Bill Robinson Interview Transcript

This item is featured in:

Bill Robinson Oral History

    Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project 

 

Bill Robinson 

Interviewed by Susie Penman 

October 27, 2023 

Washington D.C 

Length: 02:41:49 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conducted in collaboration with the Southern Oral History Program at University of North Carolina 

at Chapel Hill 

LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. 



 
 
 

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This transcript has been reviewed by Bill Robinson, the Southern Oral History Program, and LDF. It 

has been lightly edited, in consultation with Bill Robinson, for readability and clarity. Additions and 

corrections appear in both brackets and footnotes. If viewing corresponding video footage, please 

refer to this transcript for corrected information.    

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 
 

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[START OF INTERVIEW] 

 Susie Penman: This is Susie Penman from the Southern Oral History Program at the 

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It’s October 27th, 2023, at about 11:45 in the morning. 

And I’m here in Washington, D.C., with Mr. Bill Robinson in his home to conduct an interview for 

the LDF Oral History Project. Thank you very much for being here and sharing your story.  

 Bill Robinson: Well, Susie, thank you for including me.  

 SP: To begin with, can you just introduce yourself, tell us who you are?  

 BR: Yeah. I’m Bill Robinson. I worked at LDF during the late [19]60s, early [19]70s. It was, 

in many respects, the pinnacle of my career. I enjoyed it immensely. And frankly, I think during my 

time I accomplished a little good, that again, I’m enormously proud of.  

 SP: And we’ll start at the beginning. You grew up in Oberlin.  

 BR: Oberlin, Ohio. Yes.  

 SP: Can you talk a little bit about the Oberlin of your boyhood?  

 BR: Yeah. Where to start? Oberlin is a small college town. The town and the college were 

established and formed at the same time by the same people, a group of highly progressive 

Episcopalians who were moving West to set up a community and a college and exactly where they 

were going to locate it, it was up in the air. They needed a sign. They needed a sign. And they were 

camped out in Oberlin at what wound up being the town square. And that evening, a bear passed by 

the campsite, and they took that as the sign. [00:01:59] They were camping beneath what became the 

historic Elm, and Oberlin was born, back in 1833. They were visionaries. They set up a college that 

from the outset they intended to admit both women, revolutionary at the time, and African-

Americans. And to do both was truly revolutionary. It was the first college in the country then to 

admit both African-Americans and women. And that progressive beginning is an important part of 

the DNA, if you will, of Oberlin, the town and the college. It quickly became a hotbed of abolitionist 

sentiment. A spot on the Underground Railroad. And that spirit of progressivism has permeated the 



 
 
 

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town from its beginning right straight down to now, where if you went out to Oberlin now and 

visited the corner of the town square, which is right there at the heart of the town, you’d probably see 

some people marching in favor of peace and against Jim Jordan, who, strangely enough [laughs], 

after redistricting became the congressman representing Oberlin. Although historically, traditionally 

over the last 50 years, they usually have had, until the Republicans gerrymandered and redistricted, 

they had a usually, a progressive congressman. So anyhow, if you grew up in that town, you were 

perforce imbued with a sense of progressivism. And for example, I did not realize it at the time. That 

only became clear to me, the influence that my environment was having on me, later, as I began to 

piece it together. [00:04:21] Oh, you know, “Gee, where did you get that from?” So, growing up in 

that town was an important part of who I came to be. Now, also, it was growing up in that town 

during those times. You know, I’m a pretty old guy at this point, as I’m wont to tell my children, old 

but not decrepit. So, some of my formative years were in the [19]40s and Oberlin, like the United 

States in the [19]40s, America was a pretty socially, culturally, politically rigid place. White people, 

Black people, they had their place. Right straight through into the, in the late [19]40s, into the early 

[19]50s, McCarthy and McCarthyism held sway in the country. And, again, I wasn’t aware of it at 

the time. But I do recall in the, through the [19]40s we only had radio at my house and we had dinner 

together as a family. Every night after dinner, Dad would turn on the radio and we would listen to 

old time radio shows like The Shadow, Just Plain Bill, and so forth. In the early [19]50s, we finally 

got — well, nobody had TV in the [19]40s. In the [19]50s, by about 1953, we finally got a television. 

And we were one of the early families to get a television. And I recall my mom being very excited 

about watching the McCarthy hearings in 1953. And just being enormously pleased. She didn’t 

watch TV, right? [00:06:34] I mean, she was busy around the house and regarded it as the boob tube, 

the idiot box. The rest of us couldn’t get enough of it, but she generally didn’t watch TV. That she 

watched. Again, it didn’t have any great significance to me at the time. But I realize now that that 

was a turning point in the country and in the tone in our family. And I was affected by it. Didn’t 



 
 
 

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know it at the time. Only later did I realize that I was being impacted by views of my mom and dad. 

And my mom celebrating the demise of McCarthy. All right. Things begin to change with 

Eisenhower, both in the country, the country began to be more prosperous. Again, we didn’t know at 

the time that the changes in the country in the early [19]50s were creating a hotbed that was going to 

explode in the late [19]50s and early [19]60s with a demand for wider education. Throughout the 

[19]40s and early [19]50s, for example, very few, generally higher education was not available, 

generally. But particularly not to African-Americans. So, there were only about a handful of African-

Americans in town who had higher education, including my mom. 

SP: Even though Oberlin was there. 

BR: Oberlin was there. And a lot of African-Americans gravitated toward Oberlin because of 

its liberal tradition and the total absence of segregation of any kind, with one, a couple of very minor 

exceptions, that stood out because they were exceptions. 

SP: So, you were talking about the McCarthy hearings. And even though you didn’t 

understand at the time, seeing this version of the rest of the country and what was happening in it, 

how did you reconcile that with what with your lived reality in Oberlin?  

BR: Well, at the time, I didn’t recognize, reconcile it with my lived reality in Oberlin so 

much. There was a sense that there was Oberlin, our town, and the rest of the world. So, all that 

racial segregation was in the rest of the world, particularly in the Deep South, which we were aware 

of. My dad and his family migrated to Oberlin in the 1910s. So, they were early. And my father 

refused to take us back to Alabama to visit his family because he said, “There’s nothing good down 

there. It’s just evil white people who attack Black people and lynch them. And there’s nothing down 

there for us, and I won’t take you down here.” [00:10:01] That was his view of it. So, there was us in 

our, as you suggest, bubble, in Oberlin, shielded from the rest of the world, feeling like we lived in 

an idyllic place. And then the rest of the world. And it wasn’t just McCarthy. And again, I wasn’t 

aware of that, but I was aware of current events. My dad was the only member of his family to 



 
 
 

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graduate high school. And back then, graduating high school made you an educated man. 

Newspaper, every day we got the newspaper and he read it cover to cover. And we talked about 

current events, among other things, at dinner. So, our dinner table conversation was an important part 

of, I didn’t again realize it at the time, my folks’ parenting, them imbuing us with a sense of 

ambition. Most importantly, a commitment to education and higher education. It was in the 1940s 

that my dad pronounced, and he told the world, “Oh, my kids are going to college.” Well, that was a 

ridiculous thing to say in in the [19]40s, for a Black man in Oberlin or anywhere, to be talking about 

all of his four kids going to college. It of course came to pass that not only did we all go to college, 

we all had some degree of higher, of postgraduate education. My younger sister, I mentioned to you 

a minute ago, was an artist. Well, she was a Ph.D. artist. Both a professor and arts administrator, as 

well as a creator. And of course, I went to law school and the other two, my brother graduated 

Oberlin as well, and my other sister graduated Bennett College, and got two master’s degrees and so 

forth. [00:12:18] But it was ridiculous for him to make that proclamation at the time he made it. 

SP: Can you tell me a little bit about that proclamation? 

BR: Well, it was, he was a talker. And if you were within earshot, you heard.  

SP: So, he really did proclaim to the world. [laughs] 

BR: Proclaim to the world. [laughs] 

SP: When you grew up in that, when he said that, when you grew up in that, were you like, 

“Okay, I guess”? 

BR: No, I didn’t find out that he had made that proclamation until later, when other people 

said, “You sure did make your dad’s statement come true. Nobody believed it at the time, we thought 

he was just being Rip Robinson, talking, talking a lot.” But within the house, my folks had an 

enormous commitment to education. Particularly my father. My mother was well-educated, and so 

was her family. I mean, her mother and father and her maternal grandfather, all were college 

graduates. Again, for that period of time, very unusual.  



 
 
 

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SP: And where were they from, were they from the South as well?  

BR: They were from North Carolina and Virginia. As a rising senior at Bennett College, she 

visited Oberlin during the summer, met my father and did not return to college. It was kind of love at 

first sight. [00:14:02] They got married. And again, I was blissfully unaware of the relationship, the 

kind of love bond between my mom and dad, or the extent to which they talked to each other about 

their relationship, their parenting of their children, until after my mom died. My mom died and my 

younger sister discovered the letters that they had written in 1949. My mom hadn’t finished college. 

