In 2026, we are proud to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the July 4, 1776, adoption of the Declaration of Independence, which provided in pertinent portion as follows:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The U.S. Constitution ratified more than a decade later, also a monumental accomplishment, established our rule of law democracy. Yet, due to compromises in its negotiation between slave and free states, a legacy of slavery contained within it impacts us to this day. This article seeks to trace the continuing reformation of these haunting issues and to recognize individuals who have helped or are helping to erase this tragic legacy. Their stories provide powerful incentives for each of us as citizens to contribute to this essential work.

I. The Troubling Circumstances Resulting from the Negotiation of the Constitution

After the Declaration, things were different. The text of the Constitution was negotiated at a 1787 convention in Philadelphia. As set forth in James Oakes’ 2021 book, “The Crooked Path to Abolition”:

On July 4, 1776, thirteen colonies declared themselves an independent nation composed of thirteen slave states. . . . [T]here was no need for slave states to compromise with free states, because there were no free states. . . . Eleven years [after] . . . the text had been negotiated, the situation had changed dramatically. 

One by one, individual states were abolishing slavery, and the accumulation of those states came to be known as the North. This was a revolutionary departure after centuries—millennia, really—in which slavery had been accepted as perfectly legal throughout most of the world. (Id. at 9-10.)

Thus, the negotiation of the Constitution in Philadelphia required terrible compromises on the issue of slavery. In Gene Dattel’s 2009 book, “Cotton and Race in the Making of America,” he describes the atmosphere at the Convention as follows:

The Constitutional Convention, far from being an exalted meeting of the minds, was often a fractious struggle where lofty ideals were subsumed beneath the deep anxieties of America’s founders. To focus on the revealing realities of the convention, there was a desire for economic development that trumped almost all else. For this hodgepodge of not often “united” states, the need to make money demanded a semblance of unity and collective purpose. 

Toward this end, enormous compromises were made, agreements that would make America an economic powerhouse but one with serious social ills. At the convention, the issue of slavery was subordinated to union as the delegates confronted a choice: a nation with slavery, or no nation without slavery. . . . (Id. at 6.)

II. Two Different Working Interpretations of the Constitution Utilized by Diametrically Opposed Factions

A. The “Proslavery Constitution”

Oakes describes the significant compromises arising from its negotiation:

When the Constitution was ratified, nearly everyone agreed that Congress had no power to interfere with—that is abolish—slavery in a state. Historians call this the federal consensus. But the same principle protected abolition in the states. . . .  Congress had no power to interfere with emancipation in states that had established the presumption of freedom. [T]here was a fugitive slave clause and a three-fifths clause . . . together those two clauses might well be considered the bricks and mortar of a proslavery constitution. (Id. at 9.)

B. The “Antislavery Constitution”

The Constitution as deemed to be the “Antislavery Constitution” empowered Congress to make “all needful rules and regulations” for territories and “authorized the federal government to ban slavery from the territories.” Its Preamble stated in part that the purpose of the federal government was “to . . . secure the Blessings of Liberty, to ourselves and our Posterity.” The text refers to slaves only as persons, never as property. (Id. at 15.) 

It was abolitionists, and especially Frederick Douglass, who challenged America on the contradictions in the Constitution. Having escaped slavery himself, Douglass did more than denounce the institution; he demanded that America live up to its own principles. He asked the simple yet devasting question: “Why am I a slave?” He famously declared, “Interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” In his immortal 1852 address, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” Douglass exposed the hypocrisy of celebrating freedom while millions remained in bondage. He reminded America that its celebration of liberty rang hollow to those denied even the most basic human rights. He declared that: 

This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him . . . the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.

However, he believed America could still become what its founding ideals promised. He warned the nation that to betray those ideals would be, in his words, “false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.”

Over time, the federal government abolished the Atlantic slave trade, abolished slavery in Washington, D.C., observed the due process rights of fugitive slaves, denied admission to new slave states, and emancipated slaves in wartime. The Constitution authorized the government to suppress the domestic slave trade, the coastal slave trade, and to acknowledge the rights of slave rebels on the high seas. In the context of the Civil War, the “antislavery constitution” provided the legal basis of the single most revolutionary moment in the political history of the United States: the liberation of four million enslaved Americans. 

