7 
THE YALE YEARS
7 
I WENT TO LAW SCHOOL because law was the tool I thought I needed to fight racial discrimination in the South in the early 1960s. Law school had never crossed my mind until one day during my senior year in college while I was doing volunteer work in the local NAACP office in Atlanta. After sorting all the requests for legal assistance from poor Black citizens who could not afford lawyers or who sought to challenge discriminatory practices, cases White lawyers would not touch, I wondered why in the world I was thinking about studying nineteenth-century Russian literature or going into the Foreign Service when the freedom and justice struggle was right here at home. It was time to jettison plans to live abroad and jump into the home fray for freedom.
My diary shows my mother was not excited about my decision to go to law school. There was no precedent in my family or community for such a choice. She did not know any Black women lawyers. I didn’t either although I had heard of the formidable Constance Baker Motley who had worked with Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund on many important civil rights cases. Connie later helped gain James Meredith’s admission to “Ole Miss” and became the first Black woman federal district court judge. My mother wanted me to get a graduate degree (she was ahead of her time there) and, like many mothers, she wanted me to get a good job and a good husband. But as she always did, when she saw my mind was made up, she supported me. And she was proud of my being at Yale even if she did not fully understand why.
I wasn’t sure how I would support myself through law school but took it one step at a time. The John Hay Whitney Fellowship, student loans, and jobs—and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr.’s generosity with free housing and food for a year—got me through. I had no idea how I was going to support myself afterwards or pay off my law school loans, but I knew I was going to Mississippi. Like my parents I had learned to live by faith and not just by sight.
The first day I walked into the dining room at Yale Law School in 1960 with my newly discovered group of Black women friends—Amelia Cobb in the drama school, Hildred Roach in the music school, Eleanor Holmes (now Norton) in the law school, and Ruby Puryear (now Hearn) in the biochemistry department—Black male students, shocked and delighted with the unexpected bounty of Black women students, appeared instantly out of the woodwork to greet us.
Ten women were in my law school class in 1960. From some of the comments I overheard about us you would have thought that a massive invasion of aliens had descended. Yale Law School dormitories were closed to women and constitutional law professor Fred Rodell still held some of his classes at Mory’s on High Street which did not admit women. I lived my first and third years at Helen Hadley Hall on Temple Street which was the segregated dorm for female graduate and professional students. Women had not yet been admitted to Yale’s undergraduate college.
I was elected to the Yale Corporation in 1971 as the first woman alumni trustee (Hanna Gray, former Yale provost and later president of the University of Chicago, was selected as a successor trustee the same year and Eleanor Holmes Norton and Ruby Hearn were elected alumni trustees in later years). I decided to join the Yale Club in New York City, which still had not opened its membership to women. It was quietly done.
I hated law school but I had a mission and Mississippi on my mind. Many of my college friends in SNCC and Bob Moses had gone to Mississippi to begin the arduous and dangerous task of voter registration. In that state there were about 900,000 Black citizens and only four Black lawyers. Three of them had not gone to law school but had studied on their own. The one who had attended law school did not take civil rights cases.
Depressed by my complete lack of interest in property and contracts and corporations and legal procedure courses and wondering what in the world I was doing in law school when my friends were out on the front lines in Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama, I threw myself into the Northern Student Movement designed to support SNCC’s work in the South. A Yale undergraduate named Peter Countryman was a key figure in this effort as was Al Lowenstein, who entered my life during the Yale Law School years.
I spent my first summer during law school in the Ivory Coast, West Africa with Operation Crossroads Africa. A forerunner of the Peace Corps, it had been founded by a charismatic Black pastor, Reverend James Robinson of the Church of the Master in New York City. He sought to build awareness and bridges between American and African youth. Before we left for Africa our group stopped in Washington, D.C. where we were housed at the College of Preachers at the Washington National Cathedral in the neighborhood where I now live. We went to the White House to hear and meet President John F. Kennedy. Unbeknownst to me until 1998, CDF’s current board chair and Philadelphia School Superintendent David Hornbeck was in the same White House group and also participated in Crossroads that summer.
