's house a few steps away.
It's something DeLaney can hardly avoid. Sometimes he just walks away -- from a white student years ago who told him he couldn't greet him publicly on campus, from a tourist wearing a Confederate flag T-shirt that said, "If this flag offends you, you need a lesson in history."
He has pushed for change at the college and seen Washington and Lee move forward to recruit students and faculty of different races and cultures from across the country and the world. That's why he was asked to speak about John Chavis in 2001, and why the college now sends out postcards about Chavis. Now 12 percent of the nearly 1,800 undergraduates are not white; about 4 percent of them are African American. In the law school, 19 percent are not white, and 9 percent are African American.
Two years ago, Damien DeLaney graduated from the law school at Washington and Lee, and his father, fighting back tears, got to hand him the diploma.
In class on a recent morning, DeLaney, 61, with his gray beard, bow tie and little round spectacles, wrote on the chalkboard and pushed students to think harder. "He's a superb teacher, students absolutely adore him," Merchant said. "He attracts hordes of followers."
People keep stopping DeLaney as he walks. They know him from the lab, or class, or church, or local Democratic politics, or just because he's Ted DeLaney, and everyone knows Ted DeLaney.
He and his wife live in the tiny, white house in Lexington that his mother bought decades ago; he wanted to stay connected to the black community. It's worn and crowded, he said, but with memories as close at hand as the places worn smooth around the wrought-iron handles of the knotty-pine cabinets.
DeLaney hopes the desegregation project, which started with people meeting in Lee Chapel to tell their stories, will be a book one day. "I want to get some scholarship out there that can be a legacy," he said.
He has one more dream: Someday, before he retires, he wants to leave Washington and Lee. He wants to teach at a historically black college, he said, "to come full circle."

Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Fred McKinley Jones

Fred McKinley Jones is certainly one of the most important Black inventors ever based on the sheer number of inventions he formulated as well as their diversity.
Fred Jones was born on May 17, 1893 in Covington, Kentucky. His father was a white railroad worker of Irish descent and his mother was Black. It is believed that his mother died while he was young and Fred was raised by his father. When Fred was eight years old, his father took him to Cincinnati, Ohio to where they visited St. Mary's Catholic Church rectory. Fred's father urged Father Edward A. Ryan to take Fred in in order to expose him to an environment where he might have a better opportunity for gaining an education. Fred performed chores around the church in return for being fed and housed, cutting the grass, shoveling snow, scrubbing floors and learning to cook. At an early age, Fred demonstrated a great interest in mechanical working, whether taking apart a toy, a watch or a kitchen appliance. Eventually he became interested in automobiles, so much so that upon turning 12 years of age, he ran away from his home at the rectory and began working at the R.C. Crothers Garage.
Initially hired to sweep and clean the garage, Fred spent much of his time observing the mechanics as they worked on cars. His observation, along with a voracious appetite for learning through reading developed within Fred an incredible base of knowledge about automobiles and their inner workings. Within three years, Fred had become the foreman of the garage. The garage was primarily designed to repair automobiles brought in by customers but also served as a studio for building racing cars. After a few years of building these cars, Fred desired to drive them and soon became one of the most well known racers in the Great Lakes region. After brief stints working aboard a steamship and a hotel, Jones moved to Hallock, Minnesota began designing and building racecars which he drove them at local tracks and at county fairs. His favorite car was known as Number 15 and it was so well designed it not only defeated other automobile but once triumphed in a race against an airplane.
On August 1, 1918 Jones enlisted in the 809 Pioneer Infantry of the United States Army and served in France during World War I. While serving, Jones recruited German prisoners of war and rewired his camp for electricity, telephone and telegraph service. After being discharged by the Army, Fred returned to Hallock in 1919. Looking for work, Jones often aided local doctors by driving them around for housecalls during the winter season. When navigation through the snow proved difficult, Fred attached skis to the undercarriage of an old airplane body and attached an airplane propeller to a motor and soon whisked around town a high speeds in his new snowmachine. Over the next few years Fred began tinkering with almost everything he could find, inventing things he could not find and improving upon those he could. When one of the doctors he worked for on occasion complained that he wished he did not have to wait for patient to come into his office for x-ray exams, Jones created a portable x-ray machine that could be taken to the patient. Unfortunately, like many of his early inventions, Jones never thought to apply for a patent for machine and watched helplessly as other men made fortunes off of their versions of the device. Undaunted, Jones set out for other projects, including a radio transmitter, personal radio sets and eventually motion picture devices.
In 1927, Jones was faced with the problem of helping friend convert their silent movie theater into a "talkie" theater. Not only did he convert scrap metal into the parts necessary to deliver a soundtrack to the video, he also devised ways to stabilize and improve the picture quality. When Joe Numero, the head of Ultraphone Sound Systems heard about Fred's devices, he invited Fred to come to Minneapolis for a job interview. After taking a position with the company, Fred began improving on many of the existing devices the company sold. Many of his improvements were so significant, representatives from A.T. & T and RCA sat down to talk with Fred and were amazed at the depth of his knowledge on intricate details, particularly in light of his limited educational background. Around this time, Fred came up with a new idea - an automatic ticket-dispensing machine to be used at movie theaters. Fred applied for and received a patent for this device in June of 1939 and the patent rights were eventually sold to RCA.
At some point, Joe Numero was presented with the task of developing a device which would allow large trucks to transport perishable products without them spoiling. Jones set to work and developed a cooling process that could refrigerate the interior of the tractor-trailer. In 1939 Fred and Joe Numero received a patent for the vehicle air-conditioning device which would later be called a Thermo King.
This product revolutionized several industries including shipping and grocery businesses. Grocery chains were now able to import and export products which previously could only have been shipped as canned goods. Thus, the frozen food industry was created and the world saw the emergence of the "supermarket."
In addition to installing the Thermo King refrigeration units in trucks and tractor-trailers, Jones modified the original design so they could be outfitted for trains, boats and ships.
During World War II, the Department of Defense found a great need portable refrigeration units for distributing food and blood plasma to troops in the field. The Department called upon Thermo King for a solution. Fred modified his device and soon had developed a prototype which would eventually allow airplanes to parachute these units down behind enemy lines to the waiting troops.
For the next 20 years, Fred Jones continued make improvements on existing devices and devised new inventions when necessary to aid the public. Jones died on February 21, 1961 and was posthumously awarded the National Medal of Technology, one of the greatest honors an inventor could receive. Jones was the first Black inventor to ever receive such an honor.