III. Difficulties in Enforcing Constitutional Rights

A. The Effect of the “Cotton Boom” Upon the Rights Set Forth in the Constitution

Dattel observed:

The Constitutional Convention affords an appropriate beginning for the story of cotton and the black experience in America. While there was no cotton production to speak of at the time, within decades the cotton boom would radically redirect the country no one at the convention could [have] envisioned; a cotton kingdom that would spawn delusions of a slave empire. (Id. at 6.)

Before long, an insignificant crop would become the engine of the American economy, and the thorny practice of slavery, far from dying out, would become even more vital for the expansion of King Cotton. After slavery, White America obliged cotton with another century of black bondage. (Id.)

B. Barriers to Achieving the “Blessings of Liberty” Promised to the “People of the United States” in the Constitution: Cotton’s Legacy

Dattel describes the unforeseen power that subverted the best intentions of the anti-slavery participants at the convention as follows:

Is the legacy of cotton subject to a statute of limitations? This legacy is an American rather than a Southern issue. [C]otton was not even part of the consciousness of the new nation while bondage of human beings soon was very much embedded in the American brain (and ledger sheet). 

As Frederick Douglass stated, the Black cotton laborer “as he [was] nowhere else, an absolute necessity. He has a monopoly on the labor market.” 

Dattel writes further that:

Cotton, an unforeseen force, led to another century of Black bondage. For more that 150 years, America benefited enormously from cotton picked by African Americans. The economic world of cotton needed a workforce, and white America designated African Americans for the role. America no longer needs cotton, but it still bears cotton’s human legacy. (Id.)

C. Dred Scott and Other Setbacks

Just five years after Douglass delivered his 1852 speech, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down what many scholars consider the worst decision in its history: Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857). Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney declared that people of African descent “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” and could never be citizens of the United States. Whether enslaved or free, Black Americans were, in the eyes of the law, permanently excluded from the American political community. The Court transformed racial prejudice into constitutional doctrine and attempted to close forever the door to Black citizenship.

Abraham Lincoln initially opposed the expansion of slavery more than slavery itself. His foremost objective was preserving the Union. At various points, he even entertained schemes of colonization that would encourage African Americans to leave the United States.

IV. Reconstruction

History has a way of transforming leaders. As the Civil War turned against the Union, Lincoln recognized that the nation could not be saved without confronting slavery directly. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 freed enslaved people in the rebelling states and authorized Black men to enlist in the Union Army. Nearly 200,00 African American soldiers and sailors answered that call. They did not simply fight to preserve the Union – they fought to redefine it. Their courage helped secure Union victory and gave America what Lincoln would later call “a new birth of freedom.” Before his death, Lincoln publicly endorsed limited Black suffrage, suggesting that educated African Americans and Black veterans should be allowed to vote. Days later, he was silenced by an assassin’s bullet.

The constitutional revolution that followed overturned Dred Scott. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship, guaranteed due process, and promised every person the equal protection of the laws. The Fifteenth Amendment prohibited denying the right to vote because of race. The Fourteenth Amendment became the constitutional heart of America’s promise. It is, in many ways, the right to have rights. It transformed citizenship from a privilege granted to some into a constitutional guarantee intended for all. It sought to fulfill the ideals proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and embedded in the Constitution by extending liberty and justice to every person born in the United States.

Reconstruction was intended to rebuild the nation on principles of equality and justice. It promised to reintegrate the former Confederate states while creating a truly multiracial democracy. For a brief moment, African Americans voted, held public office, established schools, acquired land, and exercised political power previously unimaginable.

V. The Counter-Revolution

As Black Americans gained political influence through the Fifteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts of 1875, white Southern governments reorganized to reclaim power. Black Codes evolved into Jim Crow laws. White supremacist organizations such as the Klu Klux Klan used terror, intimidation, and murder to suppress Black political participation. Lynchings became not merely acts of violence but instruments of social control designed to enforce racial subordination.