Well, my dad told her, “You got to go back to school.” So, they got married in what, 1939? In 1949, 

he sent her back to North Carolina to finish with her four children in tow, and they wrote letters back 

and forth. My younger sister found these letters and found diaries of my mom. And she wrote. She 

never finished it because she developed Alzheimer’s as she was finishing it and couldn’t finish. I 

began to read it in and discovered, wow [laughs], I never knew these things about our folks, or what 

I just took for granted as how we were growing up. But so, anyhow. Now, where was I?  

SP: It’s just a remarkable story. Just, I love it. You had this, what sounds like an exceptional 

childhood and adolescence, not just because of where you were, which is its own exceptional sort of 

variable, but because of who your parents were. And it sounds like they were two very strong-willed 

individuals.  

BR: Strong willed, and especially my father, who was a construction worker, he worked with 

his hands. [00:16:04] He was again, not a college graduate. Those opportunities were not available to 

him. And at times he lamented that. I think in our prep I mentioned he lamented that and he made the 

statement, I remember we were riding in the car, driving in the car, and he made the comment that he 

hadn’t gone to college, but if he had gone to college, he would have wanted to go to law school. And 

he said, “And I would be awfully proud if at least one of my sons would grow up and go to law 

school.” And I immediately responded, “Yes, dad, I’ll do it. I’ll go to law school.” I think I was in 

second grade at the time. Of course, you don’t make a decision about what you’re going to do in life 



 
 
 

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when you’re in second grade. But I pronounced it and I continued to repeat it straight through high 

school and off to college. And you know, again. “Yeah, okay, I’m going to go to law school.” And 

then you get to be a senior in college, and you’ve really got to decide what are you going to do with 

your life. And I had to make that decision all over again, and the reaffirmation of the decision to go 

to law school was probably the point in time when I really made the decision, “Yes, I’m going to go 

to law school. I’m going to become a lawyer.” At the time, I didn’t know what kind of lawyer. I was 

not going to law school to become a civil rights lawyer. I was going to law school as a part of a 

general plan to better myself in life. And again, the commitment to civil rights. [00:18:00] Once 

again, I didn’t realize that that was something that was in formation from an earlier point in life. 

While it was happening, I thought of — my admiration for Thurgood Marshall was similar to when I 

was a young kid, you know, Joe Louis. “Did he, who won, did Joe win, mom? “Yeah, yeah, he 

knocked him out, Billy.” “Oh, great.” Or when Jackie Robinson, for us in northern Ohio, we 

celebrated Larry Doby as much or more than the rest of the country celebrated Jackie Robinson. You 

perhaps know that Larry Doby went into the American League about two months after Jackie 

Robinson went into the National League. Larry rode the bench the first year. Jackie played, and the 

public abuse that he took was well known, well chronicled. The racism that Larry Doby experienced 

sitting on the bench was less well chronicled. But Larry Doby was our hero out in the middle of Ohio 

— oh, we celebrated Jackie too, but Larry Doby was our guy. I thought my admiration for Thurgood 

Marshall was of the same kin, as you will. So, once a week, the Jet magazine would be published, 

and I’d get a copy of the Jet. 

SP: Did y’all have a subscription? 

BR: No, we didn’t have a subscription. [00:20:00] But one of the little local stores would get 

a batch of them. And I would get a bunch of them and walk around the neighborhood and sell them 

for $0.25 a pop. I think I got a nickel or something for every one I sold, and I would get to read it 

free. And the back page was always something written by Thurgood Marshall, describing the most 



 
 
 

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recent case he was handling or something by Simeon Booker. And as often as not Simeon Booker 

would write about the exploits of Thurgood Marshall. And again, I’d say — but we all, it wasn’t just 

me. I mean, Thurgood Marshall was the lawyer for Black people in America, and we celebrated his 

victories. I don’t remember specifics at that time. I just remember he was my hero. I didn’t know any 

lawyers. I didn’t have anybody to pattern myself after. I didn’t know really the details of what do 

lawyers do. I didn’t have any sense of that. I just knew I was going to become a lawyer. And that 

was pretty much true even when I got ready to go off to law school. 

SP: So, you talked about sort of saying from the age of when you were in the second grade, 

“I want to be a lawyer,” and then reckoning with the reality of what that would look like. Can you 

talk about gradually realizing what it was a lawyer did, especially a Black lawyer in that time? 

BR: Well, that was really, again, something that happened slowly and over time. As a senior 

in college, I really had to decide, well, what are you going to do? The opportunity, the employment 

opportunities for African Americans in 1963 were still limited. [00:22:02] Remember, the great 

explosion of employment opportunities had not occurred. There was no Civil Rights Act for 

employment or desegregation or anything else. Right. So it was, become a schoolteacher. Nah. 

Become a social worker. Nuh-uh. Law school began to look all the more viable as something to do. 

But in terms of what I was going to do as a lawyer, was again, very much unclear. There was one 

African American lawyer in town, Phil Thomas. I went and met with him and talked to him. And he 

had a pretty standard practice. My mom by then was in the workforce, and one of the women she 

taught with, her husband was a lawyer. And I met with him, and he primarily did real estate law and 

he shared with me a little bit about his practice. Again, I had no real appreciation for what they did or 

how I might put together a practice. But I was committed. I was going to go to law school and figure 

it out. And so, it was off to Columbia Law School.  

SP: Can you talk about the application process and deciding on Columbia?  



 
 
 

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BR: Yeah, again, it’s a question of being in the right place at the right time. And I’ve got a 

knack for that, apparently. [laughs] You know, I was graduating from college penniless. But Ohio 

State only cost $100 a term. Three hundred dollars a year to attend Ohio State Law School. And if 

you had a B average and scored, I’ve forgotten what, on the LSAT, you were guaranteed admission. 

If you were an Ohio resident and you got at a B average and I don’t know, 500 on the LSAT. Well, 

of course I had that. So, I was guaranteed admission. I applied and I got admitted and I was prepared 

to go off to Ohio State, which by the way, is a pretty good law school. My major advisor, John 

Donnell Lewis, J.D. Lewis, called me in. I didn’t realize that J.D. Lewis remembered who I was. I 

met him when I first enrolled at Oberlin. We spent 15, 20 minutes together. [00:24:58] He told me he 

was my advisor, and I took a course from him. I saw him in class. Otherwise, I didn’t know he 

remembered who I was. Well, it was the week before graduate classes were over. A week before we 

marched. He called me in. And he said, “Bill, I understand you’re going off to law school.” I guess 

some of the other professors who had written for me had told him. But anyhow, he said, “I 

understand you’re going off to law school. You’re going to Ohio State?” I said, “Yes, sir.” He said, 

“Well, I think we can do a little better for you than that.” I said, “Okay.” He said, “I’m aware of 

some scholarships that just becoming available at Columbia University.” I said, “Professor, I don’t 

have the money for applications.” He said, “You just fill out the form and give it to me.” I filled it 

out, gave it to him, and the next thing I know, I’ve got a rather fulsome scholarship to go to 

Columbia. And so off I went. And, you know, it was really amazing. [00:26:13] I get to Columbia, I 

get on the bus. 42nd Street. I get off the bus, I put my foot lockers into a locker, and I go into the 

subway, underground. And take the subway up to Morningside Heights to Columbia. So, I’m 

underground and up to Columbia. And from Midtown to Morningside Heights, it’s kind of, you 

know, dramatically different. But even at Morningside Heights, there were more people on the city 

block next to Columbia than lived in my hometown. [laughs] 

SP: Had you been to New York before? 



 
 
 

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BR: I had not. The only major city I had been to was Cleveland, which is just 35 miles away. 

Very few occasions outside of Ohio. And then Detroit. Maybe once. Dad took us up to a Tigers game 

once or twice, but that was about it. And then occasional trips to Greensboro for my mother’s family, 

usually when somebody died. But other than that, no. And we didn’t have money for formal 

vacations. Dad worked as a construction worker. You don’t work, you don’t get paid. We lived from 

payday to payday. That meant he basically, he didn’t take vacations because he couldn’t afford to. 

So, anyhow, New York was big. [00:28:09] Once again, I wasn’t aware of how much, how 

overwhelming it was or how radically different and overwhelming Columbia was from Oberlin. 

Oberlin was a coeducational liberal arts college where the free flow of ideas and debate and 

discussion was, you know, free flowing. Columbia Law School was a cutthroat, competitive, 

situation where we, our initial assignment was to write a legal memorandum. The guys who got the 

book first, found the case, the seminal case, first, hid the book. [laughs] So now, fortunately, the 

professors knew about all that, and they kept one copy of it on reserve. So, you did get access to it, 

but, you know, I’d kind of lived that. I didn’t really appreciate those differences or the stress that I 

was going through until later I stopped and I reflected on it. I mean, I guess as I go through life, I live 

it and then later on, stop and reflect on it and think about it and try to put it into some kind of 

perspective. 

