He had the reputation of being a kind of modern Atticus Finch, who was willing to take on these tough race cases.
Morris Abram sought advice from Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black when deciding whether to return to Georgia when his Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford came to an end in 1948. He told Justice Black that he intended to do battle with the county unit system, did not accept segregation, and tended to question traditional premises on which current Southern economic, social, and political life were based. Black did not sugarcoat his response: “If you return to Georgia and pursue your beliefs,” he told the young lawyer, “expect to get your head beaten in.”
Three decades later, when delivering the Hugo Black lecture at the University of Alabama Law School, Abram recalled that he went back to his native state and fought the county unit system, said and did what he pleased in public life, and survived very well. “I was never thrashed,” he said, “but sometimes threatened.”1
After a brief stint working in Washington DC as the assistant to the director of the Committee for the Marshall Plan, Abram returned to Atlanta to resume his practice of law. He began by contacting Hugh Howell, the former pro-Talmadge candidate for governor and senior partner of the small firm with which he had been associated during his brief period in Atlanta following law school. Howell, who was no longer involved in politics, introduced Abram to his partners Arthur Heyman, then in his eighties, and his son Herman.
Coincidentally, Abram knew the younger Heyman’s son, one of his students at the Sunday school where he had taken a part-time job in 1940 to earn extra money to make ends meet. After receiving glowing recommendations of Herman Heyman from the senior Troutman and from Allan Post, the senior partner at the firm where he worked before the war, Abram decided to join the firm.2
He would never regret it. Robert Hicks, who began practicing law in Atlanta in the early fifties, regarded Herman Heyman as “one of the finest men I ever met in every sense of the word. He was extremely brilliant, Phi Beta Kappa. Just an elegant man, too, and his wife was an elegant lady. He was President of The Temple and the two of them were important people in Atlanta in the Jewish community.”3
Abram took a job with the firm that paid him $300 a month. He and Jane rented a two bedroom apartment with a monthly rent of $95.4 Herman Heyman became a mentor to Abram, leaving him free to develop in the law and encouraging his public role. Abram’s involvement in issues of concern to the black community began very shortly after his return to Atlanta. “He had the reputation,” recalled Andrew Young, then a young preacher pastoring in South Georgia, “of being a kind of modern Atticus Finch, who was willing to take on these tough race cases.”5
Abram’s thinking on matters of race had undergone a transformation since his days as a youngster growing up in a segregated community. And it required him to face the prospect of a very uphill battle against prevailing opinion. In his 1972 address to the graduates of Emory University, he recalled the time during his senior year at Georgia when a black graduate from a good college indicated that he wished to apply to the university’s law school. The young man had circulated a tactful letter to the student body seeking, if not their support, at least their non-resistance. Abram never forgot the response of “one brilliant and otherwise open-minded law student” who spoke in opposition to the almost uniform rejection and disdain of the black student’s plea: “Let him in but let him understand that he must sit in the back of the class and move to the side of the sidewalk as whites pass.”6
In 1949 Abram drafted an amicus brief on behalf of his firm in a challenge to the state’s New Voter Registration Act. The law imposed either literacy or knowledge of citizenship tests on voters, with the results left to the discretion of the local white registrars. It was a clear effort to disenfranchise the few blacks who had the courage to show up to vote. “In a world where tyranny is so widespread,” Abram wrote, “American jurisprudence is firmly grounded on the proposition that the freedom for all and all of our freedoms are safe only in a system of law. As Cicero said: We are in the bondage of the law, in order that we may be free. . . . The unconstitutionality of this Act results from the Legislature’s willful disregard of the organic law of the land.”7
Abram persuaded then attorney Elbert Tuttle, later one of the leading pro-civil rights southern federal judges, to join the brief in the case of Franklin v. Harper before the Georgia Supreme Court. Tuttle was very pleased with the brief, writing the young lawyer, “I think you have done a marvelous job and I am very glad to be with you on the brief.”8 Abram also received a letter from Ellis Arnall, Georgia’s progressive governor from 1942 to 1946, praising the brief: “Let me again tell you how very excellent I think it is.”9