Granville Woods

The magnitude of an inventors work can often be defined by the esteem in which he is held by fellow inventors. If this is the case, then Granville Woods was certainly a respected inventor as he was often referred to as the "Black Thomas Edison."
Granville Woods was born on April 23, 1856 in Columbus, Ohio. He spent his early years attending school until the age of 10 at which point he began working in a machine shop repairing railroad equipment and machinery. Intrigued by the electricity that powered the machinery, Woods studied other machine workers as they attended to different pieces of equipment and paid other workers to sit down and explain electrical concepts to him. Over the next few years, Woods moved around the country working on railroads and in steel rolling mills. This experience helped to prepare him for a formal education studying engineering (surprisingly, it is unknown exactly where he attended school but it is believed it was an eastern college.)
After two years of studying, Woods obtained a job as an engineer on a British steamship called the Ironsides. Two years later he obtained employment with D & S Railroads, driving a steam locomotive. Unfortunately, despite his high aptitude and valuable education and expertise, Woods was denied opportunities and promotions because of the color of his skin. Out of frustration and a desire to promote his abilities, Woods, along with his brother Lyates, formed the Woods Railway Telegraph Company in 1884. The company manufactured and sold telephone, telegraph and electrical equipment. One of the early inventions from the company was an improved steam boiler furnace and this was followed up by an improved telephone transmitter which had superior clarity of sound and could provide for longer range of distance for transmission.
In 1885, Woods patented a apparatus which was a combination of a telephone and a telegraph. The device, which he called "telegraphony," would allow a telegraph station to send voice and telegraph messages over a single wire. The device was so successful that he later sold it to the American Bell Telephone Company. In 1987, Woods developed his most important invention to date - a device he called Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph. A variation of the "induction telegraph," it allowed for messages to be sent from moving trains and railway stations. By allowing dispatchers to know the location of each train, it provided for greater safety and a decrease in railway accidents.
Granville Woods often had difficulties in enjoying his success as other inventors made claims to his devices. Thomas Edison made one of these claims, stating that he had first created a similar telegraph and that he was entitled to the patent for the device. Woods was twice successful in defending himself, proving that there were no other devices upon which he could have depended or relied upon to make his device. After the second defeat, Edison decided that it would be better to work with Granville Woods than against him and thus offered him a position with the Edison Company.
In 1892, Woods used his knowledge of electrical systems in creating a method of supplying electricity to a train without any exposed wires or secondary batteries. Approximately every 12 feet, electricity would be passed to the train as it passed over an iron block. He first demonstrated the device as an amusement apparatus at the Coney Island amusement park and while it amused patrons, it would be a novel approach towards making safer travel for trains.
Many of Woods inventions attempted to increase efficiency and safety railroad cars, Woods developed the concept of a third rail which would allow a train to receive more electricity while also encountering less friction. This concept is still used on subway train platforms in major cities in the United States.
Over the course of his life time Granville Woods would obtain more than 50 patents for inventions including an automatic brake and an egg incubator and for improvements to other inventions such as safety circuits, telegraph, telephone, and phonograph. When he died on January 30, 1910 in New York City he had become an admired and well respected inventor, having sold a number of his devices to such giants as Westinghouse, General Electric and American Engineering - more importantly the world knew him as the Black Thomas Edison.

Henry Blair

Henry Blair was the second Black inventor issued a patent by the United States Patent Office. His first invention was a seed planter which enabled farmers to plant more corn utilizing less labor in a smaller period of time. Two years later, in 1836, Blair received a second patent for a corn harvester. Blair had been a successful farmer for years and developed the inventions as a means of increasing efficiency in farming.
It is noteworthy that in both of his patents he was listed as a "colored man", the only example of an inventor's race being listed or acknowledged on an issued patent.