The Supreme Court repeatedly weakened Reconstruction through a series of devasting decisions. In the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), the Court narrowly interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause, stripping it of much of its power. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), following the Colfax Massacre, the Court ruled that the federal government could do little to protect African Americans from private acts of racial violence. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Court invalidated much of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, holding that Congress lacked authority to prohibit racial discrimination by private businesses. Finally, in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court constitutionalized segregation under the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

Together, these decisions transformed the Fourteenth Amendment from a shield protecting newly freed citizens into a promise postponed. The legal victories of reconstruction were undermined by judicial interpretation, while racial terror enforced white supremacy outside the courtroom.

VI. Discrimination in New York City in the Mid-1960s

After leaving Ohio, on January 1, 1964, I became employed in New York City by White & Case. During my stay at White and Case – 1964 through November 1967 – I never met a Black lawyer or even a Black clerical worker. (In the early summer of 1966, I did see a then-Hughes Hubbard Black associate (now long time Circuit Judge) Amalya Kearse catch a fly ball in a warmup of the firm’s softball team.) In a month’s long tour of duty in July/August 1966 in Mississippi as a volunteer lawyer, I was mostly assigned to work with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference SCLC in Grenada, Mississippi; there, I worked for civil rights activist Marian Wright, the first Black lawyer I ever met. (She was not yet married to Edelman.) She was an amazing supervisor of a broad base of litigation in federal court against Grenada institutions. (I had assumed that she was much older than me; however, she was much younger.)

I do not recall seeing another Black lawyer during my first four years in New York. However, in 1966, Constance Baker Motley was appointed as a judge in the Southern District of New York, the first Black federal district judge appointed in the United States. Previously, in 1961, President Kennedy had appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Second Circuit – but he had to serve in an interim capacity for 11 months while southern senators held up his appointment.

VII. A Tipping Point Around 1968?  

The obvious and substantial discriminatory practices that I eventually came to notice in the New York legal community appeared to reach a magical tipping point sometime around 1968-1969. Some of the vestiges of the legacy of slavery were dissipating as law schools began accepting Black applicants, law firms began to take Black graduates and more Black attorneys became civic and societal leaders. 

As Andrew Kopkind ironically wrote in the New Republic on March 20, 1965, “Selma’s Sheriff Jim Clark can take much of the credit for the [1965 Civil Rights] bill, not so much perhaps as ‘Bull’ Connor takes for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but a fair-sized piece nonetheless.” I said to Congressman John Lewis in 2014 that in 1966, Hosea Williams had repeatedly told me that “‘Bull’ Connor was the hero of the Civil Rights movement.” Lewis responded by stating that President Kennedy was not the first person to say and not the last person to suggest that if we honored people for the contribution they made, that we should not forget “Bull” Connor for what he did in 1963, when he let loose the dogs and the water hoses to create the climate, the environment, for President Kennedy to come forth and make the speech he made on the night of June 11, 1963. 

Recently I had a discussion with Southern District Judge George Daniels about the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts’ impact in reducing society’s educational and discriminatory misconduct against Black citizens. He observed that “racism has been the most powerful force in American history.” He said:

It was a combination of the passage of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights bills with the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 that led to a “second reconstruction,” commencing around 1968, that opened the doors for Black citizens to participate in society on an equal basis. 

VIII. Leaders in the Ongoing Struggle for Equal Rights for Blacks

There are many individuals who were, or are, instrumental in continuing to battle for the “blessings of liberty” promised in the Constitution to the “people of the several states,” which included the descendants of American slaves. Some of those individuals who have inspired me and to whom I am indebted include those discussed below.

A. Frederick Douglass and Wynton Marsalis

It is nearly impossible to measure the enormous influence of Frederick Douglass. One indicator is from the Second Circuit’s 2024 Thurgood Marshall Lecture by Wynton Marsalis. He first heard of Frederick Douglass as a seven-year-old from a comic book on a family visit to the Cabildo Museum in New Orleans. He stated much later that he and his father, Ellis Marsalis Jr., read a book about Frederick Douglass together upon his father’s deathbed. The book stated that, in an 1857 speech, Douglass had summed up a lot of what the most conscious jazz musicians believe about the endless pursuit of freedom, equality and justice. “This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand.” 

