Speaking Truth to Power in a TIme of Crisis

Can you make a difference with a law degree?

It was 1973, and the nation was in crisis. After agents of the Committee to Re-Elect the President were arrested for attempting to burglarize the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel, Independent Prosecutor Archibald Cox issued a subpoena to President Richard Nixon, asking for copies of taped conversations recorded in the Oval Office and authorized by Nixon as evidence.

President Nixon acted to dismiss Cox from his office the next night, a Saturday, October 20th. He contacted Attorney General Elliott Richardson and ordered him to fire the special prosecutor. Richardson refused, and instead resigned in protest. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. He also refused and resigned in protest. Nixon then contacted the Solicitor General, Robert Bork, and ordered him as acting head of the Justice Department to fire Cox, and Bork complied

The nation was stunned by this series of events, which became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. In the Republican leadership, however, the immediate impulse was to "circle the wagons" around the President. Nixon's wall of protection first began to crumble when U.S. Senator Edward Brooke, a former Massachusetts Attorney General and author of the federal Fair Housing Act, privately became the first Republican Senator to call for the President's resignation, advising Nixon that he had lost the confidence of the American people.

Guests at a Party for Langston Hughes (1924)

Guests at a Party for Langston Hughes at the home of Regina Andrews and Ethel Ray Nance (580 St. Nicholas Avenue, New York), 1924. Courtesy of Regina Andrews.

Left to right: Poet Langston Hughes, sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson, historian E. Franklin Frazier, doctor and author Rudolph Fisher, and legislator Hubert Delaney.

Regina M. Andrews, born in Chicago, moved to New York and became assistant to Ernestine Rose at the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library. She organized the Negro Experimental Theatre with Gwendolyn Bennett and gave encouragement to Charles S. Johnson in organizing the Civic Club dinner for young African-American writers in 1924. This dinner was the forerunner of the Harlem Renaissance because it brought together the young and elder African-American writers with a number of white editors and publishers. Paul Kellog of Survey Graphic, in fact, was sufficiently impressed and devoted an entire issue to the "New Negro."

Ms. Andrews shared an apartment in Harlem's Sugar Hill District with Louella Tucker and Ethel Nance, secretary to Charles S. Johnson and volunteer at the library. Their apartment was a gathering place for young artists and writers. Ms. Andrews wrote a play under the pen name Ursala Tilling called Climbing Jacob's Ladder, and promoted many of the young writers of the day. She was active in the Urban League. The photo shows a group on the roof of her apartment building.

Langston Hughes (1902-1967), the poet laureate of Harlem, wrote prolifically and influenced a generation of writers. His poetry was bittersweet, based on the rhythms of jazz and the blues. It was racially sensitive, earthy and honest. One of his early poems, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, was published in The Crisis Magazine in 1921.

Charles S. Johnson (1893-1956), an educator and, as Langston Hughes put it, "one of the midwives of the Harlem Renaissance." He was executive director for research and publicity for the National Urban League. In 1923, he founded Opportunity Magazine and in 1924 organized the famous Civic Club Dinner, a legendary gathering. He also organized literary contests in Opportunity and influenced many writers with his support and nurturing. He joined the faculty of Fisk University in 1928 and was department head of social sciences. Eventually he became its first African-American president.

E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1982), educator, sociologist was born in Baltimore, Maryland. After finishing high school in the city, Frazier entered Howard University and graduated with honors in 1916. He earned an MA in sociology at Clark University in 1921 and a Ph.D in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1931. His dissertation, The Negro Family in Chicago, was published in 1932. He taught at Atlanta University, then at Fisk, before beginning a long affiliation with Howard in 1932 as chairman of the sociology department. During his tenure at Atlanta University, his essays appeared in The Journal of Social Forces, The Nation, The Crisis, and Opportunity. His classic monograph, The Negro in the United States, appeared in 1939, and his controversial Black Bourgeoisie in 1957.

Rudolph Fisher (1897-1934) was a medical doctor and writer. He established a successful practice as an x-ray specialist and was a research fellow at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, specializing in roentgenology. As a writer, his career began with a short story entitled, "City of Refuge," published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1925. Many of his stories are about Harlem and its racial and social dynamics. He wrote "The Caucasian Storms Harlem" in response to discovery that certain clubs in Harlem banned African Americans so that they could cultivate a white clientele. He died of intestinal cancer caused by his work with radiation, leaving behind a substantial body of literary works.