My Crossroads trip was made possible by a scholarship from St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, Thurgood Marshall’s church in Harlem. Its distinguished and kind rector, Dr. Moran Weston, had me speak to the congregation and has remained a life-long friend. He was a founder of Carver Federal Savings and Loan Bank in Harlem which my niece Deborah Wright now heads as president. My Crossroads group lived at and built a fence around a secondary school in Bouaké, the Ivory Coast’s second-largest city. We also traveled to Ghana where we stayed at the University of Ghana, met students, and co-existed with what seemed to me legions of lizards everywhere. I learned to step over rather than flee them and to try to scare them to hide my fear since there was no escaping them.
My second year of law school was immensely lifted by living with Yale’s chaplain, Bill Coffin and his wife, Eva Rubinstein, and their three children: Amy, Alex, and David. I luxuriated hearing Eva’s father Arthur Rubinstein play the piano downstairs as I lay upstairs in my bedroom. Bill Coffin, inspiring, outspoken, and eloquent, was mentor, friend, and billboard for faith in action. He cagily used me to integrate the all-White male usher board at Yale’s Battell Chapel, calculating that some Yalies would be afraid to protest the revolutionary presence of a woman usher for fear of being perceived as anti-Black. When Freedom Riders seeking to end segregation in interstate transportation ran into violent resistance, he recruited friends from Yale to join with Wesleyan University faculty members John Maguire and David Swift to go South. I begged to go. Bill refused on grounds it was too dangerous for a woman and took a Black male Yale law student named George Smith instead. I still haven’t forgiven him! But his commitment to racial justice and his later arrest with Dr. Benjamin Spock in opposition to the war in Vietnam made him a lifelong hero to me. On the weekend in July, 1968, when he married me and my husband in Virginia, he met with one of his defense lawyers, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, who spoke at our wedding and graciously held my flowers when my husband and I exchanged rings.
Bill Coffin’s civil rights and Vietnam antiwar witness provoked much controversy at Yale but he never wavered. He later became senior pastor of the Riverside Church in New York City and then head of SANE—Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. A versatile and gifted musician who played his guitar and sang Russian songs at my wedding to my Russian-born mother-in-law’s delight, a peerless preacher, a generous friend, and an exuberant and courageous bearer of God’s word, I count him among the brightest lanterns during a dark era of national life.
I visited Mississippi during one spring break in law school to remind myself why I was sitting in classes I found deadly dull and living in New Haven when my friends were organizing voters in the South. Medgar Evers picked me up at the airport, took me home to meet his wife Myrlie and their children, and then drove me up to Greenwood, Mississippi to join Bob Moses and others at the SNCC headquarters which was my destination.
Immediately upon our arrival in Greenwood we heard news of a drive-by shooting. The fear this provoked in the Black community and in me was palpable. Bob Moses and his SNCC colleagues knew they had to answer back by continuing to take people down to the courthouse to try to register to vote. I had promised my mother I would not get arrested and was warned by a Mississippi-born Yale law professor, Myres McDougal, that an arrest would surely keep me out of the Mississippi bar where I already faced high odds of exclusion. I approached the SNCC office the next morning determined to be helpful but to stay out of trouble.
As Bob, Jim Forman, and others persuaded some of the scared, raggedly clad but brave souls to walk in a line with them to the registrar’s office, I found myself tagging along at the very tail end as a determined observer. That day was the first time police dogs were brought out to attack Black citizens attempting to register to vote. I watched in horror and shared the terror of the people who began to scatter and run as a German shepherd attacked Bob and ripped his pants. Bob did not flinch. I caught the car keys my SNCC friends threw me as they were being arrested and felt chilling isolation and fear watching local Mississippi law enforcement officials act ruthlessly and lawlessly. Helpless and outraged, I ran to a nearby phone booth and dialed John Doar in the Justice Department’s civil rights division in Washington to tell him what was happening and to demand that FBI agents observing but doing nothing do something.
