Are you kidding? You don’t know about Morris Abram?
On April 29, 1962, the federal courtroom in Atlanta’s old post office building was packed to the rafters. Leading members of the League of Women Voters and the United Church Women, along with state and local politicians and students from the local law schools, sat, dressed in suits and wearing hats in the darkly paneled third floor room. Reporters lined both sides of the courtroom ready to rush back to their newsrooms.1
The drama began to build as U.S. Circuit Court Judge Griffin Bell started reading in his southwestern Georgia drawl the decision in the case of Sanders v. Gray. Morris Abram had spent thirteen years waiting for this moment. He was worried, since he believed that Bell (the future attorney general of the United States), a recently appointed federal appellate judge and one of the youngest in the country, was “political to his fingertips” and “tied in with all the Russell’s and everybody else who was a political force, including Herman Talmadge.”2
Everyone in the courtroom knew that if the plaintiffs were victorious, the ruling would reverberate throughout the state of Georgia. The fate of the “county unit system,” designed to entrench the practice of racial segregation by filling the state’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches with politicians and judges prepared to fight any effort to challenge it, now rested with the opinions of three federal judges. The courtroom drama marked the penultimate fight of Morris Abram’s lengthy battle against that system.
Since 1917, Georgia law required the state’s political parties to use an electoral system in statewide primaries based upon unit votes assigned to each of Georgia’s counties. (The number of counties in Georgia was capped by the 1945 and subsequent state constitutions at 159, a total second only to Texas.) The number of unit votes was so disproportionately granted to favor the smaller rural counties that the metropolitan areas could be safely ignored by candidates for statewide office. And since the state’s Republican Party was virtually nonexistent, the winner was effectively the candidate who collected the most unit votes in the Democratic primary.
Eugene Talmadge famously declared that he never wanted to carry a county with a streetcar. And in fact, in the 1946 Democratic primary, Talmadge was nominated for governor despite losing the popular vote. (To the surprise of no one, he was officially elected in the fall for a fourth term.) After succeeding his father as governor following Eugene Talmadge’s death two years later, his son Herman said that he and the unit system were the only bulwarks against federally mandated “race mixing.”
Halfway through Judge Bell’s slow reading of his seventeen-page opinion, it became clear to Abram and his colleagues that they were on the verge of achieving the result they had long sought. Atlanta’s mayor William Hartsfield, whom Abram had represented in an earlier county unit lawsuit, turned to his lawyer friend and winked. When Judge Bell finished reading the unanimous decision, the mayor jumped in the air. Abram’s daughter Ann walked to the front and gave her father a hug. Victory celebrations followed.3
But Morris Abram still had one more battle to fight. Although Judge Bell’s opinion had overruled the unit system on grounds that it was discriminatory as then constituted, it left open the possibility that a different arrangement of unit votes might pass muster with that court. And Abram’s ultimate objective was to eliminate any vestige of a system that violated the principle of “one man, one vote.”
The court’s decisions in Sanders v. Gray and a companion case involving the malapportioned Georgia state legislature were watched closely by a peanut farmer from the rural southwestern part of the state. Jimmy Carter, who considered the outcome of the county unit case “one of the most momentous judicial decisions of the century in Georgia,” soon announced his candidacy for one of the newly created state senate seats located near his home in Sumter County.4 His political career was launched after being declared the winner by a court in a disputed contest. He now represented a district located less than ninety miles from the small town where Morris Abram spent his childhood.
In the early months of 2017 I was asked by the executive director of the Geneva, Switzerland–based organization UN Watch to put together a slideshow of its founding chairman for the group’s website. The assignment took me to Emory University, where Morris Abram’s papers are archived. I knew of Abram from my own experience. In fact, I had met him once as an entering freshman at Brandeis University in the fall of 1968, where he was beginning his brief tenure as its second president. But my knowledge of Abram’s career ran much deeper. Like my subject, I am a Georgia native. I grew up during the turbulent years of the struggle for civil rights, a struggle in which Abram played a key role. And later in life, I worked in the Civil Rights Division of the Anti-Defamation League during the same period in which he ascended to the national leadership of the American Jewish community.
But why a biography of Morris Abram? It’s a question I have been asked many times, though never by those who knew him, or who were otherwise familiar with his lifetime of accomplishments. A former law partner from his days in Atlanta, Maurice “Ted” Maloof, said to me in an interview just months before his own death: “He was a great man, as you know. But I can’t believe how many people never heard of Morris Abram. I ask people all the time, ‘Do you remember Morris Abram?’ And they say, ‘No, I never heard of him.’ When I remind them about his victory over the county unit system, then they remember.”5
Jeh Johnson, whom Abram mentored during the 1980s at the New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, long before he served as General Counsel of the Pentagon and Secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama, remembers hearing from a young associate in his firm from rural Georgia that he would be arguing a death penalty case in Alabama the following week. “And I said, ‘So you must know all about Morris Abram.’ And he said, ‘Who’s Morris Abram?’ I said, ‘Are you kidding? You don’t know about Morris Abram?’”6
In fact, Abram stands today as a mostly forgotten figure outside the American Jewish community where he played a leadership role during the second half of his life. Few beyond his native Georgia remember his successful effort to unmask the Ku Klux Klan, his lengthy battle to end the state’s county unit system of voting that entrenched racial segregation, or his role as an intermediary in assisting Martin Luther King Jr. in his release from prison less than a month before the 1960 presidential election.
