and Dolly moved to Portsmouth, Virginia, where he got a job teaching at-risk youth about the perils of getting caught up into the criminal justice system. Dolly continued to work for the Social Security Administration. Then one day John came to see me. We had gone through so much together that it was difficult for us to make small talk, so there was very little of it before he produced an envelope from his pocket and handed it to me.
“I want you to have this,” he said as I opened it.
There were five hundred dollars inside. I looked at John speechless.
“Taking that money was one of the worst things I have done in my life,” he said. “I could not leave until I paid you back.”
“This is one of the nicest things that has happened to me,” I told him.
We held each other by the forearms.
“You take care,” I said.
“You too,” he responded, giving me his open John Artis smile.
I cried after he left.
* * *
There are many little rays of light I see as I survey the five decades I’ve spent doing this work. There have been powerful black CEOs—including Time Warner’s Richard Parsons and American Express’s Kenneth Chenault. Oprah Winfrey became a phenomenon unto herself. We’ve seen black chiefs of police and a black United States attorney general followed by a black female United States attorney general. Black mayors have come and gone, and of course a black family resides in the White House.
Over the years I discussed these milestones of racial progress with Bob Carter. He had moved to the same neighborhood as us, also on the park. We became very close, going to the theater and the opera together, talking about cases that interested us, and keeping up with each other’s families. In the winter Kitty and I would stay for a week at a villa Bob rented in Jamaica.
In 1972, many years before we started vacationing with Bob, Richard Nixon had appointed him to a U.S. district-court judgeship on the recommendation of New York’s liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits. Bob had wanted to be a judge since leaving the NAACP, and gave up a lucrative partnership in a midsize management-oriented firm to take the appointment. I remember Bob telling me that some of the high-powered attorneys who practiced in the federal courts tried to push him around, and there seemed to be an attitude among certain lawyers that a black judge could know nothing about the mysteries of complex litigation. Whether Bob’s belief as to what white lawyers thought was right or wrong, he had no time for anyone who failed to accord him the respect he deserved. Bob ruled his courtroom with an iron hand. No one was exempt from his ire, and even civil rights attorneys complained that he could be harsh. I appeared before him only once. As usual, I had my say. After that, he told me, never again. It was a wise decision.
Over the years Bob wrote some groundbreaking civil rights decisions and suffered his share of reversals from the far more conservative judges on the court of appeals. He has been hard on those accused of certain crimes, especially when the charges involved conduct that had a serious impact on black communities. He has also had a light touch when he thought he could save certain defendants by keeping them out of prison. Always Bob tried to do what he felt was the right thing, caring little for public opinion. The young law clerks who worked for him often tried to follow in his footsteps.
Our relationship was hard to categorize. He started as a mentor, but our connection over time became more like a family relationship. I saw him as a great man capable of warmth, kindness, and humor, but also through the lens of a son—critically—and he was indulgent of that dynamic between us. That we were not father and son, however, made it easier, as did the deep affection Kitty and Bob had for each other.
Our fellow houseguests in Jamaica varied from trip to trip. Sometimes we were with Bob’s sons, David and John, and the latter’s son, Christopher. Law professor and author Derrick Bell and his wife, Janet Dewart Bell, then the communications and public relations director of New York City’s public employees union, District Council 37, were regulars, as was Kenneth Clark, the social psychologist whose studies helped the Supreme Court understand the effects of segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Shirley Williams, whose