Grace Towns Hamilton, who was the executive director of the National Urban League’s Atlanta chapter at the time, recalled how the black community had been dealt an unfair allocation of bond funds for the erection of separate but equal schools. When she asked Abram to intervene with the city’s power structure, he brought their case before business leaders as well as the president of the school board and the superintendent of schools.10 Hamilton admired Abram as a man of principle: “He supported me in my efforts to improve medical facilities for blacks in the public hospital,” she wrote. “He supported my successful efforts to bring black physicians on its staff; he fought to make land space available for blacks to live on; we worked for middle class housing in which blacks could live; and of course, he was a leader in the fight to get rid of the county unit system which was the pillar of racist politics.” Hamilton, who later became the first black woman elected to the Georgia legislature, said that Abram practiced his beliefs “when very few southern whites surfaced in our struggle.”11
Hamilton’s biographers note that of all the programs sponsored by the Atlanta Urban League (AUL) during her time as its executive director, housing was its biggest success.12 In 1946, Atlanta’s black population, which encompassed 33 percent of the population, accounted for only 16 percent of its living space, with 71 percent of its housing deemed to be substandard. Instead of pressing for integrated housing, which would have stimulated violence, the AUL’s approach was to seek areas of land expansion that were not taken by the post–World War II flight of whites to the suburbs. Abram played a key intermediary role in these transactions. In the case of “Western Land,” a corporation formed to establish a beachhead for black ownership in the area, of the twenty-three investors, Abram was the only white. When R. A. Thompson, the AUL’s point person on housing, was asked if two additional tracts purchased to create moderate priced homes for blacks would have been sold had this ultimate purpose been known, he replied, “Might have, we don’t know. It was just easier for Morris to buy it, since he was white.”13
In 1951, Herman Heyman and Abram formed a new partnership. They took with them as an associate Robert Young, who would later become the county attorney of Fulton County. Abram’s office on the fifteenth floor of the Healey Building featured sculptures of Rodin’s “The Kiss” and the “Scales of Justice.” Maurice “Ted” Maloof, the son of Lebanese immigrants and a young lawyer looking for a like-minded firm to associate with in the late 1950s, was attracted to Abram’s law practice: “I had heard of him as a liberal and we were liberals. And I knew he had brought cases to bring down the county unit system to declare it unconstitutional. It was the kind of law I wanted to practice.”14
Miles Alexander recalled Abram as “bright, liberal, an outstanding trial lawyer.” When the Lennox Square shopping mall was being developed in the 1950s, the city of Atlanta was using eminent domain to put in roads that were wiping out a small black neighborhood in the upscale Buckhead section where maids, chauffeurs, and those who worked and had jobs in white homes lived. “Morris was challenging the amount of money the state was giving them for their homes,” recalled Alexander. Abram used an innovative argument that these homes were irreplaceable, since there was no other area where black residents could buy homes where there was no juvenile delinquency, where the schools were good, and where their children could have contact with white children. As a result, he contended, the compensation for their homes should be the fair market value of homes in their area, not in terms of what they were worth then but what they would be worth to willing buyers and sellers in the black community who wanted to be there.15
This kind of approach, according to Maloof, led to Abram’s exclusion from the city’s social clubs where the lawyers in what he termed the “silk-stocking” firms congregated. “Morris was respected for his intelligence, but they did not like him handling all these cases that he handled.” Those cases garnered Abram a great deal of publicity.16 One such case marked the first successful malpractice suit brought in the southern United States against a highly respected doctor. Abram’s client, Agnes Railey, was the victim of ill-advised brain surgery to cure epilepsy that left her unable to lead anything resembling a normal life.
During his two years at Oxford, Abram had had pangs of regret that he hadn’t pursued the medical education he had abandoned during his undergraduate years. “I’m a frustrated doctor,” he told Eli Evans. “I guess that’s why I’ve been so extraordinarily successful in litigating malpractice cases.”17 Railey’s suit against a prominent Atlanta neurosurgeon required three trials and two years of flying to numerous cities in the United States and Canada to gather evidence. In the end, Abram’s exhaustive research paid off for his client.