Hubert T. Delaney (1901-1990), a lawyer and judge, was born in North Carolina. He graduated from New York University Law School in 1926 and became the 121^st District Republican candidate for Congress in 1929. He was tax commissioner and appointed by the mayor of New York, to investigate riots in the City in 1935. His wife was a poet, and he therefore was a part of the literary scene during the Harlem Renaissance.

Photo attributed to James Van Der Zee from the collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Andrew Young: When You Vote, Consider Who Will Make the Judicial Appointments

Leading commentators, from Ambassador Andrew Young to the New York Times Editorial Board, remind us that, when we vote, we should consider who we want to shape the nation's judiciary.

From the New York Times, February 5, 2012

The Supreme Court underscored its power to shape American life when it took major cases about the health care reform law, Arizona’s anti-immigrant law and the Voting Rights Act in an election year. But this is not simply a case of the court thrusting itself into politics.

The way these cases developed and made their way to the highest court also illustrates the reverse — how politics shape the court. Each case grows out of a struggle between left and right where politics have pushed the law: between a quest for universal coverage and the defense of big health care providers; between an emphasis on openness and hostility toward immigrants; and between a promise of access to the voting booth made nearly 50 years ago and the unyielding opposition to keeping that promise.

Each party has its program and works to turn it into law. The great example of political change through legal change was the long, methodical effort to whittle away at segregation from within the legal mainstream that culminated in the court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The conservatives’ legal-political strategy draws from Brown, but it is also vastly different in nature and design.

The struggle for school desegregation was waged by and on behalf of oppressed minority groups seeking to make good on the Constitution’s promise of equal rights. They faced strong opposition from the most powerful people in our society, in courts that were not necessarily sympathetic or overtly hostile to their cause. And they fought a long, incremental campaign.

When Lewis Powell Jr. energized conservatives by writing in 1971 that “the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change,” he was himself an incrementalist and expected others to be.

But the conservative legal battles of our modern times are being waged by the most powerful, often against the weak and oppressed. They began with a carefully planned and successful effort to reshape the courts to be sympathetic to conservative causes. They are largely aimed at narrowing rights, not expanding them — except where property and guns are concerned. And beginning with the Reagan administration, conservatives became impatient with the pace of change brought about from within the mainstream. They sought to remake law into a weapon of aggressive action.

The court’s health care reform case arose from a decision by Judge Roger Vinson of Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla., striking down the Affordable Care Act as unconstitutional. It demonstrates the enduring influence of the Reagan administration, which put a premium on picking judges who would carry out its ideology and on countering liberalism with pointed conservatism any way possible.

Besides nominating Judge Vinson and getting him confirmed by a Republican-controlled Senate, the Reagan Justice Department published conservative positions on states’ rights and other issues in executive-branch opinions to promote them before courts took them seriously.

Citing conservative scholarship about the narrow meaning of the Constitution’s commerce clause, the Vinson opinion presents the Reagan view of economic liberty — an idea that was judged faulty by established scholars during the Reagan era but now carries great influence.

The Bush administration revived this practice, which led directly to the Arizona case. One of its most notorious opinions asserts the power of states “as sovereign entities” to crack down on illegal immigration even if the federal government has not delegated them that power. The author of the Arizona law cited the authority granted in the 2002 memo as a basis for it, and the memo underlies similar efforts in a growing list of other states.

The Reagan administration expressed its antipathy to the Voting Rights Act in politics and law — in its effort to persuade Congress not to strengthen the act in 1982, for example, though Congress did, and in a 1985 Supreme Court test of the extension of the act that was passed.

The case has defined the sides in many battles since about control of American democracy — between Democrats’ interest in protecting minority voters and their representation and Republicans’ insistence that the law is being misused to create racial quotas in government.

In 2009, the Supreme Court ducked ruling on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. that nonetheless laid out arguments for its unconstitutionality. The opinion is widely read as a warning that the law is vulnerable to being struck down by the conservative court.

The political influences on these major cases are important by themselves, but also as a reminder that the makeup of the court for the next generation, and thus the law’s direction, are likely to be determined by the 2012 election.

Constance Baker Motley on the Importance of Role Models

Can you make a difference with a law degree?

Constance Baker Motley was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the ninth of twelve children. Her parents had immigrated from Nevis, in the Caribbean; her mother was a founder of the New Haven chapter of the NAACP. With financial help from a local philanthropist, Clarence Blakeslee, she initially attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, before deciding to return north to attend integrated New York University, where she received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1943. Motley then obtained her law degree from Columbia University School of Law in 1946.

Her legal career began as a law clerk in the fledgling NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), where she worked with a distinguished group of civil rights attorneys, among them Thurgood Marshall, Jack Greenberg, and many others. As the LDF's first female attorney, she became Associate Counsel to the LDF, making her a lead trial attorney in a number of early and significant civil rights cases.

