Speech before lawyers about his experiences in the judicial system, 2003

LAWYERS Copyright 2003 by Julian Bond

It is a great pleasure to appear before this audience. For a non-lawyer like me, it is always an honor to appear before lawyers and others in the legal field - as long as it isn't me in a courtroom.

I want to talk about my experiences with - and against - the law.

My first appearnace before a judge was in a courtroom, when I was twenty years old.

It was March 1960, during the Jim Crow era. I had led a group of my fellow students to the segregated cafeteria in the basement of Atlanta's City Hall. We passed along the steam table loading our trays, and as first in line, I approached the cashier.

Like most Southerners, she was polite as she told me, "I'm awfully sorry, but this is for City Hall employees only."

"But," I protested, "you have a large sign outside that says 'City Hall Cafeteria - the Public is Welcome"'.

"We don't mean it," she said, and called the police who came and locked us up.

Because nearly 200 of us had been arrested that day in various locations around Atlanta, it was decided to try one person in each group, and I was chosen to represent mine.

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For the first time in my life I stood before a judge. On either side of me were two men I had never seen or met before; I quickly understood they were my lawyers.

After some back and forth the judge asked me, "How do you plead?" and I was panic-stricken.

On the one hand, I knew I was guilty - the policeman had asked me to leave and I had refused.

But I didn't feel guilty - I knew I had a right to eat in that tax supported cafeteria, and that any law that said I couldn't was no law at all.

I desperately looked to my left where the elder of my two lawyers was standing. He was the dean of black lawyers in Georgia and had risked life and limb for nearly 50 years to represent black people in courthouses in small towns where he'd not dare spend the night; now nearly in his dotage he was asleep on his feet.

I turn frantically to the lawyer on my right who said in a whisper, "Not guilty, you fool!"

I had the presence of mind to drop those last words or perhaps I'd not be standing here before you now.

I am not a lawyer, but my wife, Pamela Horowitz, ^{as you have heard,} is, and she has allowed me to tell you that one of her judicial heroes, and mine, Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr., dismissed - within hours of its filing - the first lawsuit she ever filed declaring the complaint to be "verbose, prolix, and argumentative."

The dismissal was without prejudice, allowing her to re-file - and eventually, to win - the case, the first of many she would argue before Judge Johnson.

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Johnson, as you may know, was a profile in judicial courage. A Republican from "the free state of Winston," , a northern Alabama county that voted to secede from Alabama when Alabama seceded from the Union, Johnson spent 24 years as a federal district jduge in Montogomery.

As a member of a three-judge court, he ended the Montgomery Bus Boycott by ruling bus segregation unconstitutional. This would be followed by ruling sstriking down "segregation and discrimination in every facet of Alabama life - schools, parks, jury selection, higher education, voting, legislative reapportionment."i

Johnson would place "Alabama's prison system, highway patrol, property tax assessment program, mental health agency, and public education system all under the federal court's jurisdiction."ii

Johnson was far from alone in his judicial heroism. As Claude Siton, who served as southern correspondent for The New Yorks Times in the early 1960s, put it:

"Those who think Martin Luther King desegregated the South don't know Elbert Tuttle and the record of the Fifth Circuit Cour of Appeals."iii

The Fifth Circuit, to which Johnson would eventually be elevated, then encompassed six states of the Old Confederacy, including Chief Judge Tuttle's and my Georgia.

After the landmark Brown decision struck down school segregation, and with it, the "seperate but equal" doctrine, Senator James O. Eastland told a cheering audience in Senatobia, Mississippi:

"On May 17, 1954, the Constitution of the United States was destroyed because the Supreme Corut disregared the law and decided that integration was right. You are not required to

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obey any court which passes out such a ruling. In fact, you are obligated to defy it."iv

It was in this atmosphere that the Fifth would be called upon to turn Brown's promise into reality and to expand it beyond the schoolhouse. Its judges would strike down barriers to equality in voting, jury selection, and employment, in the process formulating the remedy of "affirmative action" - the just spoils of a righteous war.

At great personal sacrifice, these judges took the nation and the South, from white-robed Klan violence to black-robed justice and helped to save us from ourselves.

They didn't always get it right.

In 1966, I was the plaintiff in a case that grew from my first election to the Georgia House of Representatives.v

A federal lawsuit had reapportioned the Georgia General Assembly, reconstituting a legislature where cows and horses were better represented than human beings.vi

Having created new, equal districts in urban Fulton County, the courts had ordered elections for a one-year term. As a scucessful candidate for one of those new seats, I was to take the oath of office on January 10, 1966.

A week earlier, Samuel Younge, Jr., a Tuskegee Institute student and a colleague in the Student Nonviolent coordinating Committee (SNCC), was shot and kileld while trying to use the segregated bathroom at a Tuskegee service station.

He needed to use the bathroom more often than most because during his Navy service, including the Cuban blockade, he had lost a kidney, and hte irony of his losing his life because of an illness suffered in service to his country prompted SNCC to issue and anti-war statement.vii

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We became the first organization to link the prosecution of the Vietnam War with the persecution of blacks at home.

SNCC issued a statement which accused the United States of deception "in its claims of concern for the freedom of colored peoples in such countries as teh Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia, and in the United States itself."

"The United States is no respecter of persons or laws," the statement said, "When such persons or laws run counter to its needs and desires."

The statement created a sensation.

I was SNCC's Communications Director, and when I appeared to take the oath of office on January 10, 1966, hostility from white legislators was nearly absolute. They prevented me from taking the oath, declared my seat vacant, and ordered another election to fill vacancy.

I won that election was expelled again; by the time I approached a third election, this time for a regular two-year term, I had filed suit in federal court.

Judge Griffin Bell wrote the majority decision for the three-judge court which refused to voerturn the legislature's decision tod deny me the seat to which I had been twice elcted.

Judge Tuttle dissented.

His view was adopted by a unanimous United States Supreme Court, and a year after my first attempt, I became a member of the Georgia House of Representatives.

Before the three-judge court, I was represented by Charles Morgan, Jr., then of the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and later my wife's law partner, and Howard Moore, later