The case enabled Abram to display a wide array of talents, including an impressive lay understanding of medicine, an aggressive courtroom manner, and an unyielding determination to challenge the forces arrayed against him, which included the Georgia medical establishment and expensive insurance attorneys. The suit on behalf of Mrs. Railey resulted in the largest judgment ever received in a DeKalb County court up to that time. According to Maloof, “The silk-stocking lawyers liked Herman and used to ask him, ‘Herman, how did you partner with this guy?’ They saw Morris as an ambitious go-getter. They didn’t embrace him. Of course, Morris didn’t need to have anyone embrace him. He knew who he was and was very satisfied with that.”18
As Abram’s success as a trial lawyer grew, so did his local reputation along with his ability to receive press notice. According to Maloof, Abram had a nose for publicity. But “he wanted people around him to get recognition, too. He tried to get recognition for all of us. In the county unit case it was all him, but he wanted them to list in the article the names of all the people who worked on it. Which was nice for us and not necessary. But he was that way. He wasn’t trying to hog at all.”19
Elliott Levitas, who would later become the U.S. congressman from Georgia’s Fourth Congressional District representing Atlanta’s growing suburbs from 1975–85, first met Morris Abram when he was invited by the Abrams to dinner after being named a Rhodes Scholar at Emory University in 1956. Levitas recalled how his admiration for Abram grew over the years: “I was very impressed with him. He became for me something of an aspirational role model because he had the reputation of being a good lawyer, he was active in a community that needed representation and visibility, and I knew of his background and that was also inspirational.” Levitas later joined the team of young lawyers who provided research and other assistance to Abram and his law partners when they were working on the county unit system cases.20
Following the demise of the white primary and two unsuccessful challenges to the county unit system, the second led by Abram shortly after he returned to Atlanta, his old nemesis from his University of Georgia days Herman Talmadge, now sitting in the governor’s seat, began the first of two campaigns to institutionalize the system by implanting it into the state’s constitution and extending its reach beyond party primaries to include general elections. Abram played a major role in those campaigns, which were successful in turning back these efforts. In 1952 he chaired a committee organized by the state chapter of the League of Women Voters called Citizens Against the County Unit Amendment.21
Joining Abram and his colleagues from the League and other civic groups was an attorney from a prominent and very conservative Macon, Georgia family named Charles Baxter Jones Jr. As Abram said, Jones was born with a garrote in his hand to use against his father. “He could make the most radical idea sound conservative,” he recalled, “and he would get an orgasm over doing so.” This quality he contrasted with his own ability “to take a conservative idea and make it sound radical.”22
In 1952 Jones took on the sitting congressman from Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, James Davis, a former state judge who had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s. As a state assemblyman, Davis had sponsored a bill passed into law requiring a card index of all Georgians indicating whether they had a trace of Negro blood. Abram, who raised funds for Jones, looked on as the congressman conducted a smear campaign against his candidate, centered on his part-time position teaching business law at a local black college. While Jones won the popular vote, he lost the county unit vote, returning Davis to Washington.
It was the second time that Davis had won his seat while receiving a minority of the vote, and Abram was convinced that he could make a credible run for the seat himself in 1954 by making this fact the centerpiece of his campaign. It wasn’t the first time that he had thought about entering politics. While completing his Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford, Abram considered returning to his hometown of Fitzgerald to run in Georgia’s Third Congressional District, which included the city of Columbus.23 When he appeared before the Fulton County Commission in January 1950 with his friend Grace Towns Hamilton, the black head of the city’s Urban League chapter, he allowed her to introduce herself rather than violate the racial norms of the day by using a polite title for her, an act which would have jeopardized his political viability.24
But to say that Abram was in for a rough ride during his campaign for Congress is an understatement. That the race issue would dominate the campaign became inevitable shortly after Abram announced his candidacy when in May, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in the groundbreaking case of Brown v. Board of Education. During the campaign, Abram, while avoiding the issue of desegregation, did say that the law of the land had to be obeyed.25