Lewis Latimer

Lewis Latimer is considered one of the 10 most important Black inventors of all time not only for the sheer number of inventions created and patents secured but also for the magnitude of importance for his most famous discovery.
Lewis Latimer was born on September 4, 1848 in Chelsea, Massachusetts. His parents were George and Rebecca Latimer, both runaway slaves who migrated to Massachusetts in 1842 from Virginia. George Latimer was captured by his slave owner, who was determined to take him back to Virginia. His situation gained great notoriety, even reaching the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Eventually George was purchased by abolition supporters who set him free.
Lewis served in the United States Navy for the Union during the Civil War, assigned to the U.S.S. Massasoit gunboat and received an honorable discharge on July 3, 1965. After his discharge he sought employment throughout Boston, Massachusetts and eventually gained a position as an office boy with a patent law firm, Crosby and Gould earning $3.00 each week. After observing Latimer's ability to sketch patent drawings, he was eventually promoted to the position of head draftsman earning $20.00 a week. In addition to his newfound success, Latimer found additional happiness when he married Mary Wilson in November of 1873.
In 1874, along with W.C. Brown, Latimer co-invented an improved of a train water closet, a bathroom compartment for railroad trains. Two years later, Latimer would play a part in one of the world's most important inventions.
In 1876, Latimer was sought out as a draftsman by a teacher for deaf children. The teacher had created a device and wanted Lewis to draft the drawing necessary for a patent application. The teacher was Alexander Graham Bell and the device was the telephone. Working late into the night, Latimer worked hard to finish the patent application, which was submitted on February 14, 1876, just hours before another application was submitted by Elisha Gray for the a similar device.
In 1880, after moving to Bridgeport, Connecticut, Latimer was hired as the assistant manager and draftsman for U.S. Electric Lighting Company owned by Hiram Maxim. Maxim was the chief rival to Thomas Edison, the man who invented the electric light bulb. The light was composed of a glass bulb which surrounded a carbon wire filament, generally made of bamboo, paper or thread. When the filament was burned inside of the bulb (which contained almost no air), it became so hot that it actually glowed. Thus by passing electricity into the bulb, Edison had been able to cause the glowing bright light to emanate within a room. Before this time most lighting was delivered either through candles or through gas lamps or kerosene lanterns. Maxim greatly desired to improve on Edison's light bulb and focused on the main weakness of Edison's bulb - their short life span (generally only a few days.) Latimer set out to make a longer lasting bulb.
Latimer devised a way of encasing the filament within an cardboard envelope which prevented the carbon from breaking and thereby provided a much longer life to the bulb and hence made the bulbs less expensive and more efficient. This enabled electric lighting to be installed within homes and throughout streets
Latimer applied for a patent for the "Process of Manufacturing Carbons" and it was granted in January 1882. Because he was working at the time for US Electric Lighting Company, he was forced to assign the patent to the company, and thus lost out on the enormous financial rewards which would result. Around this time, Latimer, along with Joseph V. Nichols received a patent for an improved incandescent lamp which utilized a more efficient way of connecting the carbon filament to the lead wires at the lamp base. Hiram Maxim named this invention the "Maxim Electric Lamp."
Latimer abilities in electric lighting became well known and soon he was sought after to continue to improve on incandescent lighting as well as arc lighting. Eventually, as more major cities began wiring their streets for electric lighting, Latimer was dispatched to lead the planning team. He helped to install the first electric plants in Philadelphia, New York City and Montreal and oversaw the installation of lighting in railroad stations, government building and major thoroughfares in Canada, New England and London.
In 1890, Latimer, having been hired by Thomas Edison, began working in the legal department of Edison Electric Light Company, serving as the chief draftsman and patent expert. In this capacity he drafted drawings and documents related to Edison patents, inspected plants in search of infringers of Edison's patents, conducted patent searches and testified in court proceeding on Edison's behalf. Later that year wrote the worlds most thorough book on electric lighting, "Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System." Lewis was named one of the charter members of the Edison pioneer, a distinguished group of people deemed responsible for creating the electrical industry. The Edison Electric Lighting would eventually evolve into what is now known as the General Electric Company.
Latimer continued to display his creative talents over then next several years. In 1894 he created a safety elevator, a vast improvement on existing elevators. He next received a patent for Locking Racks for Hats, Coats, and Umbrellas. The device was used in restaurants, hotels and office buildings, holding items securely and allowing owners of items to keep the from getting misplaced or accidentally taken by others. He next created a improved version of a Book Supporter, used to keep books neatly arranged on shelves.
Latimer next devised a method of making rooms more sanitary and climate controlled. He termed his device an Apparatus for Cooling and Disinfecting. The device worked wonders in hospitals, preventing dust and particles from circulating within patient rooms and public areas.
Throughout the rest of his life, Latimer continued to try to devise ways of improving everyday living for the public, eventually working in efforts to improve the civil rights of Black citizens within the United States. He also painted portraits and wrote poetry and music for friends and family.
Lewis Latimer died on December 11, 1928 and left behind a legacy of achievement and leadership that much of the world owes thanks.

Benjamin Banneker

Benjamin Banneker was born in 1731 just outside of Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a slave. His grandfather had been a member of a royal family in Africa and was wise in agricultural endeavors. As a young man, he was allowed to enroll in a school run by Quakers and excelled in his studies, particularly in mathematics. Soon, he had progressed beyond the capabilities of his teacher and would often make up his own math problems in order to solve them.
One day his family was introduced to a man named Josef Levi who owned a watch. Young Benjamin was so fascinated by the object that Mr. Levi gave it to him to keep, explaining how it worked. Over the course of the next few days, Benjamin repeatedly took the watch apart and then put it back together. After borrowing a book on geometry and another on Isaac Newton's Principia (laws of motion) he made plans to build a larger version of the watch, mimicking a picture he had seen of a clock. After two years of designing the clock and carving each piece by hand, including the gears, Banneker had successfully created the first clock ever built in the United States. For the next thirty years, the clock kept perfect time.
In 1776, the Third Continental Congress met and submitted the Declaration of Independence from England. Soon thereafter, the Revolutionary War broke out an Banneker set out to grow crops of wheat in order to help feed American troops. His knowledge of soil gained from his grandfather allowed him to raise crops in areas which had previously stood barren for years.
When a family friend died and left him a book on astronomy, a telescope and other scientific inventions, Banneker became fascinated with the stars and the skies. He soon was able to predict events such as solar eclipses and sunrises and sunsets. In 1792, he developed his first almanac, predicting weather and seasonal changes and also included tips on planting crops and medical remedies. Banneker sent a copy of his book to Thomas Jefferson, at that time the Secretary of State and in a twelve page later expressed to Jefferson that Blacks in the United States possessed equal intellectual capacity and mental capabilities as those Whites who were described in the Declaration of Independence. As such, he stated, Blacks should also be afforded the same rights and opportunities afforded to whites. This began a long correspondence between the two men that would extend over several years.
Around the same time, President Washington decided to move the Nation's Capitol from Philadelphia to an area on the border of Maryland and Virginia. Major Pierre L'Enfant from France was commissioned to develop the plans for for the new city and at Jefferson's request, Banneker was included as one of the men appointed to assist him. Banneker consulted frequently with L'Enfant and studied his draft and plans for the Capitol City carefully. L'Enfant was subject to great criticism and hostility because he was a foreigner and abruptly resigned from the project and moved back to France.
As the remaining members of the team gathered, they began debating as to how they should start from scratch. Banneker surprised them when he asserted that he could reproduce the plans from memory and in two days did exactly as he had promised. The plans he drew were the basis for the layout of streets, buildings and monuments that exist to this day in Washington D.C.
Benjamin Banneker died quietly on October 25, 1806, lying in a field looking at the stars through his telescope. Nations around the world mourned his passing, viewing him as a genius and the United States' first great Black Inventor.

