my anger, however, his sprang from facing the outrages of a hostile white world. As a result Bob felt that very few whites knew anything about the searing pain that racism caused. Our talks helped me better understand how black men often feel in America. I was angry and frustrated that we were not making the progress I’d hoped for when I joined the NAACP. But I was white, fighting an enemy that on a fundamental level included myself. Bob was equally frustrated and angry about how progress in the courts had come to a halt, and about the terrible poverty and lack of educational and job opportunities that afflicted African Americans.
I also saw Bob’s caring side, and how he could learn to trust a white man like me. And that experience of our endless conversations helped me to understand how many whites could be blind to their own prejudice, seeing themselves instead as being fair. Also, over the years, in a son-to-a-father way, I came to love Bob, and that helped illuminate my formative relationship with Bill Rutherford, our family butler.
At this point in my life, I am able to tell the story of why a white man who grew up wealthy might choose to spend most of his life working to advance civil rights law, representing clients and handling cases against the rich and the powerful. Another crucial undertaking here is figuring out what my work has meant and continues to mean within the framework of post-Movement civil rights enforcement. The personal conflicts caused by having so much while representing clients who couldn’t get a fair trial or sought in vain to get the smallest piece of the pie that was my birthright are always there as considerations, but what drove me to write this book is deeper: I wanted to share my experience so that others could see that they can make a difference, no matter where they’re from or what their background.
1
Attica
A flash came across the morning news on September 9, 1971, that a riot had broken out at Attica, an upstate New York penitentiary. The inmates had taken over a part of the prison and were holding some guards as hostages. I immediately thought of my client Tony Maynard, who was incarcerated there. Tony had been convicted of manslaughter, but I was convinced he was innocent and was determined to exonerate him. Almost simultaneously the phone rang. It was Dotty Stoub from the National Lawyers Guild.
A postbreakfast scuffle and a defective bolt in a central gate at Attica had literally opened the doors to a full-spectrum revolt. Buildings were set on fire, and forty-two prison employees were taken hostage.
One guard was in extremely critical condition. About a thousand of the more than two thousand inmates housed in the severely overcrowded prison had seized a central hub called “Times Square” and occupied D yard—one of four large exercise areas at the center of the medieval-looking walled fortress. Inmates waved baseball bats. They turned prison blankets into ponchos, undershirts into do-rags and kaffiyehs. They thrust fists into the air and shouted “Black Power!” while others dug trenches and huddled to prepare for battle. Leaders emerged and began issuing demands to the prison administration. A few prisoners roamed the yard wearing football helmets. It was chaos.
I was sitting in my kitchen when Dotty called. My kids had just finished breakfast. There was a cup of coffee in front of me. I had recent experience with prison uprisings in the New York State system. Dotty told me what she knew about the situation at Attica, which wasn’t much. The inmates were asking for observers, and a prison activist, probably someone from Youth Against War and Fascism (YAWF), had called the guild. And I was the right person to go. I had spent my entire career becoming the right person to go. A thirty-four-year-old former NAACP trial lawyer, I had been the protégé of the legendary civil rights attorney Robert L. Carter. In fact I had just started at the NAACP when Carter was working on Gaynor v. Rockefeller, an employment-discrimination class-action suit brought against New York’s then-governor Nelson Rockefeller, who, it turned out, would be the only person with the authority to end the crisis at Attica. In addition, four months earlier I had helped represent the Auburn Six, a group of prisoners from the Auburn Correctional Facility who were awaiting trial for doing more or less the same thing that was going on at Attica, only in that