SP: Now you’re at Columbia, at really the height of the Civil Rights Movement. You were 

there when the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed. Do you, can you talk about 

what the environment was like amongst law students? [00:30:02] 

BR: Well, look. Columbia Law School was not a hotbed of civil rights. Best way I can 

explain it to you. I mean, Colombia educated, for the most part, students who were going to go off to 

Wall Street and represent rich people. I’ll never forget, in Trust and Estates, one of our professors, 

actually, a really good guy, a liberal guy named Louis Lusky, taught Trusts and Estates. And he 

began by telling us, “In this course, we’re going to study trusts and estates for people who have an 



 
 
 

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estate valued at $40,000 or more, roughly.” He said, “People who have less than that, they have 

estate problems, but they’re taken care of by the New York law of decedent estates. And so, we’ll 

cover them in passing.” Columbia was educating lawyers to represent corporations and rich people. 

And they, it’s not just that they were unabashed about it. That’s just kind of the way it was. It was 

received wisdom. There was nothing to be proud of or embarrassed about that. That’s just what 

Columbia was there for. Now, underneath all that, there was a lot of liberal pro-civil rights sentiment 

on the faculty at Columbia. [00:32:00] Bob Carter, general counsel for NAACP, had gotten his 

master’s there. Thurgood was very, very close to members of the faculty who consulted with him on 

cases at LDF. Jack Greenberg, Connie Motley, finished Columbia. But they had classmates who 

were of like minds with them, who were also very proud Columbia people. But that just, that was all 

an undercurrent. That wasn’t what Columbia was about. So, in my first year, [19]63, [19]64, a 

couple of guys convened, called for a meeting. They said they were putting together an organization 

called the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council [LSCRRC]. Howie Slater and Richard 

Granat. Howie had been one of a handful of Ivy League lawyers who the summer before, included 

Eleanor Norton, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Howie Slater. They were in touch with Marian Wright 

Edelman. Had gone South and concluded that the civil rights activists, mainly SNCC and CORE, 

needed legal support and that there was a role for law students to play. So, they were organizing and 

said, “Look, there are some civil rights lawyers, they’re doing work, they need research assistance. 

We’re putting together this organization. During the year, you can write legal memoranda, you can 

do research for these lawyers.” And he included people like Bill Kunstler and Arthur Kinoy and a 

few others. [00:34:07] I can’t call the role so I’m not going to try to. And it sounded exciting. So, I 

stuck my hand up and volunteered. I don’t think the work I did was of any real value, but they 

humored me. I can’t remember the guy. I’ll think of it in a second, his name. Reviewed my first 

memorandum and kind of, you know, assured me that it was useful. [laughs] I don’t think it was.  

SP: But this is a memo you wrote for LSCRRC?  



 
 
 

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BR: Yes, for LSCRRC that year. And then at the, toward the end of the year, Granat called in 

to me and he said, “Look, we’ve raised some money from foundations and there’s going to be a lot 

of civil rights activity in Mississippi. Students are, undergraduate students are organizing for 

Freedom Summer. Lawyers and lawyer groups are organizing and they’re going to be there, and they 

need student research assistance. We’ve raised some money. You can go and be one of these 

research assistants and you get paid $50 a month or $50,” yes, I think it was $50 a month or $50 a 

week or whatever. But you were going to get experience as a first-year law student, getting a job 

where you got a chance to do legal work. Well, I didn’t have any other opportunities. And it sounded 

interesting to me. But look, I was not yet a real civil rights activist or, I was not, had not made a 

commitment to be a civil rights lawyer. This was part of the process of that in becoming. And I went 

and it was an incredibly emotional experience, that summer in Mississippi. 

SP: I want to ask some really specific questions, if you remember — [pause as microphone is 

adjusted] [00:36:20] Do you remember first arriving in Mississippi? Do you remember, and your 

conceptions of what, I mean, this is Mississippi in 1964. How did you feel about going back, 

especially with your dad saying — 

BR: My dad was cringing. He thought I was crazy. My mother was supportive. That’s, you 

know, mothers are. She was worried as all get out, but she was supportive and she thought that doing 

civil rights work was a noble calling. So, she was proud of me. Well, she was proud of her children, 

whatever they did. It was, you know, we were all a bit, at least apprehensive. Fearful. As we were, 

we rode down in a car. A group of us, an integrated group. And as we drove through Alabama, 

people would look and see white people and Black people in the same car. Wow. And they, I 

remember we stopped for gas. And the white guys went to a restaurant. Got some food, and they 

brought some out for us and we ate it in a park. And when we got back, we drove for a little while 

and then the car wouldn’t go. Some locals apparently had seen us as an integrated group and poured 

sugar in the gas station, in the gas tank. And that was one of the first introductions to the Deep South 



 
 
 

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and how Black and white people together were not going to be well received. [00:38:13] Then once 

we got to Mississippi, you know. We were generally not on the front line as law students. So, we had 

to be careful because the violence was all around. Only one guy got physically attacked, Dan 

Perlman, outside the COFO offices. Was walking towards to one of the cars and kind of let his guard 

down a minute, and some white guy hopped out of a car and kind of smashed him in the head and 

lacerated his skull. So, there was blood, but no serious injury.  

SP: You said COFO offices? 

BR: Yeah, the Mississippi Freedom Summer was a coalition effort between Student 

Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, CORE, Congress on Racial Equality, the NAACP, 

Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and that coalition was called COFO. Something of 

federated organizations. But all of it was under the leadership of Bob Moses. Martin King came 

through and patted us on the back once. But basically, it was Bob Moses who was the leader of the 

effort. [00:40:00] And you’re probably familiar at least with the broad outlines of Freedom Summer. 

It included Freedom Schools, Freedom Houses. But the main focus was political organizing, 

registering to vote, and creating a slate of African-Americans who had at least attempted to register 

to vote. When refused, then claiming that they were the real Mississippi Democratic Party and went 

to the convention and claimed they should be seated, not the regular Democratic Party. And that was 

an important part of Moses’s overall political strategy. But it was, it mainly revolved around voter 

registration and political organizing. But it was Freedom Summer. And there were hundreds of 

volunteer students. Early in the summer, the three civil rights workers, Schwerner, Chaney, and 

Goodman, came up missing. Ultimately, of course, they were murdered. When they came up 

missing, the Freedom Summer then dominated the six o’clock news. Every day, the six o’clock and 

eleven o’clock news every day all across the country. And it’s important to remember, this was a 

different, this was a different era. All of America got their news from Main Street news media, 

namely the six o’clock news. And if Walter Cronkite said it, well, clearly it was the truth. Or Huntley 



 
 
 

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Brinkley. And they reported it straight up. And look, the brutal denial of the basic right to vote, the 

basic right to move freely in society and so forth was put on display on the six o’clock news every 

night. [00:42:25] The news of the missing civil rights workers ultimately, obviously killed because 

they were they were promoting such basic democratic principles as the right to vote. Well, 

Americans were shocked. So anyhow, that basically should give you some idea of the tenor of the 

experience in Mississippi Freedom Summer. It was an incredibly, incredibly emotional experience. 

When we went back to law school, all of us, and there were students from law schools all across the 

country. Mainly the elite law schools, the Ivy League law schools, the University of Michigan, Boalt 

Hall. The non-elite law schools, you know, many fine law schools, and they produced many fine 

lawyers, but they just weren’t involved in civil rights efforts in Mississippi in 1964.  

SP: Were you based in Jackson?  

BR: I was based in Jackson and stayed in Jackson at the COFO headquarters, except for one 

long weekend when my friend Bob Watkins and I were tasked with traveling up to Northern 

Mississippi, Batesville, to do a canvassing for voter registration and we did that all around those 

dusty roads. [00:44:17] And interacted with a couple of incredibly impressive and incredibly brave 

local Mississippians who again, it was an emotional and deep experience for me. But Bob Miles was 

one of them. And his bravery was, I’ll never get over it. And another guy named Reverend 

Middleton, who was still registered to vote. He was registered to vote because he was an older 

African-American. He was registered to vote as a Republican and he was registered to vote as a 

Republican because he had been allowed to register before Mississippi shut it all down. And they 

never took away his registration. 

SP: Lincoln’s party. 

BR: [laughs] Lincoln’s party, yeah. I remember he drove us around in his Jeep. His Jeep. 

Somebody had an abandoned old World War II Jeep. Left it on the dump. He went, retrieved it, fixed 



 
 
 

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it so that it ran. And that became his vehicle. And he drove me and Bob around as we did our 

canvassing.  

SP: So, you said it was emotional for you. Can you talk about some of those emotions and 

how it moved you to sort of change direction when you came back to law school?  