Help Wanted: Black Journalists

BY JESSICA HANTHORN
247-4537
March 19, 2005 HAMPTON -- The news media should do a better job of covering black families, and the key way to do that is get more African-American representation in journalism, according to a noted panel of journalists who gathered at Hampton University on Friday.
"We did not finish the job of telling the story of the black family," said Jack E. White, a former Time magazine columnist and editor. "The black community is much more complex than we thought it was in the 1960s, and the media continues to oversimplify our story."
The session was part of Hampton University's 27th annual Conference on the Black Family, which started Wednesday and ended Friday. The conference, hosted this year by HU's journalism school, focused on ways to repair and restore black families.
The journalists - who now work as professors at HU - gathered to discuss how the media has portrayed the black family since the 1968 Kerner Report. That report, released by an 11-member panel appointed by President Johnson, criticized the media's coverage of black communities, saying they had "failed to analyze and report adequately on the racial problems in the United States."
Speakers also included former New York Times columnist Earl Caldwell, sports journalist Doug Smith and Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts. They called on more African-Americans to work in the news media and own media companies to help improve coverage.
Several panelists argued the media still does a poor job analyzing and reporting racial problems more than 35 years after the Kerner Report's release.
"Media did then, and do now, render our lives in primary colors and in the most simplistic ways possible," said Pitts. "Our community is rendered in a very few stock ways."
However, when white people own many media companies and most working journalists are white, it's often difficult to get stories about black people into the newspaper, said Smith, who worked for years at USA Today.
Smith shared a story:
When he wrote a piece for USA Today about tennis players Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, the story ran on the front page. But a similar story about Venus and Serena Williams was delegated to the sports pages. He thinks USA Today's leadership didn't see the importance of the story. "When you have an operation that is still controlled, essentially, by whites, it's difficult to get them to understand," he said. "We need more black people in the boardrooms in the news media."
The Kerner Report also said the journalistic profession has been "shockingly backward" in hiring, training and promoting African-Americans.
Today, the numbers of minority journalists are still low. Just 5.4 percent of journalists were black in 2004, according to a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. But, of minorities in newsrooms, the percentage who work as supervisors has grown. In 1978, 4 percent of minority journalists worked as supervisors; that number increased to 20 percent in 2004.
The number of minorities working as journalists in 1978 was about 3.9 percent, and in 2004, that number had grown to nearly 13 percent. The panelists said it's not enough. News outlets need to do more to recruit black employees, and black families should do more to own media businesses.
Copyright © 2005, Daily Press

Constance Baker Motley

MarieBrenner.com > Articles > The New Yorker > Judge Motley's Verdict
May 16, 1994
ANNALS OF LAW

