segregation. It was the effect of the actual segregation that resulted, no matter the cause, rather than the intent of public officials, that was the focus of his cases. Those targeted in this Northern campaign, as I will call it, countered that the NAACP was engaged in social engineering, and that its attempts to balance the races would require racial quotas, something that never crossed the minds of the Supreme Court justices when they decided Brown.
By the time I arrived at Freedom House in 1963, the opening round of this struggle to desegregate the Northern schools had been fought and lost in Gary, Indiana. The decision of George Beamer, the federal judge who heard Bell v. School City of Gary, Indiana, was that there was nothing illegal about the school segregation that existed. The kinds of segregation caused by housing patterns and the neighborhood-school plan, which placed children in schools near their homes, wasn’t a violation of the Constitution, he ruled. It constituted de facto, or unintentional, segregation, not de jure, or officially created, segregation.
Therefore Brown didn’t apply, Judge Beamer concluded. On behalf of the black children and their parents, Bob, appealed, and on October 31, 1963, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld Beamer’s ruling.
Bob didn’t seem to be particularly fazed by the defeat. He had hoped the Northern judges would accept his legal concept, but was confident that the Supreme Court, which had unanimously decided Brown, would understand his argument and look beyond those Latin phrases, de facto and de jure, to the word that followed them both: “segregation.” To test his theory Bob requested that the Supreme Court review the Gary decision. At the same time Bob, Barbara, and Maria were engaged in a series of cases aimed at closed-shop unions. Their claim was that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) had the authority to force segregated local unions supplying labor to the same employer, with the white unions controlling all the higher-paying jobs, to integrate. In 1963 the NLRB agreed, but its ruling was under attack in the federal courts, which had the final say. But segregated local unions were only a small part of the problem. In the building trades, for example, the unions that controlled the jobs through collective-bargaining agreements were all-white. The same was true in many other industries where there were no black unions to integrate and whites-only unions controlled all the work.
To hasten the process of opening up these jobs, Bob decided to take on the liberal establishment that had made a habit of talking out of both sides of its mouth, courting the unions for votes while engaging in lip service about supporting black equality. Disregarding the combined political power of both the construction unions and the politicians who had voted for and supported massive public construction contracts, Bob had decided to take the David and Goliath route. The NAACP legal staff, on behalf of Lloyd Gaynor, sued the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller (the same man who, eight years later, ordered the Attica attack), as well as the city of New York and its mayor, Robert F. Wagner, for authorizing multi-million-dollar projects. In one fell swoop Bob had figured out a way to open up virtually all the trades, since the state and city contracts involved everything from heavy-equipment operators to welders and iron and sheet-metal workers to electricians, carpenters, plumbers, and pipe fitters. It was a daring move. If the onus fell on public officials to ensure equal rights in the workplace, at least on public projects, all the local unions and contractors that otherwise would have had to be dragged one by one before administrative agencies or courts would be brought to heel at the same time. The case was called Gaynor v. Rockefeller, and Bob had commenced it just as I had started to volunteer at the NAACP.
Even without Gaynor, which by itself was a huge undertaking, the NAACP’s legal staff was already overwhelmed. The Northern school cases were moving forward, the NLRB test cases were still unresolved in the federal courts, and the various boycott and demonstration cases arising in the South came in over the transom nonstop.
I remember the worried look on Maria’s face as she surveyed the papers on her desk. Barbara Morris was more vocal.
“This has to be a joke,” she groused as new mountains of cases materialized on her desk. She directed the comment at Bob’s office, but it was empty. “If he’s got a plan, I’d