BR: Well, it did. But again, I didn’t realize it at the time. [00:46:00] I mean, who I was 

becoming, I was being changed. But while I was being changed, I wasn’t aware of it. I was having a 

really incredible deep experience, intellectual, emotional, in terms of friendships, camaraderie. All of 

that was combining to move me, mold me, if you will, but I wasn’t aware of it until much later when 

I reflected back on it. So again, I didn’t have some grand plan and I wasn’t aware necessarily of all 

the changes that were occurring in me while they were happening. Again, law school is an incredibly 

intense, demanding experience and ultimately, I did all right, but it didn’t come easy for me. I mean, 

I really had to work at it, and it required my full attention. So, I continued to do civil rights with Law 

Students Civil Rights Research Council, including going back to — well, the second semester, 

second summer, I worked directly for LSCRRC in New York heading up their summer project, and I 

recruited the students to go to Mississippi and place them in Mississippi and so forth. And again, that 

was moving me closer to becoming a civil rights lawyer. But once again, it was a natural, for me, it 

was a natural outgrowth of my involvement with the organization, participating in their regional and 

other meetings, being elected to an office, just because I was active. And so, it seemed the natural 

thing to do. And so, I was moving along, being moved along. But again, I didn’t have some grand 

plan. [00:48:15] 

SP: At that point, how much did you know about LDF?  

BR: Well, I knew LDF was the preeminent civil rights legal organization and that it hired 

superstars like Julius Chambers and Marian Wright Edelman and John Walker out of Little Rock. 

And there were articles in the media. There was a Time magazine article that featured them and LDF 

and talked about how LDF recruited nothing but the cream of the crop. And of course, I didn’t think 



 
 
 

17 
 

I fit in that. So, it was the preeminent civil rights organization. There were several. LDF stood at the 

top. I knew who Greenberg was. I didn’t know him. I was just a little law student. And I didn’t really 

have any expectation of going to work at LDF. And so, I graduated and at the national meeting, I 

mean, I didn’t have a job and I was thinking that I was going to get drafted right away. They asked 

me to serve as executive director of LSCRRC. [00:50:00] It was a job, consistent with what I’d been 

doing. It was a good opportunity. And so that’s what I was doing. And it was very much an interim 

thing. And I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was worried about getting drafted. And if I 

didn’t, if I managed to avoid the draft, I was thinking I probably would apply at a U.S. attorney’s 

office or something to try to get some basic experience before becoming a practicing lawyer. And 

anyhow, I got a draft notice. I knew, or the scuttlebutt was, LDF represented its folk, and they were 

able to avoid the draft. So, I asked Jack Greenberg, would he meet with me, and he said yes.  

SP: I have a question. When you say you asked Jack Greenberg, does that mean you walked 

to the office and said — ?  

BR: No, I called him up and he answered the phone. I told him I’d like to sit down and talk to 

him. And I told him why. And he said, “Well, come on over.” And I went over, and I told him what 

my dilemma was. I’d been called for the draft and knew that he’d had success. And he said, “Yes, we 

have.” He said, “And we’ve never lost a man.” He said, “Unfortunately, Bill, we can’t represent you 

because you don’t work for us.” He said, “But of course, if you come and work for us, then we will 

represent you. So, how about it? Do you want to come work at LDF?” And of course, I was a little 

stunned. He wanted me to start right away. And I said, “Well, Jack, I can’t do that. I can’t walk out 

on these people, LSCRRC. I’ve made a year commitment to them. And if I walked out on them, they 

wouldn’t have leadership and that just wouldn’t be the right thing to do.” He said, “All right, well, 

then when are you going to finish up? When can you come to work for us?” [00:52:13] And I gave 

him a date, which was roughly at the end of a year. And he said, “Okay, fine.” Well. So, [laughs] 

now I’ve got a job with LDF. And it turns out, I appeal the reclassification to 1A, and the basis of my 



 
 
 

18 
 

appeal was that as Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, under law, I was 

working in the national interest because civil rights was very important to the country, and they 

should give me an occupational deferment. And I went out and met with my local draft board in 

Lorain, Ohio. The draft board in Elyria. And the secretary was this little old white woman with blue 

hair, very formal, who had me sit down and wait my turn, then took me into the meeting. It was a 

bunch of older white men. Listened to me, thoughtfully, didn’t say much. Told me to go back out 

and have a seat. They would deliberate. I said, “Oh, well. I guess that’s that.” [laughs] The chairman 

of the meeting came back out. And in a very formal way, said, “Well, Mr. Robinson, we’ve very 

carefully considered your application and we’ve decided that yes, we will grant you an occupational 

deferment because we agree with you that your work is in the national interest.” [00:54:15] And I 

said, “Thank you, sir.” And he said, “Now that that’s over, how’s your mom?” [laughs] I was 

stunned. He said, “Of course, this had nothing to do with our deliberation. But your mom taught my 

grandchildren in elementary school. And she was just the most wonderful teacher. How is she?” 

[laughs] You know, well, the local draft board was supposed to be sensitive to local needs and local 

community, right? But who’d a thunk it? I mean, that it really worked that way? [laughs] Well, it 

did. 

SP: And just like that, your future opens up.  

BR: Opens up because by the time my one-year deferment would expire, I would turn 25 and 

they didn’t draft people over 25. So, they didn’t just give me a deferment for a year. They gave me 

an exemption. [laughs] And off I went to work for LDF and now became a civil rights lawyer.  

SP: So, I have a couple of questions and I want to go back to that, you swearing to your dad 

that you would be a lawyer. You were a lawyer. And you were a civil rights lawyer. What was his 

reaction to that?  

BR: Dad was enormously proud of me and my becoming a lawyer. And it’s really funny 

because of how he expressed that on one particular occasion. I took the bar while I was at LSCRRC 



 
 
 

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and I passed the bar and we were sworn in, a whole bunch of us in the banquet room of the Manger 

Hotel in downtown Cleveland, which was set up to be a luncheon event. [00:56:29] And it’s funny. 

Dad, I mean, I had never paid for anything with my father. Time to gas up the car? He paid. Time for 

parking? He paid. Time for a meal? He paid. He was dad, you know? All right, well, we get in the 

car. We drive up to the hotel, I said, “Oh, dad, let me at least take care of the parking.” He looked at 

me. He said, “Okay, you can pay for parking.” We get in, we have the ceremony. I stand up, raise my 

hand, I get admitted. They come by. Said, “Well, would you like to have a drink? I said, “Oh, dad, 

let me at least pay for the drink.” “You want to have a drink, dad, to celebrate this?” He said, 

“Okay.” My uncle was with us as well. My namesake. He looked at me and said, “Okay.” So, I paid 

the waiter for the drink. And we finish and he goes, “Well, where is the bill?” Waiter looked at him 

and said, “Oh, sir. Your son paid for that when he made the reservation.” [laughs] It was so funny to 

see the look on his face when he finally recognized, realized, hey, your oldest son is now a man and 

he’s a lawyer and he’s a member of the bar. And he just broke out in the biggest smile and embraced 

me. And my mom was just, I mean, she was almost cracking up. It was so funny because she knew 

exactly what was going on. And she saw his reaction and the sense of recognition and pride. And it 

was just a good moment. It was just a good moment. And then we stopped, and they took a picture of 

me and my dad and my uncle with the little certificate and the American flag on the side. And mom 

kept that picture for a long time. [00:58:49] 

SP: I love that. I think it’s so moving. You’re a working professional, you could pay the bill. 

I’m thinking about, I want to hear more, too, about this really fateful meeting you had with Jack 

Greenberg that you initiated. Had you been inside LDF’s offices before because I’m thinking about, 

you know, Thurgood Marshall is your hero, you’re entering this space. 

BR: I don’t believe I had ever been inside their offices, there at [10] Columbus Circle. Maybe 

because, I’m just not sure. They had a law library, and I may have gone over and used their library to 

do research once. I know after he hired me, but before I came on board, I did use the library to do 



 
 
 

20 
 

some research, at least once or twice. But as a practical matter, no. I mean, it was, if not the first 

time, one of the very first times that I’d ever been to their offices. 

SP: What were they like? [00:59:57] 

BR: They were good, solid offices. But Jack didn’t spend a lot of money on, and he didn’t, 

that was not the kind of atmosphere he wanted to create. So, there were Steelcase desks, Steelcase 

chairs for everybody, except the office, occupied by Jim Nabrit, who inherited the office from 

Connie Motley. When Jack was setting up the office and outfitting it in that spartan way, Connie 

Motley said, “Not me. I’m going to have a proper lawyer’s office.” And she had a wooden desk and 

carpet on the floor and a nice, well-appointed office. But Jack wanted to create an office that had an 

environment that was, I won’t say pedestrian, but it was a work office. It was a work environment. 