JUDGE MOTLEY'S VERDICT
Forty years after the N.A.A.C.P. won Brown v. Board of Education, the first woman on its legal team discusses the battle over integration–then and now.
BY MARIE BRENNER
From time to time when Constance Baker Motley is invited to recall her glory days as an N.A.A.C.P. lawyer in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, she is challenged by law students who think of her as an anachronism, a holdover from a time when it was believed that undoing the pathology between the races could be accomplished largely through the courts. This was the case last October, for example, when Motley, a New York federal judge, spent a week as jurist-in-residence at the law school of the University of Indiana in Bloomington. Motley is popular on the law-school circuit; she and her former colleagues at the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund ride a crest of civil-rights-era nostalgia.
On May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court issued its unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education which overturned school segregation, Motley, then a Legal Defense Fund trial lawyer, was thirty-two years old. She was "the girl in the office" then, the drudge, but over the next ten years she became the only woman at the plaintiff’s table in the Jim Crow South as she and other lawyers tried case after case to enforce the Brown decision; she helped to desegregate lunch counters, schools, and buses, and in those years she also argued ten cases in front of the Supreme Court. In Montgomery, Alabama, she recently recalled, she argued five different appeals in one day as the school boards tried to put off the evil moment of desegregation. In Jackson, Mississippi, a local paper referred to her as "the Motley woman." She was chided for her fashionable clothes. Her presence in court often brought dozens of spectators, simply to marvel at the fact that a Negro woman could actually be a lawyer. But the majority of the law students who gathered to hear her at Indiana last October were only vaguely aware of her importance. They weren’t yet born when she travelled from courtroom to courtroom through Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
A few days before Motley arrived in Indiana, Alfred Aman, the law-school dean, arranged a display of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund’s achievements in the foyer of the law-school building: among other items, news accounts of Charlayne Hunter entering the University of Georgia in 1961 and James Meredith desegregating the University of Mississippi the same year were visible in a glass case. The moot-court room at the law school was filled to capacity on the afternoon Motley delivered her lecture. That night, she spoke at a dinner given by the Black Law Students Association, or B.L.S.A. She recalled the many school-desegregation cases that had led to and followed Brown, but after she spoke she was kept busy answering sharp questions about her own experiences, posed by several of the B.L.S.A. members: the narrative of Constance Motley’s life seemed to contradict the reality of modern racial politics. "Shouldn’t you have fought for equal schools?" one student asked her, and went on to cite the breakdown in black communities, the black-on-black crime, the miserable test scores, and the loss of pride among black men. "Your generation always used the word ‘mainstream,’ " another student said, and asked, "What is wrong with black culture?" Motley was brisk with the B.L.S.A. students. "I don’t know what black culture is," she said, as if attempting to camouflage her irritation. When Motley returned to New York, she told me that she had been startled at being asked to defend herself. At this point in her life, she has come to expect, at the very least, a certain degree of respect for what she and the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund accomplished. A mistake to fight for integration? The guiding principle of Constance Baker Motley’s life has been her belief that the law is the primary instrument of social reform. "In my early days at the N.A.A.C.P., I could never have imagined this situation at the colleges today," she told me.
A few weeks later, I went to visit Judge Motley at the United States Court House in downtown Manhattan. I took the elevator to the twentieth floor, but Motley was not yet in her chambers; she was in court, hearing pretrial motions on a case that involved the alleged mistreatment of a Black Muslim by prison officials.
The décor of Motley’s chambers was very feminine, with floral chintz curtains and pink walls. Judge Motley’s law clerk had left a stack of faded newspapers for me on the conference table. A headline on the top paper, a copy of the September 11, 1963, Times, read, "WALLACE ENDS RESISTANCE AS GUARD IS FEDERALIZED; MORE SCHOOLS INTEGRATE." The news story described the events of the previous day, when, after months of resistance by Governor George Wallace, the schools in Birmingham and two other Alabama cities were integrated. It told of a blond high-school girl in Birmingham who had cried when she learned that black children were enrolled in her school. "I hope my momma heard, so she’ll come get me," she said. The Times correspondent in Birmingham related that seventy-five youths had shouted, "Keep the niggers out!" "Go home!" and "Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate!" I flipped through the stack of newspapers. In one, I saw a photograph, snapped in the hallway of the federal courthouse in Birmingham in l962, that showed Motley wearing a fashionable black coat and matching hat and an elegant printed scarf. She was looking down at the floor, as if to distance herself from the mob, but she did not look particularly afraid; in fact, she appeared oddly serene.
There was also an envelope of documents referring to Constance Motley that went back as far as fifty years. They included the expected awards letters and banquet menus, and some unexpected examples of the way she handled her anger: Motley had kept a copy of every complaint she filed with the Taxi and Limousine Commission about drivers who failed to pick her up. ("Complainant, who is a Negro, charged that respondent discriminated against her . . .because of complainant’s color.") Then I came to a single-spaced letter signed "Anthropologist":
Mrs. Motley:
When you made your plea before Judge Tuttle, how many windows did you raise to let your stinking body odor escape? How much cologne did you use to saturate your clothing with to prevent others from smelling your stinking body? . . . It is hard to see how any person with an ounce of brains would get up and argue that the nigger is equal to other races. It just is not so.
As I finished the letter, Judge Motley walked into the room. I asked her about the letter, and she told me she could hardly remember receiving it. "I used to get letters like that all the time. I wonder why I even kept it," she said.
Constance Baker Motley is seventy-two years old. When she was admitted to Columbia Law School, in 1943, her photograph ran in a rotogravure for African-Americans, and she was held up as a role model. "She’s one of the few Negro women enrolled in Columbia University’s famous School of Law," the caption noted. As time passed, she became the first African-American woman to be a New York state senator, a borough president (Manhattan), a federal judge. Judge Motley is tall and large-boned, but she has delicate features and dainty hands and feet. She is judicial, formal, precise. Unlike many of the civil-rights activists of her generation, she is far more comfortable discoursing on the history of the Fourteenth Amendment than delivering an impassioned speech. Given what she has been through, her dry, legalistic demeanor may be her most remarkable achievement. She has been in jail cells with Martin Luther King, Jr., where the air was so foul that she became faint; she spent long nights in Birmingham churches singing freedom songs; she stayed with Medgar Evers, and, under armed guard, in the Birmingham home of a Legal Defense Fund attorney whose house was repeatedly bombed during the fifties and sixties; racist insults have been hurled at her by white lawyers. Yet, for all this, her memories tend to be a lawyer’s memories. She focusses on the method by which school integration was actually achieved, the litigation strategies, the motions and sustaining orders, the quashing of subpoenas, the emergency appeals. It was her knowledge of the law that enabled her to transcend the emotionalism of the Jim Crow courts. In her 1992 memoir, "In My Place," Charlayne Hunter-Gault recalls sitting with Constance Motley at the plaintiff’s table in a Georgia courtroom during her attempt to enter the University of Georgia: "She barely acknowledged my presence. . . . I never, for example, heard her laugh in the presence of any state or university officials, except as a barely masked form of sarcasm. It seemed as if this was the most important mission in her life. In fact, she often talked about the South in those days as if it were a war zone and she was fighting in a revolution. No one–be it defendant or plaintiff–was going to distract her from carrying her task to a successful conclusion."