Marsalis came to understand that “the pursuit of freedom could not be taken out of its historical context and that people have always struggled and fought for freedom and for equality and for justice.” Growing up in segregated New Orleans, his father, a jazz musician, had standards that he imposed upon his children, and that Marsalis described as follows:

[A]t the dawn of the civil rights movement, when my father was a young man learning the language of modern jazz, we connected, as many did, the struggle for freedom with the fundamentals of jazz.

B. Frank Thomas

With more Black lawyers in society, they further expedited progress towards bringing about the “blessings of liberty” to Black citizens. Frank Thomas became a lawyer in 1963, and in 1967, Senator Bobby Kennedy appointed him as the first president of the Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation. His leadership led to establishment of a Bedford Stuyvesant (1) shopping center, (2) theatre, (3) supermarket, and (4) mortgage pool to enable residents to secure mortgages in the red-lined community. During his tenure, dozens of Bedford Stuyvesant derelict houses were rehabilitated and there were countless other community benefits secured under his leadership. 

In 1968, I came to know Thomas as a neighbor in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. That year, my late wife Sue and I were encouraging others to follow us and buy homes across from Fort Greene Park as pioneers in the neighborhood. A friend told me that “the great John Doar is coming to Brooklyn,” under the leadership of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Doar had been head of the U.S. Justice Department Civil Rights Division. Doar had been hired in Brooklyn by then Senator Kennedy to head a second corporation (Bedford Stuyvesant D&S) comprised of the leaders of major corporations to support the efforts of Restoration.

That spring, I wrote to Doar, suggesting he look at a house that was for sale on our block in Fort Greene. One Saturday, John showed up wearing a blue knit wool navy cap as I was tearing down a ceiling to renovate our new home. Sue showed John around the neighborhood. He got back to me to say that his wife was not ready to live in Fort Greene. He said that he informed Frank Thomas about the house, and Thomas and his wife bought it. (Thomas had begun work as president of Restoration.) Doar said that I should stop by and see him at his Grenada Hotel headquarters after my 1968 congressional primary race was over in June. (I was not expected to win. I got 13 percent of the vote.) That summer I met with John, and he offered me a job at D&S, where I became general counsel. I started in 1968, the day after Labor Day. Thus, I worked with Frank from 1968 to 1970, and I came to hugely appreciate his brilliant judgment in appointing and training talented but inexperienced Black people to Restoration’s staff.  

1. David Danoia and the 80 Houses 

In the 1960s, New York City routinely destroyed a house if the owner became delinquent in payment of the taxes on it. At a meeting of the D&S board held in Bedford Stuyvesant, the residents complained that the destruction of houses by the city ultimately led to the accumulation of garbage, rats, junkies and illicit activities in the middle of their blocks. Doar gave me the problem to solve. I called Tom Cuite, president of the City Council. He said, “Pete, that’s easy, talk to Sy Feller, Head of Demolition for the City.” Sy was very accommodating. He said, “Just give me a letter any time the community wants to preserve a house, and I will put a hold on the demolition.” 

Some 50 years later, I learned what happened after I started sending the letters. Frank Thomas had Restoration purchase from the city 80 of the decrepit houses that Sy Feller had spared. In 1968, Danoia was set to graduate as an architect from Pratt Institute when he was approached by Restoration staff members. They said Thomas was looking for an architect, but Danoia said, “I am not licensed.” Restoration’s representatives said, “It doesn’t matter; Frank just wants somebody who understands the issues.” After lunching in Bedford Stuyvesant with the “recruiters,” they said, “Now, we are going to take you to meet ‘the man’!” Thomas hired Danoia immediately. As one of Danoia’s first tasks, Thomas assigned him the job of renovating the 80 houses. 

Two problems arose: the city’s building inspectors asked for a $40,000 bribe, and the union leaders shut down the renovations because the workers were not union. Thomas told Danoia, “We can take care of this!” Thomas set up a sting with money in a suitcase and police hidden in a bathroom. The offending inspectors were arrested, and the problem disappeared. The union leaders came to the Restoration in a cavalcade of three cars weighted down with the individual bulks of the leaders. Danoia told them that none of the 400,000 residents of Bed Stuy could get membership in their unions, and “The unions had to do something.” A deal was struck and the process of membership for the renovation workers at Restoration was expedited into hours from the problematic months’ long process of the past. (David Danoia later became an established architect in lower Manhattan.)