And that did not at all detract from the overall sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps that I think 

was a holdover from the days when Thurgood Marshall, who was — Thurgood had a personality that 

was bigger than life. And the working relationship between him and that coterie of lawyers that, 

including Jack, that were responsible for Brown v. Board of Education was a close knit, mutually 

supportive, mutually respectful group that just, I mean, there was a sense of fellowship and 

camaraderie, that spirit that continued to permeate LDF, frankly, from that day to this, that’s never 

been broken. That sense of mission that is deeply inculcated in everybody who works at LDF. It’s 

been true from then to now. In part, it comes from, came from Thurgood and his being an 

inspirational leader. It also had a lot to do with our relationship to the clients. You could not help but 

be impressed and have a sense of purpose when you represented some of the people that we 

represented. I know it came to a head for me in my representation of clients in Roberts against, I’ve 

forgotten whether it was Saint Regis Paper Company. And Mr. Roberts had been president of the 

segregated local Papermakers union. [01:03:24] He organized the Black workers. They had filed a 

charge. It was one of those original charges that I’ll get to in a minute when we talk about the 

employment campaign. They went to Earl Johnson for representation. I wound up handling the case 



 
 
 

21 
 

with Earl. But Mr. Roberts, he was one of those classic African-American leaders. Salt of the earth 

kind of people, who was going to oppose racial segregation and subjugation and be noble about 

doing it. [01:04:12] And he was the kind of leader that infuriated the redneck whites. I’ll never 

forget, during one of the depositions, one of the white employees made a threatening kind of 

comment about Mr. Roberts during the deposition. He wasn’t being deposed, but he made that, he 

was sitting to the side. He was one of the white union officials. And Betty Southard Murphy, who 

represented the white union. Subsequently a very, very good friend of mine, a really good woman 

who ultimately became a member of the National Labor Relations Board, among other things. But 

anyhow, Betty turned to him and said, “You know, you just absolutely guaranteed Mr. Roberts’s 

safety, because if anything happens to him, I’ll make sure that the FBI and others are at your front 

door.” And I said, “Well, thank you, Betty.” I didn’t have to say a word. [laughs] But, it was Mr. 

Roberts and the opportunity to represent him that was just so special. And others like him. When you 

talk to U.W. Clemon and Barry Goldstein, you’ll get a better flavor for that because their clients in 

Stockham Valves and in the steel cases organized themselves into, as class representatives, the 

leaders organized the class and they would have class meetings. [01:06:07] They would bring the 

workers up to date. They would set up class meetings so that when the lawyers came to town, they 

could meet with all the class and keep them. And these guys, they had been subjected to such 

incredible abuse and discrimination. Given the dirtiest, hottest, least desirable jobs, that took a toll on 

you, and still maintained their dignity. It was just such a privilege to represent them. And of course, 

that was part and parcel of why we had such a sense of mission and how we could maintain our 

sense of camaraderie and esprit de corps. And that was not just a product of my era. That went all the 

way back to Thurgood and his representation of Black people in the Deep South concerned about 

segregated schools or segregation in in the military and the abuse that Black servicemen were 

experiencing. Representing those clients was just something special. And that continues to be the 



 
 
 

22 
 

case right up to today. Again, if you talk to, when you talk to some of the current litigators at LDF, 

you’ll find, I’m sure that same thing is true.  

SP: And we’ll get to your, you know, we’ll talk a lot about your labor, the litigation work. 

But your early work at LDF was of a different nature. Can you describe your early work? You did 

some more law school desegregation — and you were in Florida a lot, because the St. Regis case 

was in Florida, wasn’t it? [01:07:52]  

BR: It was indeed. Yeah. When I went to work at LDF, getting on board was, it turns out, 

awfully special as well. Starting with the ride up on the elevator. I get there that morning. I forgot the 

exact date. But as we enter the lobby, I bump into Haywood Burns. Another one of LDF’s illustrious 

alums. And I had known Haywood from our work as civil rights lawyers and as members of 

LSCRRC. Now neither Haywood nor I can remember. One of us held the elevator door for the other. 

We get to the front door and one of us holds the front door for the other and one goes in first. We 

don’t remember who was first. But that became significant when, for example, we were the two low 

on the totem pole, and there was a conference and only so many people got to go and “Okay, only 

you, Bill, or Haywood can go. Who is senior? Senior person gets to go. Junior doesn’t.” Well, who’s 

first? Who walked in the door first? We don’t remember. So, flipped a coin. I won the coin flip. I 

was going to go to Tahoe for the conference, but the date for the conference comes up. One of my 

judges sets a hearing. I don’t go, Haywood goes. [laughs] But anyhow, Haywood and I, of course, 

became very, very good friends and colleagues long after we both left LDF. So, he was Dean at 

CUNY [City University of New York Law School] when I became dean at the D.C. School of Law. 

And one of the first people I called to, “Hey, give me the ABCs of how do you be a dean of a law 

school, Haywood?” And, of course, he sits me down and we talk. But that incident, that first day on 

the job with me and Haywood became a source of conversation and camaraderie between the two of 

us.  

SP: First day for both of you? [01:10:25] 



 
 
 

23 
 

BR: First day for both of us. Yes. And I get on board and you get your first assignments. My 

supervisor, well, I was split between two supervisors, Leroy Clark and Mike Meltsner, and Leroy 

gives me what everybody, an assignment that everybody wanted to avoid. But Leroy tells me, “Take 

it.” It was to do the docket. Review all the cases and update the entry, so the current description of 

the status of the case is listed on the docket, so that if the lawyer handling the case, and there were 

lots of cases that you needed to go and review the file and prepare that update. It was, everybody 

thought it was a dreary, mundane assignment. Leroy said, “Do it.” I did it. And of course, as a result, 

I learned a little bit about all the cases that were in the office. Later on, when it came time to get 

further assignments of cases, I knew what were the good cases, and what were not the good cases 

and what ones you really wanted, if you could. And one of the things that that meant I had a chance 

to put dibs on was the Florida school cases, which were good cases. And the group of cooperating 

attorneys in Florida were guys I really wanted to get a chance to work with. [01:12:13] So that 

assignment that Leroy gave me was one of the two assignments he gave me that really stood me in 

good stead. And he knew what he was doing at the time. The other one, LDF had handled during the 

sit-ins and afterward, a large number of cases that went up on appeal. And LDF, lots and lots of 

cases. LDF had never bothered to collect the costs of printing the record, of filing fees, so forth, and 

so on. And I even discovered that you’re entitled to a thing called an attorney’s docketing fee. 

Anyhow, Leroy said, “Look, you did the docket. Now go back in and identify all the cases wherein 

we are entitled to costs. Then prepare a bill of costs and collect that money.” Okay. I dug in and I 

found a couple of dozen cases where we were entitled to costs. And I prepared the bill of costs. Well, 

I wasn’t counsel of record in those cases. Leroy, as first assistant counsel, was counsel of record in a 

number of them. But some of them, the only guy who was counsel was Greenberg. I prepared the bill 

of costs. When it was just Greenberg, I could give it to Leroy and he either would sign it or get 

Greenberg to sign it. Anyhow, about six to eight weeks later, all these checks started coming in and 

they were going to Greenberg’s, because the checks were made out to LDF and they’d come in and 



 
 
 

24 
 

the check’d go to Greenberg. [01:14:16] He says, “Where the hell are all of these checks coming 

from?” [laughs] And it was funny because Jack came in and talked to me about recovering these and 

it just became an occasion where I got to know Jack a little better. Jack got to know me a little better. 

And he stopped being, well, not right away, but he ceased to be this forbidding, intimidating, bigger 

than life figure, and became Jack. The other part of it was, I need to get into the office early and get 

the day off to a good start. If I get in early and have a coffee and get the jitters out and get started, I’ll 

have a good day. If I kind of don’t get in early and half the day is gone and I still haven’t gotten off, I 

don’t have a good day. So, I would get in early. Well, Jack would get in early, and Jack would walk 

around the office. And a lot of times it would just be me and him. And he would come, and he’d sit 

down in front of me and, “What are you working on?” And at first, I was wondering, what is this guy 

doing? Why is he checking up on me? Well, it turned out, no. Jack was generally interested in 

knowing what his lawyers were working on and chatting about it. And if you told him and he had 

some ideas, he would share his ideas with you. And then he’d go on back to his office and take care 

— well again, it was the beginning of the establishment of a working relationship between me and 

Jack that later on blossomed. [01:16:09] Again, I didn’t know it was happening at the time, that I was 

developing a close working relationship with Jack Greenberg. But later on, when I was first assistant 

counsel, there was a basis. We had talked a lot about informal, inconsequential, little things, so that 

when it came time to talk about big things, it was easier for us to do so. And again, I didn’t plan it 

that way. It just kind of happened. 

