Paris Underground. Its heroes defied the Nazis to get downed flyers out of France. They were underdogs, and I admired them. I imagined myself alongside them, a ragged crew fighting for something that mattered. I think my father intuited my rebel leanings and tried to be supportive. Soon after that book about the resistance, he had me reading Irving Stone’s Clarence Darrow for the Defense.
My father’s interest in the renowned “Attorney for the Damned” was that of a spectator. The stories were great. Darrow’s cases were adapted into plays and movies, including Inherit the Wind and Compulsion. Darrow was a charismatic man who did important work—an American hero. I wanted to be a lawyer like him. I did eventually become a lawyer, though I wasn’t often associated with the sort of high-profile cases that were Darrow’s stock in trade. There was never a hanging tree outside the courthouse door when I served as counsel. With the exception of Hurricane Carter, none of my cases have been turned into movies. Like Hurricane’s, however, I tended to take on hard-to-win or unwinnable cases—though I never thought that way—and other cases because they held the possibility of breaking down racial barriers in the United States. I eschewed the interference of special interests—corporate or otherwise—whose objectives were antagonistic to the cause. (This was not true of Darrow, since he occasionally worked for big-money entities, but my financial situation let me be more of a purist.) While my path diverged from Darrow’s, his career blazed a trail for the kind of work that attracted me most. Like him, I came of age during the still-evolving uproar in America’s cities, which were exploding with the anger of people too long kept down. The Harlem I experienced as a child on the bus ride to Riverdale Country School ceased being contained. The tone and tenor of that outrage reached a fever pitch.
With Darrow serving as my role model, I dared to believe in the impossible. He took on impossible cases and won. He made me want to become a lawyer. Thinking back to the time when my father gave me that Darrow book, I remember him being wistful, and how he told me of his regret that he had not become a lawyer.
“Why didn’t you?” I asked.
He shrugged.
If he answered, I have no memory of what he said. I remember more his sense of resignation. Maybe that interchange planted a seed; I don’t know. Maybe it made me think about how Bill and Lorraina led their lives; I don’t remember. I do remember wondering a lot about it, and that I didn’t feel comfortable with the thoughts I had—as if they were an invasion of my father’s world. I never asked my father about it again. On some level I knew I didn’t want to hear the answer, but that moment with my dad marked my fantasizing about doing something important with my life.
That was around the time that Uncle Al stopped calling me Blackie and started calling me Counselor.
3
Culver Military Academy and Harvard
On May 17, 1954, with Culver Military Academy’s commencement a few days away, something infinitely more important happened that would forever change the course of American life. There was no way I could know that it would be the cornerstone of my life’s work. Back then, however, I missed it entirely.
As a cadet I was waiting for the marching band to blare the John Philip Sousa music that signaled the high spectacle of the garrison parade, with its precision marching, booming howitzers, and daring horsemanship. A little ambivalent, I was also thinking about the formal ball with the brilliant saber-arch salute honoring our regimental commander and his date. And I suppose I was also thinking about freedom from the strictures of military school as we headed off into the lazy days of summer, which would end with me entering my freshman year at Harvard.
It was no time for the news of the day, no matter how momentous. Not even if the United States Supreme Court ruled in a case that would put an end to state-mandated public school segregation. The Court based its decision in Brown v. Board of Education to no small degree on the theory that segregation taught black children that they were inferior to white children, doing permanent damage to their self-esteem. That, the court said, irreparably harmed them, affecting their ability to learn and function in society. Brown described the fallout from segregation in stark terms, stating forcefully that its