2. Ben Glascoe and the Shopping Center 

Ben Glascoe was recommended to Restoration by a friend, Everette Jennings, whose brother had coached him on a football team in Bed Stuy. Thomas installed Glascoe as a community director in one of the five local centers that Thomas had set up. Thomas sent Glascoe to school full time for six months for education in “shopping center management and leasing.” Thomas then made him responsible for lining up tenants for a shopping center. Thomas’ concept was that tenants were more likely to locate in the new shopping center if someone talked to them who was from the neighborhood. Thomas got Bobby Kennedy to help in the effort. Thomas sent Glascoe to Washington, and Senator Kennedy walked Glascoe into the offices of a number of federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration. It and other agencies eventually agreed to locate facilities in the planned shopping center. 

3. Herb Scott-Gibson and the Billie Holiday Theatre 

In 1968, Herbert Scott-Gibson, a singer, and his wife Evelyn, a dancer, had moved from the apartment house where they had been neighbors of Sue and me to a house they purchased on the street we lived on, Washington Park, across from Fort Greene Park. After living on the same block, Thomas got to know Scott-Gibson. He had sung for the president in the White House and for the Queen in England, but never at the Met. Black singers had yet to be invited. I invited Scott-Gibson to my office in the Grenada Hotel where I worked for Doar. My secretary and I interviewed Scott-Gibson and created a resume that I gave to Thomas. 

He talked to Scott-Gibson and hired him as one of the five heads of the small neighborhood offices. Thomas asked Scott-Gibson to buy art from local residents to place in the planned headquarters building then under renovation, which Scott-Gibson did – another vision of Thomas’ fulfilled. He also assigned Scott-Gibson to the task of conceiving of and planning for a local theatre, which became the Billie Holiday Theater. Scott-Gibson’s multiple contributions were so significant that he was later employed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a major position, until he died in 1980 at the age of 52. 

Danoia, Glascoe and Scott-Gibson are only three of a multitude of Thomas’ choices of leaders who helped implement his visions. His instinctive recognition of leadership and his trust in the leaders he identified were major pillars of his success and theirs. He followed his Restoration tour of duty with remarkable service as president of the Ford Foundation, where, among other things, he opened a Foundation branch in South Africa. There, he negotiated Nelson Mandela’s release from prison and his election into the presidency.

C. Conrad Harper (with recognition to Cy Vance and Jim Oliensis)

Conrad was the only Black of 550 in the Harvard Law School class of 1965. In his last year, he went to Alabama for three days to participate in the “March from Selma to Montgomery,” where he was party to strategy conversations with Martin Luther King, Jr. After graduation, he worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 1965 to 1971. He then became a Simpson Thacher associate. 

When he became a partner at Simpson Thacher, there was only one other Black person who had ever become a partner in a major New York City law firm. (In 1979, Amalya Kearse had become a partner of Hughes Hubbard & Reed.) By the late 1980s, there were still only five or six Blacks who were partners in major firms. There were firms at that time of 200 or 300 lawyers in size, and of that number, at least 70 or so were partners. Periodically, the few Black partners got together for lunch, and they soon determined that to have such minuscule numbers of Black partners was indefensible. They decided to try to do something about it. Harper was convinced that the only way you get real progress was to continually to push for it. They approached the president of the New York City Bar, Jim Oliensis. He set up a committee whose members were leaders of the leading New York City firms. At the time Oliensis put this committee together, he was anticipating who his successor would be. 

He approached Cy Vance about the committee, who said to him, “I will be a member of this committee only if Conrad Harper is the president of the City Bar.” Thus, Cy chaired the committee, and Conrad became the president of the City Bar. For a year or so, the 35 or so lawyers on the committee discussed what to do and how to do it. Then in the summer of 1991, Cy successfully approached most of the major firms and was able to talk to his peers in a way that Conrad could not. There was a major holdout, so Cy and Conrad went to see its senior partner. He was accompanied at the meeting by one of his hotshot corporate law partners. The “hotshot” gave an impressive speech, “Things are just fine the way they are!” After he finished talking, Cy said to the man’s senior partner, “I need your vote on this!” The man said, “You have it!” 