SP: It sounds like an unusual relationship with him, because I’ve gotten the impression that 

he was pretty buttoned up. You know, he was —   

BR: He was buttoned up, and a lot of people took that to be intimidating or standoffish. It 

wasn’t. Jack was shy. Jack was actually shy. The ice was broken with us. It also was broken with a 

number of other people, particularly our Title VII team. I mean, he had a great relationship with all 

the guys and gals on the Title VII team, and he really opened up a good deal. It didn’t hurt that that 



 
 
 

25 
 

Debbie, his wife, was a member of the team. [laughs] And that, too, was funny. I mean, Jack and I by 

then, by the time she came to be a member of the team, Debbie was volunteering, not getting a salary 

because they were married. And Jack came to me. He said, “Look, Bill. I’m going to assign Debbie 

to work with you, teach her how to be a good lawyer.” Okay, well, Debbie, you didn’t need to teach 

Debbie how to be a good lawyer. I mean, she was so smart that that was almost instantaneous. But 

anyhow, she became a member of the team. [01:18:13] And it was so funny because I kind of treated 

her like just another member of the team, right? She got assignments. And sometimes her 

assignments meant that she had to work into the evening. Jack was done. And it was so funny to see 

him sitting there in his office kind of waiting for her to finish up [laughs] and then go home. And 

again, that produced some really funny occasions. One evening we were there, and we finally 

finished up and Debbie said, “Well, come on, Bill. Go home with us. We’ll get Jack to cook us 

dinner.” I said, “Huh?” She said, “Yeah. He’s a great cook.” [laughs] And of course, he was. He and 

Jim Vorenberg, by the way, wrote a cookbook together. Vorenberg was a law professor at Harvard, 

and I think was Dean there for a period of time. Anyhow, he and Jack were great friends, and they 

were both gourmet cooks and wrote this cookbook together. So, they were living on Park Avenue at 

the time. And ride up to their elevator. And there were just two apartments on that floor. Theirs and 

another. We ride up and we get off the elevator and Debbie says [sniffs], “Jack, you forgot to take 

out the garbage again today.” I said, “Oh, shit.” And he says, “Oh, yeah, I’m sorry, I’ll do it right 

now.” I said, “Oh, you mean, he has to take the garbage out just like the rest of us?” [laughs] It was 

so funny that his wife talked to him just like our wives talk to us. He had to take the garbage out, just 

like we had to take the garbage out. Again, that helped in cracking the ice between me and Jack. And 

that, you know, the working relationship that we had will always be a hallmark of my life and my 

career. He was my mentor. He gave me, I mean, it was he who decided that I was ready to argue 

Phillips v. Martin Marietta in the Supreme Court. I didn’t know I was ready. And he sat right next to 

me and made sure that I couldn’t stumble because Jack Greenberg was right there to back me up. 



 
 
 

26 
 

[01:20:45] And again, we’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. I like to share some of the 

funny stories about that day. 

SP: Do you remember what he cooked? 

BR: He cooked Chinese food that night. She specifically said, “We‘ll get him to make 

Chinese food.” And he did. And it was great. [laughs] 

SP: Of all the stories I’ve read about him, I didn’t realize he was an accomplished cook. 

BR: Yeah. So.  

SP: So, can you talk about some of those early cases that were, before you got on the 

litigation team? So, just give us an example of some of those cases.  

BR: The school desegregation cases. The Florida cases were great. It was in 1968, we wrote a 

motion for further relief and reopened all of the cases because until [19]68, there really hadn’t been 

any progress in terms of desegregation. And after Green v. New Kent County, where the Supreme 

Court said, essentially, the time for all deliberate speed is over, it’s time to integrate now and do so 

root and branch. [01:22:07] And armed with that decision, we filed motions for further relief in all 

the cases and reopened them. And I then filed those motions in all the Florida cases. I’ve forgotten 

now how many of them, at least a half a dozen. Working with Earl, Earl had most of the cases. Ted 

Bowers, Earl Johnson. Earl Johnson had most of the cases. Ted Bowers had the Panama City case 

and the Pensacola case. 

SP: Jim Sanderlin? 

BR: Jim Sanderlin had the Tampa case and the St. Petersburg case. Alcee Hastings had the 

Miami case. With all the guys except Alcee, basically, I wrote all the motions and memoranda of law 

and so forth. And when we got to the hearings, they would take the lead on interrogating the 

witnesses because they were experienced trial lawyers. They did it all day, every day. I didn’t. And 

so, they were much more accomplished at taking testimony than I was. I did get some experience 

taking testimony, and they helped guide me and teach me how to elicit testimony out of a witness. 



 
 
 

27 
 

And Earl particularly gave me the ABCs of how to cross-examine a witness. And again, it was just 

an incredibly important learning experience for me. But those guys, working with them was, again, a 

joy. They were really pillars of their community. The guys who did the school desegregation cases 

were the Black lawyers for their community, not just the school lawyer. [01:23:58] Whenever the 

Black community had an issue, we took it to them. Whether it paid or not. They represented their 

community. Anyhow, I wrote the pleadings for everybody except Alcee. Alcee always wrote his own 

stuff, and frankly, he wrote better than I did. Which it was funny because when he later had his 

difficulties, and he explained that he had prepared some documents and one of the senators said, 

“You mean, you wrote this and there are no scratch outs and it’s just absolutely perfectly written? 

Are we to believe that?” And I said to myself, yeah, that’s the way he writes. But of course, that was 

deemed not credible. But it was true. I mean, he was an incredibly good writer. Didn’t really have 

much contact with him until later, much later, after he was a member of Congress and active in 

international human rights. And there was a trip to Europe with the Organization for Cooperation 

and Security of Europe. And I was a delegate representing somebody. And he represented the 

Congress at that. And we had a chance to get to know each other better and chat. But other than that, 

he handled everything. But all the other guys. I had a nice, warm, wonderful relationship with them. 

First me, and then when I got moved over to employment, I had to give up the Florida cases. And 

Drew Days took them over. And Drew had the same relationship with them that I had, and it was 

something that Drew and I then shared in terms of our working relationship with those Florida 

lawyers, which was pretty special. [01:26:10] 

SP: And as you said, these are Black lawyers in these communities who were doing work 

oftentimes pro-bono. 

BR: Right. All the school cases, they didn’t get paid for the school cases. They did a lot of 

work, but they didn’t get paid for the school cases. Much, much later, after I was gone, motions were 

filed in at least some of the cases to recoup fees because there was a fee shifting provision that 



 
 
 

28 
 

kicked in later. But all the years that I was handling cases, Drew was handling cases, they didn’t get 

paid a penny.  

SP: And of course, they’re coming at it from a totally different perspective because they lived 

in these communities, too. Can you talk about a sense you got of the risks they faced working in 

these areas?  

BR: It varied. By and large, the lawyers were not the subject of threats because they did the 

school cases. They had to be careful. So, among other things, when we traveled, I traveled down to 

Florida in the more rural areas, didn’t stay at Holiday Inns outside town, near the airport or whatnot. 

Stayed at the downtown hotel in the middle of town, rather than a motel on the outskirts of town, that 

kind of thing. But as long as you were reasonably careful, I didn’t sense that there was any, any real 

physical threat for me or for them. That was not true for Julius Chambers, who, I mean Julius, he 

handled so many cases of such a wide variety and he was so relentless and so successful at 

transforming North Carolina that he was viewed as a threat, and they firebombed his office. But that 

was unusual. [01:28:22] 

SP: And his car. 

BR: I didn’t recall about the car, but yeah, he was viewed as a threat for a number of years. 

Later viewed as the hero of North Carolina. But during the late [19]60s, he was viewed as a threat. 

SP: And your shift from these earlier cases, the Florida docket, to the litigation work that you 

did, which had been done by Robert Belton and Gabrielle Kirk McDonald. 

BR: Right.  

SP: Can you talk about that shift, how you found out that you were going to start looking into 

the cases, and the changing nature of that work?  

BR: Yeah. First, the employment discrimination campaign, and it really was a campaign. 

And I want to spend a minute or two talking about it as a campaign. But it had been started and 

headed up Bob and Gaby. Bob was head of it, but Gaby and he were really co-equals in terms of the 



 
 
 

29 
 

work that they did. Gaby got married and moved off to Houston. Bob had for years planned to 

relocate to Charlotte, North Carolina, and become partners with Julius Chambers in North Carolina 

and take a number, or certainly all the North Carolina cases with him. And Gaby took the Texas 

cases with her and filed additional cases in Texas. I think she also, I’m not sure we had, she took at 

least one of the Louisiana cases with her as well. And so that left the employment area without staff. 