The Fifth Congressional District consisted of three counties: Fulton, the more urbanized part of Atlanta; DeKalb, the home of James Davis, which was then primarily rural; and the small county of Rockdale, whose population at the time was under 8,500. The problem for a candidate with Abram’s political orientation was that in the Democratic primary, which invariably determined the eventual outcome, it was rural Rockdale’s two unit votes that determined the winner of races in which one candidate carried Fulton and the other DeKalb. As an editorial in the Atlanta Journal during the 1952 campaign pointed out, in a close race, Rockdale’s 1,500 voters could determine who would represent the Fifth CD.26
On the last day of July, Abram kicked off his Rockdale campaign by riding a two-horse buggy into Conyers, Georgia, the heart of Rockdale County, with his wife Jane and his three children, Ruth, Ann, and Morris Jr. Parking the buggy on the courthouse lawn, he stood on the back seat and took aim at the incumbent congressman. Abram blasted Davis for his failure to do anything positive for the Fifth Congressional District, for his unwillingness to defend the Democratic Party against what he called “GOP slander,” and for his blocking of America’s fight against Communism and its efforts to achieve world peace. In a county that benefitted greatly from the county unit system, Abram said he would abolish the undemocratic system.27
The audience applauded when Abram explained how his family’s home in Fitzgerald had been saved by a federal agency during the Depression and how, with that action, “Morris Abram became a Democrat for the rest of his life.” Asking why the congressman could not get in step with Georgia’s senators Richard Russell and Walter George, he criticized Davis for voting against his party 67 percent of the time. Abram ended his oration with a passage about the Lord’s kingdom “from the prayer book I use in my religious life.”28
Two days later, readers of the Atlanta Journal found in their morning newspapers a four-page paid advertisement supplement highlighted by what Abram regarded as the key issues of his campaign, namely, economic development and an end to the undemocratic county unit system. “In his busy legal career,” the supplement noted, “he is in the middle of the District’s diverse economic activities, its role of leadership in finance, in wholesale and retail trade, in service enterprises, in transportation and communications. He will be on top of the problems and needs of all these activities, as only an intelligent, forward looking young man can be.” The supplement included a statement by his campaign manager, Stephens Mitchell, brother of the famed Atlanta author of Gone with the Wind, on why Morris Abram would be a positive force for progressive growth in the district.29
Regarding the county unit system, Abram pointed out in the supplement that in non-statewide races, the practice was not required by law and not even sanctioned in the Fifth Congressional District by custom, having been substituted for free, popular voting in 1946. He also noted that the Congressional nominee appoints the District Democratic Committee that determines whether the unit system will be applied, and that in both 1950 and 1952, both Fulton and DeKalb counties had voted overwhelmingly to defeat the proposed amendments giving the system state constitutional protection.30
During the 1952 campaign to add the county unit system to the state’s constitution, two of its leading opponents, Jones and Abram, had been attacked during the height of the Red Scare as Communist sympathizers.31 Two years later, the former Klansman Davis highlighted Abram’s membership in the American Civil Liberties Union, which the congressman claimed was giving clandestine aid to the Communist Party.32 He attacked Abram as the candidate of the most radical elements of organized labor and of the Negroes.
Hovering over Abram’s campaign was what he later described as an “undercurrent” of antisemitism, which he regretted not confronting.33 Atlanta’s Jewish community was still traumatized by the 1913 trial, conviction, and subsequent lynching of Leo Frank. Abram recalled how he was frequently reduced to collecting money for his campaign, anonymously, so it wouldn’t be known that he was the recipient.34
Miles Alexander, then a summer law associate, recalled attending several debates between the two candidates, one with Barbara Hillman, the future wife of his good friend Elliott Levitas:
I remember being very disappointed in Morris’s inability to cope with James Davis, who would interrupt him and speak over him during their debates. Morris was used to a certain civility in exchanges. He could not compete in that realm of someone who would lack any courtesy and who would not let him talk without interrupting him. Babs and I both had the same reaction that he was losing the debates despite being a much better speaker. Morris was not able to finish his sentence before Davis interrupted him with some irrelevant and usually pejorative comment. It was not his lack of speaking ability. It was his lack of ability to cope with someone of that ilk.35