When I joined the City Bar, it was upon the recommendations of senior partners of two different law firms; it was like being admitted to a private club! When Conrad Harper became its president, he required every committee chair, including me, to meet with him once a year and list the members of his or her respective committee who were minorities, women and those admitted fewer than three years. Conrad single handedly effected another monumental change in the New York City legal community by ensuring that Blacks (and others discriminated against as well) would be well represented in the membership and leadership of this very important New York City legal institution.

D. Justice Priscilla Hall

After first being appointed Criminal Court Judge, next elected New York Supreme Court Justice, then becoming an Appellate Judge, Justice Hall has since retired to full time professional, church and community leadership. She once chaired a City Bar committee sponsoring an every-other-year conference on “How to Become A Judge In N.Y.C.” The purpose being to demystify the process of becoming a judge so that more minorities will seek judicial office. Justice Hall is the daughter of a Chicago activist minister father and an activist schoolteacher mother. She says that the Black population of Chicago came largely from Mississippi and Alabama to find that Chicago was not the promised land. Her father was a member of a triplicate group with a Catholic priest and a Jewish rabbi who together engaged in civil rights activities including missions to Mississippi and Alabama.

When she was a senior at Howard University, Justice Hall was a member of a group that occupied a building. The university had recruited college professors primarily from Harvard and Yale without including any with an awareness of a Black heritage. Later, as a lawyer and judge, she gave leadership to an amalgamation of the Black bar associations from the different boroughs into the Metropolitan Black Bar Association. All were created when the City Bar did not admit Blacks to membership. Previously, Priscilla was head of the National Bar Association formed when the American Bar Association did not admit Blacks. Recently, my wife and I travelled to Alabama to visit civil rights sites with other members of the Metropolitan Black Bar. It keeps alive our civil rights heritage in a way that established bar groups do not. Such trips, regularly scheduled to significant civil rights sites, are open to lawyers who join the MBBA.

E. Cleve McDowell

After being the second Black person (to James Meredith) to attend “Ole Miss,” Cleve McDowell became a lawyer in Mississippi. He came to establish his practice in his hometown of Drew, Mississippi. There, he commenced an investigation into all the murders of Black citizens of Mississippi, including Emmett Till. I spent a weekend in Drew as his guest in 1971, his first year of practice. During Memorial Day weekend in 1971, I had travelled to Mississippi to visit Grenada, where I had been assigned for close to a month as a full time civil rights volunteer lawyer. 

When I learned on the radio of a “drive by” shooting death of a Black girl on the eve of her high school graduation in Drew, I drove there after a 24 hour stay in Grenada. Upon meeting him, Cleve asked me to help a fellow graduate of the murdered girl to write a speech to give at the memorial service. Cleve had recruited civil rights leaders from all over the state to the service including Henry Aaron, Charles Evers and Ralph Abernathy, all of whom I met at a picnic table in Cleve’s backyard. Cleve also secured my introduction to Fannie Lou Hamer with whom I talked for about an hour on her front porch. 

Cleve was murdered in 1997, after he did not accept the status quo. The files that he had assembled on the Black murders were burned by arson six months later. Since the dates of the respective investigations of his murder and of the arson of the files he maintained on Black murders in Mississippi, the records of the two investigations have been sealed by court order. They should be unsealed and made public!

F. Marva Brown

In the late 1980s, a Black receptionist on the executive floor of a prominent leather goods marketer was instructed to screen the female applicants for employment. She was to spend 10 or 15 minutes with those who were slim, blond and attractive before forwarding their resumes for interviews. Those who did not fit the description were to be thanked for their application and ushered from the premises. She brought a suit condemning the practice and secured a favorable settlement. During the litigation, a company official from the Chicago corporate owner of her New York City employer approached her; he displayed a company magazine picturing a Black model on the cover. The man said to her, “This is because of you, Marva!” Not only did Marva secure a settlement, she paved the way for Blacks to be hired in the future by her employer. I have lost touch with Marva, but I do know her 15-year-old granddaughter. I tell her, “Jada, your grandmother was a heroine!” The company has done well as a favorite marketer to Black people. A few years ago, it was listed as one of the seven most profitable businesses in the U.S. (Its corporate name is now Tapestry Inc.)

