in our nation’s courtrooms. Later, in private practice with progressive—and some would say radical—attorneys, I continued the struggle. The cast of characters sometimes changed from decade to decade. There are too many to name here, but they comprise every combination of race, religion, and gender. Many have since passed away. Some have told their stories; others have not. For those who didn’t, the loss is ours. The stories about what we lawyers tried to accomplish and what we actually achieved are important. Embedded in our efforts, they go a long way toward telling how we got where we are today in a country that is still racially divided. Because so many of these stories are being lost, it has become increasingly urgent for me to tell them as I seek to unravel that age-old question: How did I get involved in the first place?
To answer that question, this memoir takes me back to my childhood, when I first began to question the glimmers of racism that intruded upon my life. At the same time, under pressure from African Americans coming home from the battlefields of World War II, where they fought against racist ideologies, and supported by a growing cadre of idealistic white as well as black youth, the Movement—led principally by Martin Luther King, Jr., and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—confronted the outrages of Jim Crow in the South. Watching on television the killings and assaults they endured pushed the issue of racism into my consciousness. The mix was electric. It led me, right after graduating law school in 1963, straight to the office of the NAACP.
Working under NAACP general counsel Robert L. Carter, who had won twenty-one of twenty-two cases in the Unites States Supreme Court, I learned firsthand what an arduous task it was to use the legal system to enforce the Movement’s hardest-won victories and confront the segregation and discrimination that permeated every aspect of American life, in the North as well as the South. Taking on the hardest of cases, I knew the highs of winning and the lows of losing when courts of law turned their backs on racial inequality. Frustrated and angry, I vented my feelings in an article titled “Nine Men in Black Who Think White,” which was published in the New York Times Magazine in October 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Written with Robert Carter’s approval, it got me fired. In response Carter and the entire legal staff resigned, deeply disturbed that the NAACP, which was dedicated to fighting racism in all its forms, would come to the defense of a Supreme Court that had been called out for retreating from the opening it had helped to create in Chief Justice Earl Warren’s fine 1954 opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. The shock I experienced when the NAACP cast me off, and the fallout with the staff resigning despite our large and important caseload, was indescribable. Aware of the continuing need for Movement lawyers, however, I refused to be sidetracked and have practiced my craft in every conceivable forum from the Supreme Court to the state criminal courts, where I have defended innocent African Americans falsely accused of murdering whites.
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To make sense of my feelings, which have led to my more than fifty years of civil rights work (which continues to this day), I have thought back to the Warner family from which I came, to the advantages being white conferred on me, and to the death of our family butler, William Rutherford, the year before I was fired.
Bill was black, and had worked for my family since I was a little boy on the gentleman’s farm in Hendersonville, North Carolina, that belonged to my grandfather, Albert Warner. Bill was a very special person who had given me love, care, and affection. And while it was not clear back then, that was the relationship that sent me on my path.
My bond to Bob Carter, a relationship that grew and deepened till the day he died in 2012, helped me develop the clarity afforded by distance. He, Kitty, and I spent many hours together, both in New York and on vacation. We talked about everything, and his feelings about race and prejudice were never more than a moment away from any conversation. I learned Bob was angry too. Unlike