The Legal Warriors

CHAPTER ONE: In the Beginning . . . This chapter presents some of my early legal experiences. These include work in the South during Freedom Summer in 1964, the founding of the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, advice on taking the bar examination, and work with the Bruce Klunder Freedom House in 1966 and 1967. After completing law school in 1966, and while waiting for the Army to call me to active duty based on my ROTC commitment, I also spent a year teaching at Myron T. Herrick Junior High School on Cleveland’s southeast side. The Army would then own me for the next two years, including a year at Fort Hamilton at the foot of the stunning Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York, and then 1968 and 1969 in Viet Nam with the finest soldiers in the world—the Green Berets of Special Forces at 5th SFGA (Airborne). Only then would I be free to return to Cleveland and come back to my position at the Legal Aid Society. Section 1. Jones Day Interviewer: “We keep the women in the back.” I have tried to locate chronologically the following interview event in my law-school career. I think this took place sometime in my second year, and probably in the fall of 1964. This was after I had volunteered for and participated in the 1964 Summer Civil Rights Activities in the South. Let me begin with recalling that passionate, exciting, and inspirational summer. We had a national organization called the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council, or LSCRRC. This organization of law students dedicated to fighting for civil rights had originated in 1963 from the inspirational work of Attorney William Higgs. A white attorney from Mississippi, he had earned the wrath of the local Establishment, who prosecuted him on what many say was a trumped-up morals charge and forced him to leave Mississippi. Higgs inspired a group of idealistic law students from Harvard and Yale to do legal work in the South during the summer of 1963. The original group had some seven members, who then formally set up a national organization in the fall of 1963 and began to recruit law students from all over America, whose mission would be to provide legal support to community groups and local lawyers in the South during the Civil Rights Summer of 1964.