Until she was a teen-ager, Connie Baker had never heard of Harriet Tubman or Sojourner Truth. She attended a New Haven school where she was one of the few Negro students. Her parents, originally from the tiny Caribbean island of Nevis, moved to New Haven at the turn of the century and became part of the clannish West Indian community there. Connie Baker had eleven brothers and sisters. Although the family was poor, the children had an air of superiority, from their parents’ years at British schools. The Bakers lived on the outskirts of the Yale campus, and Connie’s father was a cook at Skull & Bones; in fact, most of the Baker family was associated with Yale–her uncles also worked in the university’s clubs. "They told all the little white Yalies what to do," Judge Motley’s niece and namesake Connie Royster told me.
Nevertheless, Connie was once turned away from a Connecticut beach near New Haven, and some restaurants in New Haven wouldn’t serve blacks. She learned about black heroes and heroines and discovered the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois at church lectures.
Last October, Judge Motley was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, in Seneca Falls, New York. The list of women inducted with her included the physicist Rosalyn Yalow, who had won a Nobel Prize; the civil-rights leader and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund Marian Wright Edelman; the labor organizer Dolores Huerta; and Wilma Mankiller, the chief of the Cherokee Nation. The mother of Emmett Till, a black teen-ager who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955, accepted an award for Rosa Parks, who had inspired the 1955-56 bus boycott in Montgomery when she refused to give up a front seat. "Rosa Parks was willing to pay the cost to save the lost," Emmett Till’s mother said. Most of the women used the occasion to make political speeches, but Judge Motley spoke about a white man named Clarence Blakeslee. "There was no money for me to go to college," she said. "I went to work at the National Youth Administration, and one day I gave a speech at a black community house. Clarence Blakeslee had built the community house. He was a contractor who had done a lot of work at Yale.
He had made millions of dollars, and what he did with those millions was to help educate black Americans." Blakeslee had been impressed by the teen-ager’s speech and had asked her where she would attend college. When Connie Baker told him that her parents could not afford to send her, he offered to pay for her entire education. "Clarence Blakeslee was a white man responsible for my being here today," she said.
Connie Baker travelled to Fisk University, in Nashville, by train, riding in a Jim Crow car; she was eager to experience segregation. Her parents were frightened for her; they themselves refused to cross the Mason-Dixon Line. On her first trip home, she brought them back a "Colored Only" sign. At Fisk, she met, for the first time, black students from middle-class families in the South, who were ensconced in black communities, with their own clubs and churches. "It was my first experience in a black institution with black people who were just like white people, as we used to say," Judge Motley said of Fisk. "Their parents were college educated, they had wealth. For the first time, I met blacks who were doing something other than cooking and waiting on tables. They intended to go back into the black community." White people, however, were the standard, and Connie Baker could not understand why the Fisk students were not interested in advancing in the white world. It was, she told me, the enigma of her college days. "All of our lives, we had to be like white people. We had to dress, think, and act like white people," she recalled, yet her classmates did not want to become part of the white community.
At Columbia Law School, she began to work as a volunteer at the N.A.A.C.P.’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., a subsidiary that Thurgood Marshall and his mentor, Charles Houston, had created in 1939. It was usually called the Inc. Fund, for short. Marshall seemed to find little remarkable in the fact that she was a woman, and took her on as a clerk. After she graduated, in 1946, she began working full-time. Her salary was fifty dollars a week. Besides Motley, the entire staff consisted of Marshall and three other lawyers, one of whom worked part time. At first, Motley worked on housing cases, challenging the restrictive covenants that excluded blacks from buying real estate in white neighborhoods. Marshall was then involved in several cases to integrate universities at the graduate-school level, such as the ones in which Ada Sipuel sought admission to the University of Oklahoma College of Law and Heman Sweatt to the University of Texas School of Law. It was Marshall’s strategy to argue the graduate-school cases under Plessy v. Ferguson, the onerous 1896 Supreme Court decision that upheld existing separate-but-equal doctrine and set up the legal framework for segregation. Marshall argued that since there were no black law schools in Texas and Oklahoma, Sipuel and Sweatt should be admitted to the white institutions. Ultimately, of course, in Brown, the Supreme Court ruled against separate facilities, arguing that even where they were equal segregation per se had a negative effect.
In 1949, when Connie Motley tried her first case, in Jackson, Mississippi, the people there had hardly ever seen a Negro lawyer before, and had never seen one who was a woman. She was married by then. Her husband, Joel Motley, was a New York real-estate broker whom she had met when they were living at the Harlem Y.M.C.A. and Y.W.C.A., respectively. They had got married in August of 1946, and this was her first trip to the deep South ever; her husband worried about her. Her only experience in a courtroom had been observing the meticulous style of Charles Houston in a University of Maryland nursing-school case. Motley found it impressive that Houston wrote down every one of his exhibits and questions in advance and never deviated from his text.
Motley and her colleague Robert Carter, who is now also a federal judge, booked a Pullman to Jackson. (She had bought a new dress at Lord & Taylor for the trial.) The case was an equalization-of-salary suit originally brought by a teacher, Gladys Noel Bates. When Connie Motley walked into the courtroom in Jackson for the first time, she was appalled by a W.P.A. mural depicting the glories of lost Dixie which covered an entire wall. She remembers staring at the white women in their crinolines and hoopskirts on one side and the darkies hoisting cotton bales on the other. She had never imagined that on her first big case, when she needed all the poise she could muster, she would have to interrogate witnesses and offer arguments while being confronted with such a spectacle. She recalls that trial as one of the few occasions when she was almost overcome with rage.
Other memories of the trial also remain vivid. "When we got to court on the first day, we saw that all the seats were taken by whites, because the black people believed that they had to sit in the balcony," she told me. "But this court did not have a balcony, so the blacks stood along the walls. After the first session, Bob Carter told the people that, unlike in state court, in a federal court you could sit anywhere you wanted. The next morning, we got there at nine o’clock, and all the seats were taken by blacks."