I remember his firm steely voice instructing me just to tell him the facts and to skip the emotion. I did but after I hung up shed furious tears of frustration as I wondered what to do next and whom else to call for immediate help. Jack Young, Jess Brown, and Carsie Hall, the three Black civil rights attorneys, were more than ninety miles away in Jackson. Huge numbers of Whites surrounded the courthouse where Moses and Forman and other SNCC workers had been taken to be tried immediately without a lawyer. The only person I recognized in the menacing crowd as I walked towards the front courthouse steps was Claude Sitton, the veteran New York Times reporter. He neither acknowledged me nor met my eyes. I knew then what it was like to be a poor Black person in Mississippi: alone. When I was blocked at the front courthouse door I attempted to enter by the side entrance but was again repelled by burly policemen. As I walked away through the milling mostly White male crowd and past the police cruisers with police dogs, I knew I would get through law school, however dull, would come back to Mississippi, and would walk into that and other courthouses to provide counsel to those unjustly treated.
It was at Yale Law School that I met Malcolm X. I was sitting in the Law School auditorium reading and waiting for him to come on stage and speak. Although I was a Tolstoy, Gandhi, and King disciple, Malcolm X’s sharp, sarcastic, funny, irreverent, tell-it-like-it-is rhetoric labeling Whites as devils who had oppressed Black America struck a resonant chord in my psyche. Experiences like the one I’d had in Mississippi were testimony to the evils of racial oppression he described. He provided a much needed outlet for the rage embedded in my and nearly every Black heart and soul in America. The Civil Rights Movement channeled much Black anger and rage into positive avenues. But Malcolm X knew how deeply White resistance and White privilege remained ingrained and how much needed to be done to free many Black minds enslaved by a sense of inferiority and many White minds enslaved by a sense of superiority instilled over nearly two centuries of slavery and segregation.
I was dumbstruck when I looked up from my reading and saw a tall, clean-cut, nattily dressed, freckle-faced man with glasses and neatly trimmed reddish hair smiling down at me, calling my name—“Miss Wright”—and introducing himself as Malcolm X. I was struck even dumber as he proceeded to tell me a number of facts about my life. I eventually recognized his source—a childhood friend in his entourage with shaved head, bow tie, and new last name of X, who was now a member of the Bridgeport mosque. I later renewed contact with another hometown friend who had become a Black Muslim when I went to New York to have several meals with Malcolm X in the Muslim’s Harlem restaurant.
I was buoyed and enthralled by Malcolm X’s intelligence, by his barbed humor (he chided me for ordering white bread during my first meal with him, saying it was utterly without nutritional value like White folks generally), and by his keen analysis of America’s racial divide. But I was not recruitable. While many of his words resonated deep within me, made me laugh and clap and say “Amen” as much as they made many White people squirm, I was too deeply grounded in my Christian faith, unconvinced of the religious authenticity of the honorable Elijah Muhammad, unclear about the Black Muslim’s true political agenda, and utterly unwilling to accede to their subservient role for women. I nevertheless felt enriched by the chance to cross paths and listen and converse and debate with this extraordinary man.
Like many I watched with deep interest Malcolm X’s evolution, which included reaching out to Dr. King, and read with interest his words in The Autobiography of Malcolm X after he visited Mecca in 1964:
During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass, and slept in the same bed (or on the same rug)—while praying to the same God—with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the “white” Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan and Ghana.
We were truly all the same (brothers)—because their belief in one God had removed the “white” from their minds, the “white” from their behavior, and the “white” from their attitude.
I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man—and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their “differences” in color.
His assassination in New York City in 1965 cut short the transformation of another hero who gave hope to Black children and to America. His wife and children who witnessed their husband’s and father’s killing carried on. Malcolm X’s transformation to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz left all Americans much to think about if we are to grow beyond racism as he did.
During my Yale years I shared a platform with Dr. King at Wesleyan University and in August of 1963 stood with uncontained excitement and tears with Bob Moses, Julian Bond, Ella Baker, and over two hundred thousand others as Dr. King told all America about his and our dream at the March on Washington. Renewed and buoyed by that gathering I headed north for my last year of intensive preparation to become a civil rights lawyer.