And we were at a point where Jack wasn’t hiring new staff at the time. So, he just came to me, and 

told me, “Bill, I would like you to take over the employment area and phase out your work in 

schools.” And Norm Chachkin was heading up schools, and he and Drew agreed that Drew would 

take over the school cases. The Florida cases. I had also one case and I said, every self-respecting 

civil rights lawyer has got to have at least one school desegregation case. So, I’ll keep the Fort Worth 

case. So, I kept the Fort Worth case. And indeed, tried that case an additional three times while I 

continued to do the employment stuff. But the transition was Jack came to me and said, “I want you 

to take over this,” and I did. [01:31:22] And the first year or year and a half, I was kind of by myself 

and on my own in the New York office and it was a lot of long weeks and weekends because of the 

stage in the proceedings that we were. Now let me back up. The employment program at LDF was 

very much a litigation campaign, and that was fairly typical of how Jack and LDF approached civil 

rights litigation. [01:32:13] He didn’t, following in the path of Thurgood and Thurgood’s colleagues 

at the NAACP, Bob Carter, even after they split, they didn’t just look at a lawsuit as an independent, 

freestanding one case. They sought to look at how that instance of discrimination fit into the overall 

structure of racism and discrimination in America. And how litigating that case and obtaining relief 

in that case could help take a bite out of racism and discrimination more generally. And so, Jack, in 

looking at the area, at the 1964 Civil Rights Act, that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, looked 

at it as something — we were to enforce a statute, not simply represent individuals in a bunch of 

individual cases. Again, let me digress for a moment. Historically, the approach had always been, the 

approach toward civil rights change had involved a formula of agitation. And the civil rights leaders, 



 
 
 

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particularly Roy Wilkins, were really militant in using agitation and as one means of drawing 

attention to racism and discrimination. [01:34:23] So, it’s agitation. Legislation. So, the NAACP’s 

work in Congress, asking for legislation, including the anti-lynching act and so forth, was very much 

a part of the formula to demand relief from discrimination. So, it’s agitation, legislation, and 

litigation was the formula. And none of them were to stand in splendid isolation of the other. In 

lobbying for the passage of a jobs act, I’m blanking on some names now. Joe Rao and Clarence 

Mitchell were the principal lobbyists, very much keeping Jack informed, Jack and Roy and others 

informed. But they did the lobbying and they made decisions that nobody questioned. They wanted a 

Title VII that included cease and desist for EEOC. They didn’t get it. Jack testified and his testimony 

was rejected, in terms of asking for cease and desist. [01:36:12] Jack was stung by that. Jack then 

looked at the statue. It was past July 2nd, 1964, to become effective July 2nd, 1965. Jack said, 

“We’ve got to use that year to get ready. We want to do two things. First, we want to have, I want 

1,000 complaints.” And he hired law students, including law students from the Law Student Civil 

Rights Research Council, to travel around the South, visit the companies who had segregated 

workforces or were known in the community to be racially discriminatory and so forth. Get them to 

prepare complaints, ready for filing, with the EEOC, or filed with the EEOC, and a copy to us. In the 

file room there were a bunch of file drawers with 1,000, and I’m sorry, we didn’t get 1,000. We only 

got 800 and some. And so, he didn’t quite get his goal, but he had, ready to go, 1,000 complaints, 

really good cases. The other thing he said, “All right, we want to find out, if we’re going to litigate 

this thing, what do people in the Black community really want most? Where are they getting hurt the 

worst?” [01:38:04] I learned something from Jack. You don’t just litigate aimlessly. You’ve got to 

attack where your people are getting hurt the worst. That’s what being a good civil rights lawyer is 

all about. It stood me in good stead later when I headed up the Lawyers’ Committee and when I went 

to EEOC and headed up litigation there. And the way you find out is you ask your people. So, they 

did a survey, sent it around to Black ministers, all around. The heads of Black local unions and so 



 
 
 

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forth. And the answer came back overwhelmingly, “You’ve got to do something about those tests. 

White guys didn’t have to pass those tests. Those tests don’t have anything to do with the job. But 

we can’t pass them. As long as they’ve got those tests, we’re not going to get those jobs.” The other 

was seniority. “They got all these seniority systems. We’re locked out. If you don’t do something 

about seniority.” And of course, one of the compromises in Congress had been to make seniority 

sacrosanct. But those were the two. There was a third that I’ve, I’m slipping my mind. But those 

were the things then that Jack said, “Okay. All right, how do we attack those?” And he put together 

then teams of law professors, economists, industrial relations specialists, to study and come up with 

approaches toward going after seniority and testing. And what are going to be our theories? How do 

we go after these built-in institutionalized devices? And that yielded the theories that first Bob and 

then Gaby laid out for challenging testing. [01:40:21] Disparate impact and seniority. Present effects 

of past discrimination. I added the claim for individual cases. That really wasn’t on the horizon. But I 

looked at it and I said, after I took over and I’d been there for a while, I said, “Wait a minute. I’ve 

got these fancy theories, but look. If we’re successful, and it looks like we’re going to be successful 

at getting all kinds of individuals to file charges. And all kinds of lawyers. We’re not going to be 

able to control this thing going forward the way we can now in the early years. We need to have an 

approach to proving discrimination that doesn’t require an expert, that doesn’t require a seasoned 

civil rights lawyer, that your everyday, ordinary person can go in and present their case. And so, we 

need an approach to basic disparate treatment.” So, but anyhow, when I took over employment 

discrimination, Bob and Gaby had those two basic theories well underway with some considerable 

success, especially on the seniority claim. Present effects of past discrimination.  

SP: And that was with Quarles, right? 

BR: That was — the Quarles case, Quarles v. Philip Morris was the first case that was a 

district court case by a, I’m blanking on the name of the very renowned district court judge who 

wrote the opinion, that laid out the case for seniority reform, because to preserve seniority systems 



 
 
 

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intact would perpetuate into the present the effects of past discrimination. And it’s not the past 

discrimination. [01:42:32] It’s the present effects that are unlawful under the act. And, of course, we 

won those cases. We won that theory in at least eight, I’d say, nine of the circuits when the Supreme 

Court in the trucking case reached out. It wasn’t part of the question presented, but they reached out 

and grabbed it and overturned that theory. And so, we lost it ultimately in the Supreme Court, to my 

great chagrin.  

SP: How many years after the original Quarles decision, how many years did the present 

effects of past discrimination?  

BR: See, Quarles would have been decided in like 1969, and Teamsters v. United States 

would have been decided in about 1980. I may be a little off on those dates. Blessedly, during that 

period of time, we were able to get seniority relief in many of the basic industries where seniority 

had been such a roadblock for Black workers. Steel industry had been reformed. The trucking 

industry had been reformed. [01:44:20] The aluminum industry had been reformed, the paper 

industry had been reformed. A whole host of smaller corporations, not industry wide, but smaller 

corporations that relied on industry, looking at the handwriting on the wall, had made changes, so 

that Teamsters v. United States did not have the devastating impact that it otherwise would have had. 

But I always felt like, gee, the reason why you grant cert is because there’s a conflict of circuits. 

There was no conflict of the circuits. Or there’s a national question of law that needs resolution. If 

there was a national question, by golly, with eight circuits answering all the same way, there was a 

national answer. Don’t get me started. I will always feel a good deal of angst, because the Supreme 

Court reached out and took that issue and overturned that theory, that the present effects of past 

discrimination is unlawful. And you see because, quite apart from the seniority cases, the idea of 

present effects of past discrimination as resulting in unlawful discrimination could have every bit as 

much impact as the disparate impact theory of discrimination, had it been allowed to remain a viable 

claim. So again, in part it’s my personal angst, but it’s also, I think, true that an important and 



 
 
 

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potentially very effective remedy was taken away from us, I think inappropriately so. Backing up 

and going back, [01:46:18] Jack also thought, look, this statute is a shambles. What we’re going to 

do is we’re going to go in and we’re going to litigate a whole lot of cases, because if you looked at 

Title VII, it required filing of a charge, EEOC investigation, EEOC finding reasonable cause, EEOC 

conciliating, EEOC failing conciliation, EEOC issuing a notice of right to sue letter. Question: if any 

one of those things fails to happen, can you still go to court?  

SP: You’ve described this as the underbrush.  

BR: Yes, that was the underbrush of the statute. Many early decisions held that any one, 

failure to complete any one of those steps meant that the individual aggrieved person, the Black 

worker claiming discrimination, couldn’t go to court. And Jack said, “What we’re going to do is 

litigate those cases and we are either going to reform the statute or we’re going to prove that it’s 

unworkable and go back and get the statute we didn’t get in the first place. And this time, by golly, 

we’re going to get cease and desist.” Well, of course, we didn’t get cease and desist, instead — 

SP: Can you describe, just so I can understand better, what you mean by cease and desist in 

regards to the EEOC?  

BR: Yes. The EEOC wouldn’t simply find probable cause. EEOC would have the authority. 