She went on to say, "In those days, no black lawyers ever went to court. If they had a case, they got a white lawyer to go for them. Bob and I needed a local lawyer to appear and sign the complaint. This was the first case since Reconstruction where blacks had appeared as lawyers in a courtroom in Mississippi. We found a black lawyer who lived in Meridian, Mississippi–James Burns. He owned a little grocery store, and he was scared to death. When we were in court, he sat with his back to us. He was making notes. He wanted to give the impression that he was just local counsel. He wanted to convey that he was not the lawyer bringing the suit. On the second day of the trial, Bob Carter said to him, ‘Go out and see if our witnesses are out there.’ He went out bent over completely–again, showing that he knew his place as a black man. When we went to have dinner, he would disappear; he did not want to take the chance of being killed with us.
"From time to time, the judge would rule in our favor, and once Bob spoke to the judge about a witness who was speaking very softly. He said, ‘Could you ask that witness to speak up, please?’ The black people in Jackson had never seen that before, and when Bob went to get his hair cut at the barbershop that evening everyone was reënacting this white man being made to speak up so a black man could hear. The final day, the judge was very polite. He addressed me as Mrs. Motley. The judge was from the Mississippi coast, and had no hostility toward black people. So, on the last day, when Bob told our lawyer to go out and get our witnesses, Burns for the first time in the entire trial walked out erect. I said to Bob, ‘At least we have accomplished something in this case.’ "
In the several TV movies made about the drama leading up to the Brown decision, the Inc. Fund is commonly portrayed as resembling a tabloid newsroom, filled with bantering black lawyers. The office jokes have become standards; one had it that Marshall called himself "H.N.I.C."–"head nigger in charge." In Jack Greenberg’s book "Crusaders in the Courts," a history of the Inc. Fund that will be published this month, a different portrait emerges. Greenberg, now a Columbia Law School professor, started at the Inc. Fund several years after Connie Motley. For a while, they shared the same office. (When Greenberg, as a naïve young white lawyer, first met Motley, according to his new book, he was startled when she quickly corrected his use of the term "Negress," then in common use. "Negress," she said, "was like using the word ‘tigress’ or ‘lioness,’ and was offensive to women.") In one TV miniseries, "Separate but Equal," the actor Ron Silver portrayed Greenberg, and Sidney Poitier portrayed Thurgood Marshall. Greenberg recently told me that he was nettled by the histrionics. "The idea that Thurgood was waving his arms around in court yelling and screaming and grimacing!" Greenberg said. "Thurgood didn’t do that. In fact, no lawyer does that. Except William Kunstler." The real atmosphere was "lawyers at work," Greenberg recalled, the pedestrian stuff of "following precedents and filing motions for preliminary injunctions." It was difficult to tell the difference between the Inc. Fund office and any other office, except that its occupants talked about race all the time.
"What do you remember about the day of the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education?" I asked Judge Motley a few months ago. We were on a train on our way to Washington. It was the morning of the Supreme Court’s memorial service for Thurgood Marshall, and Judge Motley had been asked to speak. At first, her memories were atmospheric–the pandemonium in the office, the joyous ringing of the telephones. That night, she recalled, she went home to her apartment on West End Avenue. She was proud of that apartment; the Motleys were the first black family to move into the building. Motley had big plans then for her two-year-old son, Joel–and, indeed, he ultimately graduated from Harvard Law School and became a partner in an investment-banking firm. Motley’s memory of the day of the Brown decision focussed on Joel in his high chair. She had already realized, she told me, that the effect of Brown was going to be primarily psychological, and she informed her toddler that the Supreme Court had, that very day, undone segregation. She made no effort to explain it in terms a two-year-old might begin to comprehend, but she was convinced that Joel understood her.
When she got to the office the next morning, she learned that Walter White, the head of the N.A.A.C.P., had had to cancel a lecture date in Selma, Alabama. "Thurgood called me and said, ‘You go, Connie’–very terse. He did not say, ‘I will help you with your speech,’ or give me any ideas. You were supposed to do it on your own. If you made a mess, you made a mess. That was the way Thurgood was. So I went to Selma that Sunday. And the place was jammed. It was a small church, and one man had even come in an oxcart."
It was Connie Motley’s first real exposure to Southern black rural poverty. She recalled the drive from the airport in Birmingham to Selma, during which she looked out the window at tarpaper shacks and outhouses. She was not prepared for the starkness. "It sort of knocked me over," she said. The church was filled with people from all over Alabama, many of whom had saved their money to travel to hear Walter White. Thinking of that day in Alabama, she recalled that she knew immediately that the white people would fight Brown all the way. She saw her future in terms of a vast tapestry of court cases and problems, and worried about how the tiny Inc. Fund, with its minimal budget, could afford the years of litigation. On the flight back to New York, she recalled, her euphoria over the Brown decision faded, and she felt lost, with no idea what lay ahead.
As each Brown v. Board of Education milestone occurs, civil-rights legal scholars–Randall Kennedy among others inevitably comment on the obliqueness of the Court’s language, which led to years of legal maneuvers and the continued de-facto segregation that plagues inner-city schools. When the Brown decision came down, Motley recalls, it was initially viewed as a decision that prohibited segregation but not as one that required affirmative action from state officials. Connie Motley prepared many of the hundreds of court papers and arguments necessary to enforce Brown, yet she never became a darling of the civil-rights movement, perhaps because her skill as a litigator lay in her very thorough preparation and understanding of the arcana of the law.
Connie Motley first met Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Atlanta. King was seen as a nuisance by the Inc. Fund, because his demonstrations had strained their ability to pursue school cases. In 1962, King had been enjoined by a court order from leading a march in Albany, Georgia. Motley arrived in Atlanta at one in the morning, in order to be in Judge Elbert Tuttle’s court that day. Tuttle, an Eisenhower appointee, held relatively liberal views on race. He was born in California, and had once seen his mother leave her porch and stand at a bus stop with a black woman so that the bus would stop to pick her up. At the airport, Motley was met by the Legal Defense Fund’s local counsel and, to her surprise, by William Kunstler, who was a private attorney at that time and had flown in from New York a few days before, claiming to represent Martin Luther King. Kunstler arranged with Motley and the other lawyers that he would make the first argument. "First of all, Judge Tuttle, let me introduce Mrs. Motley," Motley remembers him saying in court later that morning. Tuttle then said, "Mr. Kunstler, Mrs. Motley has been here so often that she could be a member of the court." The question at hand–whether the injunction against King’s march was a preliminary one, and could be appealed–was a tricky point to argue. As Motley recalls it, Kunstler told Judge Tuttle, "Well, Mrs. Motley will argue that." With little preparation, Motley stood up and spoke. Tuttle overturned the injunction. "As I was walking out," she said, "who should be sitting in the front row but Martin Luther King!" Not long afterward, the Inc. Fund became King’s primary counsel.
The envelope of papers that Connie Motley keeps in her chambers includes a copy of a letter written by James Meredith on January 29, 1961, to Thurgood Marshall:
I am submitting an application for admission to the University of Mississippi. I am seeking entrance for the second semester which begins the 8th of February. I am anticipating encountering some type of difficulty with the various agencies here in the State which are against my gaining entrance into the school. . . . I am making this move in, what I consider, the interest of and for the benefit of (1) my country (2) my race (3) my family, and (4) myself.