God was headed south to Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia and Louisiana and North Carolina and I went along for the scariest, most exhilarating, most challenging years any human being could hope for. On the way to Mississippi, though, I stopped for a year in New York City to place myself under the tutelage of an extraordinarily gifted and committed band of attorneys at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) headquartered then at 10 Columbus Circle.
Providentially LDF had created the Earl Warren Fellowship Program named after the great Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who had led the high court to unanimously decree public school segregation unconstitutional. The program began the year I graduated from law school to help young attorneys seeking to practice in the South. Julius Chambers and I were the first two Earl Warren Fellows. He was the first Black editor-in-chief of the Law Review at the University of North Carolina Law School, later succeeded Jack Greenberg as head of LDF, and is now chancellor of North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina. We received a year’s rigorous training at LDF’s New York City headquarters under Jack Greenberg, James M. Nabrit, III, Constance Baker Motley, Derrick Bell, Norman Amaker, Leroy Clarke, Mike Meltsner, and Frank Hefron. I learned an enormous amount about practical lawyering from these fine lawyers whose standards of excellence I have not seen bettered. We also were exposed to leading law professors and civil rights lions of the time and adopted into a network of LDF cooperating attorneys throughout the South and country who were litigating civil rights cases in their communities with LDF technical and financial assistance. These relationships nurtured Julius’ and my confidence for the tough battles ahead and became a lifelong community of support and inspiration.
I learned more that year in LDF’s practical school of lawyering about the real workings of the legal system than I had in the prior three years in law school. I also learned that the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slowly. One of my first assignments at LDF was to draft the brief for college students like myself who had been arrested for sitting in at lunch counters throughout the South. Some of these cases had wound their way on appeal up to the U.S. Supreme Court several years later. Their eventual successful resolution lifted the legal cloud hanging over my own head from my arrest on March 15, 1960 for sitting in at the City Hall Cafeteria in Atlanta for which courtly Donald Hollowell was my LDF cooperating attorney. I did not return to that cafeteria until 1988 when I visited Andy Young who was by then mayor of the city of Atlanta.
In the 1960s, there was a demonstrated need for more lawyers to do the trenchwork for civil rights. As moving and important as the Montgomery bus boycott was in emotionally galvanizing a city and a nation to end decades of segregated public buses, the ultimate victory was in the federal courts where such segregation was outlawed. At a time when many movement feet were getting tired after countless days of walking and hitching rides and young Dr. King was becoming discouraged and worn down by incessant White harassment including the bombing of his home and obscene phone threats, the role of lawyers was crucial to the movement’s success.
I was proud to join LDF’s ranks with its trailblazing legal legacy to serve as part of the backup legal machinery for those demonstrating in the streets. My Earl Warren Fellowship provided three years of de-dining support after the year in New York City. A full salary of $7200 for the first year enabled me to live comfortably in Jackson, Mississippi where I opened an office to handle the anticipated onslaught of cases from Mississippi’s Freedom Summer of 1964. I opened up a satellite office in Memphis, Tennessee to service anticipated northern Mississippi cases in the law firm of civil rights attorneys Z. Alexander Looby and Russell Sugarman. Hundreds of White middle-class students soon brought visibility to the too long invisible struggles of local Black citizens for simple justice and the right to vote. I finally was going to witness on a sustained basis the unbelievably courageous efforts of Bob Moses and SNCC workers and local young people like June Johnson, Hollis Watkins, Willie Peacock, and Curtis Hayes to gain the vote; of courageous Black parents like Mae Bertha Carter and sisters Winson and Dovie Hudson and others who risked all to desegregate Mississippi public schools; of Fannie Lou Hamer who let her light shine everywhere she went; of Hartman Turnbow in Holmes County whose elocution of wisdom is not capturable on paper and who took no guff from anybody White or Black; of E. W. “Pops” Steptoe in fearsome Amite County whom I used to visit with Bob Moses; and of Amzie Moore—wise, warm, calm, helpful Amzie—who took youthful freedom fighters into his home and heart and showed us the rounds and rules for survival.
All of these great Black foot soldiers in the army of justice awaited me on arrival in Mississippi and sustained me all the while I lived there.
The White lawyers were not as welcoming.