In 1950 she wrote the original complaint in the case of Brown v. Board of Education. The first African-American woman ever to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, in Meredith v. Fair she successfully won James Meredith's effort to be the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi in 1962. Motley was successful in nine of the ten cases she argued before the Supreme Court. The tenth decision, regarding jury composition, was eventually overturned in her favor. She was otherwise a key legal strategist in the civil rights movement, helping to desegregate Southern schools, buses, and lunch counters.

In 1964, Motley became the first African American woman elected to the New York State Senate. In 1965, she was chosen Manhattan Borough President—the first woman in that position. In 1966, President Lyndon Johnson named her a district judge for the United States District CourtSouthern District of New York, making her the first African American woman federal court judge, a position she held, including a term as chief judge, until her death in 2005.

In this video, Judge Motley reflects on how she decided to pursue a legal career, noting that as a young person she was inspired by the few of Black female lawyers that she knew of.

Samuel DuBois Cook: A Gentleman and a Scholar

Samuel DuBois Cook is a retired Dillard University president and, with his appointment to the Duke University faculty in 1966, was the first African American professor to hold a regular faculty appointment at any predominantly white college or university in the South. Cook also served as a member of the Duke University Board of Trustees from 1981 to 1993. In 1993, Dillard University honored Cook by naming the school's new fine arts and communication center after him. That same year, Cook was elected by Duke University's Board of Trustee as a Trustee Emeritus.

Born on November 21, 1928 in Griffin, Georgia, Cook's father was a Baptist minister who instilled a passion for education in all of his children. Samuel DuBois Cook entered all-male Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia in 1943 with his friend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) when they were both 15 years of age. Both boys participated in the Morehouse early admission program during World War II that sought to fill the college's classrooms when many older students were in the U.S. military. At Morehouse, Cook became student body president and founded the campus chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He earned a BA degree in history in 1948. He went on to earn an MA (1950) in political science and a Ph.D (1954) from Ohio State University.

After a short stint in the U.S. Army in 1955, Cook taught political science at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Then, in 1956, he moved to Atlanta University and became politically active working on voter registration and served as Youth Director of the Georgia NAACP. As chair of the school's political science department in the early 1960s, Cook moderated forums that involved emerging civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., along with a younger generation of student activists. During his career, Dr. Cook has taught at the University of Illinois and the University of California – Los Angeles.

In 1966, Cook was appointed a professor in the Duke University political science department. Nine years later, Cook was chosen to serve as president of Dillard University, a historically black liberal arts institution in New Orleans. He served as president for 22 years, retiring in 1997. During his tenure at Dillard, President Cook initiated a Japanese language studies program (the first at a historically black college) and founded the Center for Black-Jewish Relations. In 1977, three years after he left Duke, faculty and students founded the Samuel DuBois Cook Society in his honor to promote the development of black studies at the school.

Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook, although retired, continues to lecture at universities and colleges around the country and has served on the board of trustees of The King Center in Atlanta since its founding in 1968.

In Virginia, A Pioneer Many Times Over

Can you make a difference with a law degree?

L. Douglas Wilder became the first African American to be elected to the Virginia State Senate since Reconstruction. He later became the first African American to be elected to statewide office when he was elected to the position of Lieutenant Governor. He later was the first African American to be elected Governor of any state.

During his tenure as governor, Wilder worked on crime and gun control initiatives. He also worked to fund Virginia's transportation initiatives, effectively lobbying Congress to reallocate highway monies to those states with the greatest needs.^[3] Much residential and office development had taken place in Northern Virginia without the state's receiving sufficient federal money for infrastructure improvements to keep up. He also succeeded in passing state bond issues to support improving transportation. In May 1990 Wilder ordered state agencies and universities to divest themselves of any investments in South Africa because of its then policy of apartheid, making Virginia the first Southern state to take such action.He served as Mayor of the City of Richmond from 2005 to 2009.

Kappa Boule of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity

Sigma Phi Phi Fraternity was founded in 1904 for the purpose of binding men of like qualities into a close, sacred, fraternal union, that they may know the best of one another and that each in this life may to his full ability aid the other and by concerted action bring about those things that seem best for all that cannot be accomplished by individual effort.

Since 1920, these purposes have been pursued in Atlanta through the work of Kappa Boule, which is now in it's 92nd year. Its members have included some of the city's leading citizens, including college presidents, corporate executives, civic figures, and leaders in their professions.