Years later Abram attributed the nastiness of the campaign to the fact that the Brown decision had been handed down the very month he announced his candidacy. And there was no question that the state’s segregationists were watching in a state of alarm. Georgia’s most well-known segregationist, Governor (Herman) Talmadge, noted that there had been an unbroken chain of what he referred to as “bloc voting” since the white Democratic primary was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. “In the 1954 Congressional race in Atlanta,” he wrote, “Congressman James C. Davis, who was reelected, received only 540 votes in these bloc-vote controlled precincts to 5,558 for his opponent,” not mentioning Abram by name.36
In the end, Abram carried Fulton County but lost the unit votes of both DeKalb and Rockdale. Throughout his life he would contend that it was the county unit system that had led to his defeat, but he also lost the popular vote by a five thousand vote margin. Ralph McGill would later write that Abram was defeated in 1954 by “demagoguery, prejudice, and the county system.”37 As Mayor Hartsfield pointed out in his affidavit to the Supreme Court in the case of Gray v. Sanders, under the unit system it was not customary for people in the urban counties to register or vote in anything like the proportionate numbers they were to the population because of the fact that their votes didn’t count.38
Looking back on that election over two decades later, Abram told Eli Evans that he was far from the ideal candidate: “I’m not a political animal. I think I am, but I’m not. I don’t like to see my name in headlines in the New York Times. I don’t like to self-advertise myself on a billboard I’ve paid for, I don’t like to hear spot announcements about myself for Congress. I don’t like to get up early in the morning and shake hands. I don’t like chicken dinners, the tyranny of political clubs.”39
Although elected office eluded him, Abram did receive a key public position in the summer of 1958 when he was called upon by Mayor Hartsfield to head up a crime committee for the city of Atlanta composed of leading citizens. The mayor had been stung by a Time magazine story that said Atlanta had the second highest crime rate in the country. He charged the committee, headed by the young lawyer with whom he was working closely to abolish the state’s county unit system, to propose recommendations to the city, the counties of Fulton and DeKalb, and the state legislature.40
Joseph Lefkoff was a recent Emory Law School graduate when he was recommended to Abram by Charles Weltner, a Georgia liberal who became the first Fifth District Congressman elected after the demise of the county unit system and later served on Georgia’s Supreme Court. Lefkoff recalled meeting Abram when the young lawyer spoke to his law school’s honorary society. Invited to dinner at the Abrams with his wife following the Weltner recommendation, Lefkoff recalled voicing his differences with Abram about the legality of the Nuremberg trials. This, however, did not prevent Abram from offering the recent graduate a position at Heyman, Abram and Young. As Lefkoff recalled,
the bar in Atlanta in 1960 was very interesting. Everyone knew everyone else. There were not a lot of Jewish practitioners in Atlanta, particularly in the larger firms. Herman Heyman, who was the senior partner, had an incredible reputation. He was as well respected as any lawyer in Atlanta. And to some degree Morris had benefitted from Herman’s reputation. He [Abram] was considered a maverick of sorts in that he would undertake some cases that other lawyers might not be willing to jump into. And of course, Morris was a brilliant trial lawyer. If you ever tried a case with him or against him, you would have respect for him.41
Lefkoff recalled the medical malpractice case Abram brought that had been tried twice, resulting both times in hung juries. The third time he tried it, he involved his good friend Osgood Williams. “Osgood was a country lawyer,” Lefkoff remembered. “He used Osgood to read medical depositions to the jury. And Osgood had trouble, stumbling over all the medical terms. He humanized the case. And it resulted in a substantial medical malpractice verdict that Morris took great credit for.”42
Abram’s relationship with Osgood Williams stretched back to the early 1950s after he coauthored a pamphlet for the local office of the Anti-Defamation League. The publication included five pieces of model legislation aimed at weakening the Ku Klux Klan, a fact that was used to paint him as the candidate of the blacks in his 1954 campaign for Congress. Abram recalled from his childhood the incident when the sheriff of Ben Hill County, a friend of his father, had stood up to an outside organizer for the Klan. The legislation he proposed would restrict cross-burning and, most significantly, unmask Klansmen during their hate-filled demonstrations.43
In 1950, Williams, then a recently elected state senator from a rural north Georgia county, showed up in Abram’s office offering to introduce the Klan legislation in the Georgia legislature. It was a gutsy thing to do at the time, given the anger he knew it would generate back home. Williams was also only one of fifteen state senators to oppose the Talmadge amendment to expand the county unit system to include general elections.