But his civil rights work in Atlanta during the 1950s and early 1960s marked only the beginning of Abram’s public service, for which he was tapped by five U.S. presidents, from John F. Kennedy to George H. W. Bush. Beginning with his presidency of the American Jewish Committee in the 1960s, he became a leading voice in the worldwide effort to free the Jews behind the Iron Curtain. And his pioneering work in the field of international human rights spanned the years from his service on Justice Robert Jackson’s prosecution team at Nuremburg shortly after World War II to his efforts in the final decade of the twentieth century to hold the United Nations to the high standards of human rights protections its founders had envisioned.
Abram’s accomplishments are even more remarkable considering his humble beginnings. Growing up in Fitzgerald, a rural town in southcentral Georgia, his immigrant father struggled to support his family with earnings from a dry goods business that failed to provide a secure income for his wife and their four children. Abram’s childhood haunted him throughout his life, and he frequently thought himself unworthy of the many accolades that accompanied his achievements. “He was smart, and he was charming,” said Robert Hicks, a law partner in Abram’s firm in Atlanta. “But he couldn’t understand why people thought so highly of him.”7
Still, growing up as a minority in a small town installed in Morris Abram a fierce ambition to succeed. His background as an “outsider,” a Jewish southerner growing up in a racially segregated environment, played a major role in sensitizing him to the injustices he witnessed early in his life. He became an effective advocate in his home state for those who were being denied the protections he believed to be guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and by a society committed to the rule of law. He carried that outspokenness to the national and international arenas on behalf of Soviet Jewry and the state of Israel.
According to his daughter Ruth, founder of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City, Abram’s status as an outsider “was actually very much communicated to his family as a good position to be in. Not a thing to be afraid of, or try to change, since being an outsider had some advantages.” When I spoke to her, Ruth was preparing to give a presentation on the relationship between the artist and the immigrant. “I will be speaking to the outsider theme,” she said. “I’m sure I got that from him.”8
During the mid-1960s, several years after his move to New York, Abram reflected upon the advantages his marginality had afforded him: “If one is a Jew and lives in a small Southern town, one is bound to realize early that a minority group has a different position than a majority. . . . By being one of such a small group, I was bound to get a certain insight that I would not have had as a member of the majority group.”9
In a lengthy set of interviews he sat for with the writer Eli Evans after receiving his doctor’s diagnosis of acute myelocytic leukemia, a disease most of his associates did not expect him to survive, Abram ruminated on where he should be buried: “I don’t feel at home in Fitzgerald. I don’t feel at home in New York. Who wants to be buried in one of those cemeteries on Long Island? I don’t feel at home in Atlanta. At least I feel more at home than I did, but from the years 1948 to 1962 as a Jew confronting the system, I was not part of it and Atlanta was not really my home.”10
Abram’s ascendency to the leadership of the American Jewish community could hardly have been predicted in his early years. He told Evans only half-jokingly that he was raised as a Protestant. In fact, his hometown did have a tiny close-knit contingent of Jewish families, but under his mother’s influence the Abram family had little association with them. Abram’s intellectual curiosity as a teenager led him to an early fascination with Jewish history and culture that grew over the years into a strong personal identification as a Jew. Though never religious, he became a passionate public defender of the state of Israel.
Abram’s life as an outsider followed him throughout his career: a student at the University of Georgia and later an Atlanta lawyer who vigorously opposed the predominant political and social views of the day; a partner in a highly regarded Northern law firm who never lost his genteel Southern manner and style; the president of an elite university to which he brought traditional liberal views during a time when those views were under assault from the New Left; and a pioneer of the civil rights movement, which turned against him as the result of his vigorous opposition to racial and ethnic quotas.
As the latter example indicates, Abram’s career was not without its disappointments. When the Rhodes Scholarship he received during his senior year at the University of Georgia was cancelled just before the outbreak of World War II, Abram was able to accept an invitation to complete his legal education at the University of Chicago, thanks to the financial intervention of his college roommate’s father. But following his graduation, anti-Jewish discrimination prevented him from being hired at any of Atlanta’s prestigious law firms.