G. Orison Marden

In 1964, 1965 and into 1966, I was not aware of the absence of Black faces at White & Case. Then, I went to Mississippi in 1966 upon the invitation of my White & Case boss Orison Marden. A 1963 Berkeley, California, leaflet advocating a boycott of Hink’s Department Store stated in part that, “Most people in Berkeley regard Racial Discrimination as a Southern Problem, and Hink’s, the largest department store in Berkeley and a locally owned store, has held to a white-only employment policy for all of its 57 years.” I recall this as the prevalent attitude in New York City in the mid-1960s – discrimination was a “southern problem.”

Orison Marden, later president of the American Bar Association, and New York City Bar leader Whitney North Seymour were among other American Bar leaders called to the White House by President Kennedy in 1963 to determine how to provide legal representation for civil rights litigants in Mississippi. As a result, they formed the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Marden informed me that he had personally gone to Mississippi to address the members of the Mississippi Bar Association, where he demanded and secured their permission for out-of-state lawyers to practice in Mississippi with the newly formed organization. There were only six Black lawyers in the state. Though White & Case itself was an employer that apparently did not hire Black lawyers, Marden stepped outside the status quo in his successful efforts to secure representation for Black litigants in Mississippi. (After I returned from a month in Mississippi in 1966, upon their request, I met separately with Marden and Seymour to report upon my experiences.)

H. Judge Robert Katzmann

As a Second Circuit Judge, Robert Katzmann became aware of the non-representation of 90 percent of litigants contesting their deportation whose appeals came before the circuit. Later, he was given the opportunity to give the City Bar’s Marden Memorial Lecture. Before speaking he had gone through seven drafts. After the lecture, he secured a reprinting of it in the Georgetown Journal on Ethics. He next formed a study group that birthed other organizations, including the Immigrant Justice Corps. Though a judge, he found a way to encourage others to raise money for immigrant representation from New York City, New York State, the federal government as well as significant foundations. 

Thus, countless tens of thousands have been represented by counsel while facing deportation, not only in New York, but throughout the U.S. Though this was not strictly a “Black problem,” per se, it had the same discriminatory impact upon individual freedom, including that of countless Black immigrants. The judge’s awareness of the issues is a model! Everyone’s awareness should be as astute.

IX. Conclusion

As the late Judge Katzmann stated, lawyers are “licensed by the state to do justice.” It is our task as lawyers to attempt to continue to help secure the “blessings of liberty” as promised in the Constitution for Black citizens facing discrimination as the descendants of slaves. Adherence to the rule of law based in the Constitution is a necessity for those of us who seek its help in realizing its commitments. We owe great homage to, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Constance Baker Mottley, the children who suffered from the attacks of “Bull” Connor’s police dogs, Marian Wright Edelman and to John Lewis and Hosea Williams who were beaten on the Selma bridge. 

We also owe a gigantic sense of gratitude to unrecognized people who have contributed including Marva Brown, and to Cy Vance and Jim Oliensis as well. They all took risks, and we are bettered by their efforts. Without leadership of all who have contributed, the nation might still be merely creeping forward in relieving Black citizens from the “legacy” of slavery. We have made some gigantic strides. However, with D.E.I. standards being eliminated by the current administration, and the Supreme Court scaling back most of the gains secured by the 1965 Voting Rights Act, we obviously have a lot to do. 

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Editor’s note: Hugh Reid is a New York litigator who was the primary author of much of the history set forth in this article, i.e., Sections II.B, III.C, IV, and V. He is a former Olympic athlete, currently serving as head coach of the men’s and women’s cross country and track & field programs at Medgar Evers College. His perspective as an attorney, educator, and community leader informs his work on issues of race, justice, and equity in America.