Not surprisingly, Williams promptly lost his bid for reelection when the Talmadge political machine contributed heavily to his opponent and threatened elderly voters with the loss of their pensions. He moved to Atlanta, where he set up a law office in the same building where Abram’s firm was located. The two struck up a friendship that would last the remainder of their lives.44
After he moved to New York, Abram maintained close contact with the man he referred to as “the Wizard,” who became a Superior Court judge in Atlanta. According to Joseph Lefkoff, “Morris loathed certain aspects of Atlanta, but he loved his good friend Osgood Williams. Probably on an average of once a week we would have to get on the phone. He would call, and I would have to get Osgood on the phone and we would sit and just blabber for 30 or 40 minutes. I don’t know who he was billing his time to.”45 When asked by a reporter to describe Williams, Abram said that his friend was “moral, but not moralistic. He doesn’t wear his goodness on his sleeve.” According to Lefkoff, “I cannot overstate the importance of Osgood Williams to Morris.”46
In 1988, Judge Williams was honored by the Litigation Section of the Atlanta Bar Association as the first recipient of its new annual award. Asked by the dinner chair to offer comments, Abram sent the following message from New York: “Osgood Williams is a 20th Century Original. To find a counterpart, one would have to go back to a previous century and a lanky country lawyer of wit and wisdom who left his farming community for positions of greater scope and service. Jimmy Carter became the first Georgia president of the United States. Had Osgood Williams been born a decade later, that distinction could have fallen on him. If that had occurred, the country would have been well served.”47 When Williams died in 1994, Abram returned to Atlanta from his home in Geneva for the funeral and delivered the eulogy.
Ted Maloof recalled the congenial atmosphere of the Heyman, Abram, Young law firm: “It was just a great place to work. Everybody was dedicated. Everybody loved Morris. Morris was never mean; everybody who worked with him thought he was God. He had a good relationship with people in the firm. He would do a lot of laughing and a lot of practical jokes.”48
One of those jokes Abram’s partners played on him backfired badly when President Kennedy offered him the ambassadorship to the newly independent East African country of Tanganyika, then on the verge of achieving its independence from Great Britain. Knowing that Abram had sought a more prestigious position in the new administration, they conspired to send the president a letter complaining of the offer while Abram was in the country representing the United States in its independence ceremonies. Abram was furious when he read a blind copy of the letter on his desk upon his return before realizing it was bogus.49
During this period in Atlanta, Abram began his associations with the regional offices of two prominent Jewish “defense” organizations, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). His involvement with the Jewish community was originally based on simple economics. Abram supplemented his legal salary by teaching Sunday School, serving as secretary to the local AJC chapter, and providing counsel to the ADL. He speculated to Eli Evans that “maybe this is how I got caught up in Jewish Affairs—I needed to earn extra money.”50
According to Robert Hicks, who joined the Heyman, Abram and Young firm in the late 1950s, Abram’s Jewish identity was far less than what it would later become:
I was really touched by the way Morris became, in his later years, a real Jew. I mean he was proud of it, he was delighted with its ancient history, its culture, the divine causes of Judaism. But he was not a Jew in the sense that I’m describing when I was with him in Atlanta. I don’t mean he was hostile in any way. But his law practice was heavily gentile, representing corporations that didn’t have any connection to Jews at all. Herman [Heyman] was in the Jewish community in a much stronger way than Morris was. I know he [Abram] had friends at the Temple and he would go to ceremonies and things like that, but I don’t think he was a regular attendee.51