When Abram was in his late fifties, he wrote to his son Morris Jr., “Once I had rather vaulting ambitions to make contributions to social and/or political progress or even to history. The latter dream I discarded early—or was it only a day dream?” He had, after all, been president of his class at law school and president of his debating society at the University of Georgia. As he told Eli Evans, “I was always involved in political matters. I loved political matters.”11
In 1954 Abram challenged Atlanta’s incumbent congressman, a former judge and member of the Ku Klux Klan, but he lost in a race he later described as “the nastiest, meanest campaign in the world.”12 Reflecting on that campaign twenty years later, Abram said that his first speech in the small county he needed to win the election “went over like a lead balloon” since he was making the mistake of trying to reason with his audience. “I couldn’t be a demagogue,” he said, “and I am no good at speaking that requires wit and humor. I cannot even remember jokes very well.”13 As he told Evans, “I would never be a Madison Square Garden speaker. I am not good at shouting out one-sentence applause producing lines like a labor leader . . . and I do not like to speak in polemical terms. I like to reason in a speech.”14
In the late 1960s, after moving to New York and establishing his reputation in both the legal and Jewish communities, Abram was considered a leading Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate, but he dropped out of the race when he realized his call for a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam War prevented him from receiving the support of the Johnson White House. And after stepping down from the presidency of Brandeis University, his candidacy for New York’s other Senate seat fizzled out before the Democratic primary.
But it was Brandeis that marked Abram’s biggest career disappointment. A position for which he believed himself perfectly suited lasted less than two years, a memory that troubled him for the rest of his life. Many of the problems he encountered stemmed from a naiveté about what a university president could achieve during the campus upheavals of the late 1960s. “He got into Brandeis,” said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, then its student council president, “and he realized very quickly that this was not the job for him. The whole university scene was not for him, particularly in the ‘60s.”15
Abram also suffered personal setbacks. Although his first marriage to a talented journalist from a prominent Florida family brought much happiness and five children to whom he was deeply devoted, it fell apart shortly before he was diagnosed with the leukemia that nearly took his life. During the same period he experienced deep frustration trying to connect with his oldest son, Morris Jr., who had left the country and temporarily broken off communication.
Abram fought a lifetime of insecurity. As Robert Hicks told me, “I think Morris was a man in search of himself all his life. He had what I call a ‘green pasture’ syndrome. Everything was greener on the other side of the fence. He was always aggrandizing himself, pushing and climbing, climbing, climbing.” He continued, “Morris was one of the most brilliant men I ever knew. Men or women; he just was smart. But he never was at peace. He wanted to get somewhere all the time.”16
And he had his shortcomings. He went to great lengths, mainly through the use of extravagant flattery, to ingratiate himself with those whom he believed could advance his career. On separate occasions he got into trouble with important constituencies for making unauthorized statements to the press, first as president of Brandeis and years later as chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. And his second marriage to a long-lost sweetheart from his early days in Atlanta did not survive her discovery of his infidelity.
Abram did marry for a third time at the outset of his final decade. The marriage to a European career woman over two decades younger was spent in his adopted home of Geneva with summers on Cape Cod. His wife Bruna described it to me as a happy one, and by then he had long since rebuilt his relationship with Morris Jr.
Alan Dershowitz, who found himself at odds with Abram on several occasions, told me that Abram was a proud member of the establishment, in contrast to his own career as an outsider. For someone like Abram, who grew up in one of twelve Jewish families in a rural Protestant southern town of six thousand residents, this may seem like a contradiction.
But Dershowitz’s encounters with Abram did in fact come after Abram had ascended to one of the top New York law firms and the leadership of the organized Jewish community. In his mid-forties, Abram accepted a partnership at the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, shortly before becoming the youngest president in the history of the American Jewish Committee, that most established of Jewish organizations. And a little over two decades later, special arrangements were made by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to enable him to become its chairman. He was now, indeed, a full-fledged member of the country’s Jewish establishment.
By then Abram had parted ways politically with old friends and allies who could not fathom the fact that this crusader for civil rights had, in their estimation, abandoned his liberal views and “moved to the right.” But in Abram’s assessment it was they, and not he, who had compromised their position. Testifying before the Democratic National Committee’s Platform Committee in 1984, he and fellow U.S. Civil Rights Commission colleague John Bunzel pointed out that “in the name of a new equality, the policy of color-blindness, which had long been the touchstone and mandate of our Constitution and is a requirement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, has been severely modified.”17
Abram was saddened to see the civil rights movement discard the concept of equal protection of law in favor of legally sanctioned racial preference—the very antithesis of what the authors of the key civil rights legislation had advocated. Toward the end of his life Abram wrote, “The transformation of the moral struggle for equality and integration into one for preference and separation has not been to the advantage of blacks and certainly not to the country.”18
Morris Abram’s story is, as his son Joshua describes it, an “American story,” and for that reason alone it is worth telling. But what is most striking is its relevance to our times. In an opinion piece Abram wrote in 1978 that was quoted before the Senate Judiciary Committee by Senator Henry Jackson in his statement on behalf of Abram’s nomination to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, he warned of the dangers of using race and ethnicity as political tools in a pluralistic society. “The State must not tag and assign rights on the basis of race, sex, or religion,” he wrote. “If we do, we shall surely end up at each other’s throats.”19
One can only wonder what the early pioneers of the civil rights movement would think of the politics of identity that have moved to the center of our partisan battles today. Morris Abram, who knew with certainty the injustice of discrimination based on one’s identity at birth, understood the price that is paid by a nation that abandons its commitment to the rule of law.