of the Springfield police department. I was the lead attorney in a court action to stop police interference with lawful demonstrations there, and to enjoin the criminal prosecutions of the leaders. We tried that case and lost despite the wild stories police told—or maybe it all hung on that one grinning police officer’s testimony that he couldn’t understand what the marchers were saying because they were speaking “African.” The testimony of our witnesses was clear, consistent, and credible. The city did not even call the mayor or the police chief; it did not matter. A year later I lost a similar demonstration-and-mass-arrest case in Hartford, Connecticut. In both cases we had presented witness after witness who testified that the marchers had been peaceful. In both cases the judges accepted whatever the cops said. In both the authorities eventually dismissed the criminal prosecutions. But in both the demonstrations had been broken.
In the South I was equally frustrated. I represented three student leaders at Bluefield State College, which is in the coal country of West Virginia. The college had been historically black but was being converted to a white college due to overcrowding at the state’s white institutions. The black president had been replaced with a white man. There were mass demonstrations and some property damage. Although there was no proof that our clients, who led the black protests, had caused the damage or advocated it, a federal judge upheld their expulsion. True, we won a demonstration case involving all-black South Carolina State College that same year. A year later, however, state police shot wildly into a crowd of demonstrators, killing three South Carolina State students and wounding twenty-eight others, in what became known as the Orangeburg Massacre.
On the school segregation front the Supreme Court declined to review the adverse decision of the court of appeals in the Cincinnati school case, which triggered another district-court-level review of a few outstanding questions relating to school boundary lines and bus routes. We were preparing to file more Northern campaign cases, but the picture there was certainly becoming bleaker.
* * *
Two years after Gaynor v. Rockefeller, in 1967, the Columbus branch of the NAACP propelled us into an almost identical case involving construction jobs at Ohio State University.
Bowing to NAACP pressure, Governor James A. Rhodes had signed a state executive order in 1966 that required contractors to include in their public construction bids an assurance that their workforces would not be closed to blacks. The next year Ohio officials called for bids on a new Ohio State University medical science building. It was a $12,800,000 construction project. The contractors refused to sign the assurances, so the state director of public works, Alfred Gienow, obtained a waiver. It was the same old story, an order with no enforcement.
I fielded the calls from the branch office in Columbus, and promised to talk about the situation with Bob, but the Gaynor decision had made us gun-shy. Also, I had enough on my plate without a reprise of that case. Kitty was pregnant with Patrick, and we had an exhausting caseload. Picking up on my ambivalence, the local NAACP branch filed a federal suit on its own, modeling it on Gaynor. The complaint named Governor Rhodes, Alfred Gienow, and John Gardner, who was President Johnson’s secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. When the judge ordered a hearing for the following week, the local attorneys in Columbus asked us to send someone out to make the presentation in court.
David G. McConnell, a white science professor at the university and the chairman of the local NAACP branch’s labor and industry committee, had spent a long time developing contacts and creating a list of black candidates for admission to the unions of the all-white building trades. He found William Ethridge and Jerome Welch, who had been denied union membership application forms, and after they agreed to be plaintiffs in the suit, McConnell also brought two local attorneys on board.
William J. Davis and Irwin Barkin prepared the legal papers. Davis was a well-known local black lawyer with a reputation for speaking his mind, but he was a single practitioner and his time was limited. Barkin was much more accessible. He had a small law firm that worked on labor cases, and was already representing Ethridge in a snail-like Ohio Civil Rights Commission proceeding against a major electrical contractor and the local electrical workers’ union. But Barkin also represented unions in his practice, which made it impossible for him to be the lead attorney.