Ted Maloof agreed. “Morris was not into Jewish causes to speak of when he first came to Atlanta from Fitzgerald. He wasn’t in the Jewish community in the sense that he was fighting for Jewish causes.” Maloof said it was Harry Elson, an Atlanta businessman and later business partner, whose legal matters Abram handled, who recommended that he become involved in Jewish causes.52
When asked what role Judaism played in their family life, Ruth Abram responded, “Hardly any. We didn’t celebrate Passover at home. We went to the Elson family for that. I think there was some attempt to light Hanukah candles. We didn’t go to Sunday school and we didn’t go to the Temple.”53
By the time of the 1960 presidential campaign, Abram’s reputation as one of the most prominent liberals in Atlanta had been firmly established. During the highly competitive race within the Democratic Party for the 1960 presidential nomination, Abram was introduced to Senator John F. Kennedy by Bobby Troutman, a close friend of Kennedy’s older brother at Harvard Law School who became active in his campaign. Troutman’s plan to keep Kennedy friendly with both the large conservative camp in Georgia and the small but influential group of liberals connected to the state’s blacks was to set up a dinner in Georgetown that included the Kennedys, the Talmadges, and the Abrams.54
As the 1960 election drew near, Martin Luther King Jr. and fifty-one student activists were arrested on October 19, 1960 by Atlanta police after being refused service at the Magnolia Room, a segregated restaurant at Rich’s, the city’s largest department store. King and the students were charged under Georgia’s new anti-trespassing law. After charges were dropped against many of the trespassers, King and thirty-five students were held in custody after refusing to post bail.55
Harris Wofford, a Yale Law graduate and a devotee of Gandhian political activism, had befriended King after the 1955–56 Montgomery boycott, introducing him to the Mahatma’s tactics of civil disobedience. He joined Sargent Shriver’s team during the Kennedy campaign, concentrating his efforts on strengthening the senator’s support in the black community. Acting on a personal basis, without wanting to drag the Kennedy campaign into public controversy, Wofford sought the assistance of someone who could prevail upon Mayor Hartsfield to get the city involved in King’s release. He found the perfect candidate among his Atlanta contacts in Abram, who had represented Hartsfield on litigation to abolish the county unit system.56 As Oliphant and Wilkie explain, “Abram was part of an influential coterie of whites in Atlanta who were helping to build the city’s reputation as a refuge from backwoods violence and injustice.”57
When he received the phone call, Abram was on his way to take his twelve-year-old daughter Ann out for a special day. Abram contacted the mayor, who was already engaged in discussions with the city’s black leadership. He invited Abram to join them and to bring Ann along with him. When he arrived, he learned that King and the imprisoned students would not leave the jail until all charges against them were dropped. However, since they were being held in the county jail, the matter was beyond the mayor’s jurisdiction.58
When Hartsfield heard from Abram that he had received the call from Wofford, whom he knew was part of the Kennedy campaign, the mayor believed that his hand would be strengthened by invoking the candidate’s name. Instead, it created panic in Kennedy’s inner circle and fury among its Southern strategists, including Bobby Troutman. Troutman and others believed it would upend the political tightrope the campaign was walking between black and segregationist voters.59
After the local prosecutor agreed to drop the charges against King and the students, the reverend was immediately confronted with a more serious problem. Because of the trespassing charge, King had violated his probation on an old violation in neighboring DeKalb County of driving with an out of state license. The penalty, astonishing for a misdemeanor charge, was four months at hard labor in a state road gang, a potentially dangerous prospect that alarmed his wife Coretta, pregnant with the couple’s third child. Mrs. King was terrified when her husband was taken out in the dead of night from the DeKalb jail and transferred to the maximum-security state prison in Reidsville.