Connie Motley is convinced that she was assigned the Meredith case because she was a woman. "Thurgood knew they treated black men a whole lot differently in Mississippi from the way they treated black women," she told Alfred Aman, the dean of the Indiana University—Bloomington School of Law, during an interview he conducted in 1988. "This is the last place in the world we wanted to hear from," she added, explaining that Marshall was worried about getting involved in Mississippi at that point, because the state seemed to be nearing an explosion, with Freedom Riders being arrested by the hundreds. By 1961, the Inc. Fund had grown to seven lawyers, and some of them were before the Supreme Court every couple of months. The office was already strained by its caseload, but Marshall knew that he had to make his last and best stand in Mississippi.
By then, Motley was well known in the Jackson federal court. She recalled that when she appeared to file her motion for Meredith, the judge, Sidney Mize, called to her from the bench, "Hi, Miz Motley!" "This was in the middle of another trial," she said. "He was very informal. When he took his recess, I told him I wanted to file my complaint against the University of Mississippi. Knowing there would be resistance, given the volatile situation in the state, he said to me, ‘Why did you have to come now?’ "
Motley was brisk with Meredith. She told him to get decent clothes and to shave his beard. He was a meticulous record keeper, Motley recalled. At one point, she subpoenaed his files from the university. The registrar, in an attempt to stall, said, "We didn’t bring the records," whereupon Meredith said, "I have a copy of everything I sent." Motley had a vivid memory of the moment: "They were floored. They had never expected that here was this student who would have a copy of all their correspondence!" One of the many tactics that were used to keep Meredith out of the university was to threaten to arrest him for having registered to vote in Jackson, where he had gone to college, rather than in his home town, Kosciusko. Immediately, Motley flew to New Orleans, where the court of appeals judge on Meredith’s case was sitting. "They are about to arrest Meredith," she told Judge John Minor Wisdom, and then suggested, "You could issue an injunction under the all-writs statute," a statute that permits a court to take whatever action is necessary to preserve its jurisdiction. Wisdom did so. Motley met Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., in New Orleans and, with him, drove straight to Jackson. "We got there at five minutes to six to prevent Meredith’s arrest," she recalled.
For months, the Justice Department avoided weighing in on Meredith, because the new Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, did not want a confrontation with Governor Ross Barnett. The litigation dragged on for a year and a half; Motley made twenty-two trips to Mississippi. For Joel Motley, then in grade school at Dalton, his mother’s travel was part of a great crusade. "There was no question in our house that history was being made," he told me. "One day during the Meredith trial, Burke Marshall"–an Assistant United States Attorney General–"called. I remember he told my mother that he wanted her to do X, Y, and Z. She hung up the phone on him. She told us that she was happy to have his help, but he wasn’t going to tell her how to run her case." On the day when Connie Motley decided that she would file a motion in federal district court to hold Governor Barnett in contempt, she drove to the Meridian, Mississippi, courthouse with Meredith and her secretary, in Medgar Evers’ car. "While we were driving," she recalled, "Meredith said to me, ‘Put those papers inside the Times. We are being followed. We don’t want them to know who you are.’ There we were, frightened to death, driving to Meridian. This occurred going through a wooded area. The state police just followed us all the way. They knew it was Medgar’s car, because they had been following him for years." (Within a year, of course, Evers was murdered.) "When we got to court, my secretary, in her haste, wrote ‘motion’ instead of ‘order.’ Judge Mize was presiding over the court, with Harold Cox, another judge, who was the most anti-black human being I ever met. Judge Cox looked at our document and threw it at us. He said, ‘Look at this, it says "motion"!’ Judge Mize put his hand on Judge Cox’s hand and said, ‘Judge Cox, it is all over.’ Mize was saying, in effect, ‘You are a federal judge. You cannot take sides.’ "
A few weeks before the fortieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, I went to Columbia to visit Jack Greenberg. Greenberg has been on sabbatical this year, finishing "Crusaders in the Courts," and I wondered whether the years he spent analyzing the Inc. Fund cases had given him a larger perspective on what he and Connie Motley and their colleagues accomplished. Greenberg, who is sixty-nine, is slightly built and appears younger than he is. I had noticed many black students on the campus; Greenberg recalled that when he entered Columbia Law School, in the nineteen-forties, there was only one black in his class and she was from the Virgin Islands. Greenberg talked about Thurgood Marshall and his legacy, and that conversation led inevitably to the subject of Clarence Thomas. Greenberg simply shook his head sadly, as if he could hardly tolerate the fact that Thomas had taken Marshall’s place on the bench.
I asked Greenberg about the many celebrations that I had been told he plans to speak at for the fortieth anniversary of Brown. He said, "I’ll tell you exactly," and pulled out a small calendar and read off a list: it included forums at Princeton, the College of William and Mary, and Texas Southern University, and an event that the Legal Defense Fund, which now has a staff of twenty-five lawyers, will hold in Washington on May 16th, at which the President will also speak. I told Greenberg about Connie Motley’s trip to Indiana and how she was confronted by B.L.S.A. members who seemed to be trying to hold the Inc. Fund responsible for the breakdown in the black communities.
"None of these things are simple," Greenberg said. "We can’t do anything about the pathologies of the ghetto: drugs, guns, single-parent households, and housing that has collapsed. But Brown has been an important factor in producing a large black middle class."
As Judge Motley and I arrived in Washington for Thurgood Marshall’s memorial service and walked through Union Station, she said, "When I first came to Washington, on that restrictive-covenants case, this was the only place Thurgood and I could eat." Motley and I had talked about some of her cases since she became a judge. In 1969, she had been vigorous in her decision to protect prisoners’ right to due process in the Sostre case; in 1978, it was her ruling that allowed women reporters to enter the locker rooms of professional sports. But she said that it was her time at the Legal Defense Fund that was "lasting and significant." She later remarked that she was annoyed when the Indiana law students expected her to be an architect of social policy. "We were trying to eke out a legal victory. If you want to win a legal case, you had to win a legal argument," she said. It was a warm day in November–freakishly warm–and Judge Motley decided to take a taxi the short distance to the Court. In the taxi, she again brought up the subject of what had happened to her in Indiana. "Don’t those students realize that they would not even be at Indiana if it weren’t for Thurgood Marshall and the Brown decision?" she said.
I was sitting in the front seat of the taxi, whose driver happened to be black. When he heard the name Thurgood Marshall, he suddenly became attentive. He looked carefully in the rearview mirror at the Judge. When we pulled up at the Supreme Court Building, it took Judge Motley a few moments to organize her papers in her briefcase and comb her hair. I noticed a sea of gray heads moving toward the entrance of the building, and she began to tell me which lawyer had helped with each case. The unpleasant questions posed by the Indiana students were forgotten. As we got out of the car, the taxi-driver asked her, "Ma’am, did you really know Thurgood Marshall?"
"Yes," she said matter-of-factly.
"My God," he said. ©

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