Wofford prevailed upon his campaign boss Sargent Shriver to meet the candidate at the Chicago airport between campaign appearances and to convince him to make a supportive phone call to Mrs. King. At the time of the call, she was dressing for an appointment with Abram that had been arranged by her father-in-law, “Daddy” King, a client of Abram’s, to see what his lawyer could do to get her husband released.60
When Robert Kennedy, the candidate’s campaign manager, heard about the call and how Shriver and Wofford had engineered it, he was furious and dressed them down for insubordination and jeopardizing his brother’s electoral chances less than two weeks before the election. But before Abram could become involved, King was unexpectedly released from Reidsville as the result of the involvement of none other than the younger Kennedy, who took the questionable step of calling the judge from a phone booth in New York outside a campaign event. Kennedy’s phone call was the result of quiet intervention by Georgia’s governor Vandiver at the behest of the presidential candidate himself. The governor contacted one of the judge’s closest friends, who got the judge to agree to release Dr. King but only if contacted personally by either Kennedy.61
Martin Luther King Jr. had earlier in the campaign made clear to Wofford that he would not be endorsing either candidate for president. Although his father had previously taken the position of many Baptists, black and white, who opposed Kennedy on religious grounds, the actions taken by the campaign had changed his mind about voting for him. At the urging of Abram, Daddy King agreed to let his congregants know of these intentions, promising to deliver a “suitcase” full of votes for Senator Kennedy. At Ebeneezer Baptist Church on the Sunday before the election, he kept his promise.62
Following the election, Martin Luther King Jr. telephoned the White House and offered the president-elect several recommendations for positions in the new administration. For the important position of Solicitor General, the individual responsible for preparing and presenting the government’s cases before the Supreme Court, he recommended Morris Abram. He repeated this to the new attorney general, but the Kennedys had already settled on Harvard Law professor Archibald Cox, who had been an advisor to the campaign. As Bobby Kennedy told Dr. King, despite thinking highly of Abram, they had already committed to Cox.63
Abram turned down the offer of the Ambassadorship to Tanganyika after his visit to the country. He opted instead to accept a temporary position as the first general counsel of the newly established Peace Corps, which he did by commuting to Washington from Atlanta during its first year of operation and traveling home on weekends.64 The corps idea had been proposed by Senator Kennedy toward the end of his campaign in a rousing speech to a crowd of students at the University of Michigan. In it, he issued a challenge, asking how many of them would be willing to serve their country by living and working in the developing world.65
As general counsel and a close aide of its founding director, Sargent Shriver, Abram’s main duty was to prepare legislation to supplant President Kennedy’s executive order creating the organization. In an interview he gave three days after the order was signed on March 1, 1961, Abram described the corps as “the most original act of foreign policy” America has seen in years. He also expressed the view that Shriver was one of the best appointees named by the new president.66
One of Abram’s jobs was to determine the legal status of a volunteer, since he or she would not be a civil servant or a soldier, but rather needed to have the advantages of an insurance program and the protection of the U.S. Health Service while overseas. Abram warned of the potential dangers involved: “It is going to be hard and tough and the romantic idealist who thinks it will be wonderful to be in an exotic country for two years will not be able to survive.”67
In October 1962, shortly before he left Atlanta, Abram accepted an invitation to debate William F. Buckley Jr. before a packed audience in the Glenn Memorial Auditorium at Emory University. The event was sponsored by the conservative young adult group, Young Americans for Freedom. The debate centered on U.S. foreign policy and the proper role of the federal government in domestic affairs. The two clashed on U.S. policy on Cuba, the effectiveness of U.S. policy in the Cold War more broadly, and on their respective assessments of the late Senator Joe McCarthy. Abram contended that he was “not a McCarthyite,” and that the two of them differed “on the issue of freedom.” When he asserted that “McCarthy was an enemy of freedom,” Abram drew big applause.
To Abram, the duty of the federal government is to help the people do things together that would not be done so well individually. If the states or private industry lag, the federal government should take up the slack. The example he offered was FDR’s creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which made possible the electrification of the region of South Georgia in which he grew up. Conservatives, Abram asserted, view the world as “black and white, saved and damned, good and bad, which is a respectable viewpoint, widely held in the Middle Ages.”68
For his part, Buckley accused Abram of having “done his best to present a caricature of the conservative point of view,” and contended that conservatives are much less concerned about communists or traitors within the United States than “about the Abrams and the Kennedys of the world who did not recognize Fidel Castro for what he was even after he had kept his firing squads working day and night.” Buckley said, “The people who cause catastrophes in government are not Communists but people like Mr. Abram.” In response, Abram argued for complete academic freedom, including “the clash of ideas” at colleges and universities. As he remarked, “I glory in the excitement of the pursuit of truth.” Buckley responded that “certain truths have in fact been found,” and that “college presidents should only have faculty members whose set of values are identical with theirs.”69
It had been fourteen years since Justice Black had warned Abram about the potential consequences of returning to the city he had lived in briefly after college and challenging the legal establishment. But it had been a success on many fronts: he had established a successful legal practice; he had emerged as one of the leading voices of a newer, more progressive South; and he and his wife Jane had established a rich family life and developed friendships that would last for many years. And his most ambitious project, to rid his native state of its archaic and regressive electoral system, was about to reach its climax.