You didn’t, you wouldn’t have to go to court. If EEOC found probable cause, EEOC would issue an 

immediate order saying the company had to cease and desist from its discrimination. And so there 

would be an administrative remedy, a much more favorable forum, presumably, and a much more 

streamlined process for getting at discrimination. [01:48:22] And Jack and Clarence particularly 

wanted that. That had been in some of the old FEP administrative proceedings in a couple of states. I 

think they had that, maybe Wisconsin. Or certainly that was a model that was known about. Jack and 

Clarence, particularly Clarence Mitchell, particularly wanted it. They didn’t get it. As we litigated 

those cases, we won. I did a number of the cases on appeal, but I really have to give Bob Belton 

credit. Bob led the way. And Bob and I worked together on a number of those cases ultimately. And 



 
 
 

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it was one of the holdings in Green v. McDonnell Douglas. “No,” the court said. “Your right to 

proceed in court is not defeated. If the EEOC fails to find reasonable cause, fails to investigate, fails 

to find reasonable cause, fails to conciliate, fails to issue. All you’ve got to do is file a timely charge 

with the EEOC. And get a notice of right to sue from EEOC. And file a timely lawsuit that is within 

first 120, later 180 days, if you file a timely charge of discrimination within 180 days of the act of 

discrimination. [01:50:12] And you file a timely lawsuit within 180 days of the issuance of your right 

to sue that you have a right to be in court.” And that, of course, cleared out all that underbrush, 

streamlined the process and made the statute infinitely more workable. So, Jack was not able to 

prove the statute completely unworkable and therefore get a new act. 

SP: And the EEOC was a relatively young — and I read a wonderful interview you did with 

David Cashdan. And talking about it, you know, reading what you all said, got the impression that it 

was almost sort of scrappy in its early days.  

BR: Oh, you betcha. You remember in its earliest days, EEOC didn’t have the right to go to 

court. And so, its lawyers would file amicus curiae briefs. And many of the cases were our cases at 

LDF. Or if not our cases at LDF, cases brought by our cooperating attorneys. And as soon as those 

cases went up on appeal, they would immediately — or more often than not, they would call us in 

New York and say, “Hey, Bill, can you give me a hand here?” Look, they were in court every day, 

taking the time out to write a brief. Many of them could and did. But often they would say, “Hey, 

look, can you give me a hand here?” And of course we did. And it doesn’t take, you don’t have to be 

a rocket scientist to know that having the government there with you is a big help. That was brought 

home to me, actually, when I was arguing a school desegregation case. And I was arguing back to 

back. And Gary Greenberg represented Department of Justice and he stepped to the lectern, and he 

said to the Fifth Circuit, “On behalf of the United States of America, may it please the court.” I said, 

[laughs] [to myself] “Oh, my God.” [01:52:42] And then he said, “It’s the position of the government 

that this case should be, not the case should be reversed — that the case should be remanded to the 



 
 
 

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lower court. Forget all the argument about why I’m right. This case should be remanded with the 

following instructions.” And I said [to myself], “Whoa.” He’s getting away with all of that because 

he’s the United States of America. He is the government. Well, he was right. He had Tuttle and 

Wisdom on his panel. And he didn’t need to be bothered with arguing why the lower court was 

wrong because it was some district judge that always ruled against civil rights. And he immediately 

cut right to the chase and talked about how they ought to give him instructions on remand. But the 

way he put it. “On behalf of the United States of America.” Well, we know EEOC is not the 

Department of Justice. They don’t go in saying “on behalf of the United States of America.” But you 

get the point. Having the government on your side is a huge advantage. And with them filing amicus 

curiae briefs in all of those cases, cutting away at the underbrush. Remember, they are the agency 

responsible for administering that statute. [01:54:10] And they were joining us in saying that their 

statutes should not be construed in a way to defeat the right of the individual Black claimant to get 

relief in court. When that agency was agreeing with you, that was a big help. And they stood 

shoulder to shoulder with us in those early years. And it was just a great boon. And they had real 

good appellate lawyers. And I know Bob and Gaby and I will be forever grateful to them for the help 

that they gave us.  

SP: A lot of young lawyers, too, it seems like sort of a sibling organization to LDF in some 

regards.  

BR: They were young lawyers. It was a new agency, and they were hiring afresh and so they 

hired a lot of people. Most of the people they were hiring were either right out of law school or 

recently out of law school. So, yes.  

SP: There are things that we take for granted now that you and other lawyers on these cases 

had to sort of convincingly argue. Like you were saying, the theory of discrimination, present effects 

of past discrimination, that sort of thing. Can you talk about formulating those arguments, which 



 
 
 

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worked with what seemed like such obvious disparities, but you had to be so careful with the 

language that you used to talk about them in court?  

BR: Yeah. I — remember I’m old. I can’t remember all of the details. I remember that the 

testing cases culminating in Griggs v. Duke Power were the cases where we first at trial had to be 

most careful at developing a record, through expert testimony, about the statistical evidence that 

proved there was discrimination to a mathematical certainty. [01:56:35] And by the way, that was 

one of the big concerns that we had with Griggs. And a reason why our dear colleague George 

Cooper initially thought we should not take it to the Supreme Court. He wrote this long memo and 

sent it to Jack saying we shouldn’t take the case to the Supreme Court. He used that as a basis for 

teaching his employment discrimination class that semester. And the reason was, in the record in 

Griggs, we hadn’t proved disparate impact. And that was a big hole in the record in Griggs. Not in 

some of the other cases where we had put on that detailed, careful, statistical evidence, but it wasn’t 

there in Griggs. I said to Jack, “Look, this is our horse. We’ve got to ride it.” Jack, it took him five 

minutes. “Yeah, we’re going.” George changed his mind, and he wrote brilliantly. So, the testing 

section of our brief in Griggs — remember, in Griggs, it involved more than just testing and more 

than just disparate impact. We got relief in Griggs for immediately with, more for the — it involved 

tests and high school diploma. We got relief in Griggs [01:58:25] without the disparate impact 

theory, for all those African American workers who didn’t have a high school diploma, who were 

hired at the time whites without a diploma were hired. The Supreme Court gave us that. So, we 

would have kept that even if we hadn’t won the disparate impact theory. But it was the disparate 

impact theory, of course, that we wanted, that paved the way for all subsequent cases to make use of 

the argument based on statistics that had to be carefully presented with all the expert testimony. And 

we did that, for example, in Albemarle, the record was very carefully prepared. You know, you could 

have argued that we should have waited for Albemarle. We didn’t. And I think we were right. And of 

course, we got victories out of both Griggs and Albemarle. The argument in Griggs, I think, was one 



 
 
 

37 
 

of Jack’s best. And I sat second chair to him in there, in that case, and we had prepared for every 

conceivable question. And Jack was ready. And he laid out his argument. He marched right through 

it in 13 minutes and didn’t get a single solitary question. [02:00:07] 

SP: 13. 

BR: 12, 13. He had 18 minutes left after his argument in chief. And he hadn’t gotten a single 

solitary question. And I said [to myself], “Oh, my God.” Jack just calmly said, “I reserve the balance 

of my time for rebuttal.” Turned out just brilliant. The lawyer representing the company then stood 

up. He gave a meandering argument that left Jack with a great big hole. Essentially, he said that it 

was convenient for the company to use these tests. And used his full 30 minutes. And when he 

finished, there were two minutes before lunch. If the normal thing had happened, the break would 

have occurred and he would have had time at lunch to fix his argument up and be counseled, “Don’t 

waste all your time just arguing, presenting facts. They’ve read the facts. Get to it.” Well, but [Chief] 

Justice Warren Burger said, “Well, it’s almost lunch time. We’ll take our break now.” And we went 

down, and Bob Belton joined me and Jack. And we sat there, and Jack restructured his argument. He 

was ready for rebuttal. And now he’s got 18 minutes. That’s a huge amount of time. He stood up and 

bam, every question we had prepared for, bam, and he knocked every one of them right out of the 

park. Bam, bam, bam. And after he finished, I said [to myself], “Oh, my goodness, we’re going to 

win this case.” [02:02:02] Of course, not only did we win it, but Burger wrote the opinion, and I 

think it was one of the best opinions he’s written, at least one of the best opinions he ever wrote in 

support of civil rights.  

SP: And it was unanimous.  

BR: It was unanimous. And of course, that established the disparate impact theory of 

discrimination that benefits not only employment cases, but fair housing cases. And just generally 

became a theory of proof that is accepted in all forms of discrimination law and elsewhere, a 

wonderful, wonderful precedent that continues to this day. Now, McDonnell Douglas was the other 



 
 
 

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big impact case that was decided during the period of time I was heading up employment at LDF. I 

mentioned, you know, we had these theories of discrimination, but what we didn’t have is an 

approach to discrimination that was going to benefit an individual claimant. And we were looking 

around and trying to formulate an approach. Al Rosenthal, who was a professor up at Columbia, 

worked with me and Barry and Mike. We came up with a theory of discrimination patterned after 

tort law. And that was our argument in Green v. McDonnell Douglas. Now, once again, Lou Gilden, 

I had worked with Lou on some other cases, and Lou was one of my cooperating attorneys. Lou was 

a guy who, even if LDF wasn’t in the case, he might very well call me. “Hey, Bill, look, I got this. 

What do you think?” Or “Can you give me a memo?” Or this, that, or the other. And of course, I 

always said yes, because among other things, he represented Percy Green, who was really, really 

special. [02:04:24] And anyhow, he called and said, “Look. I got this case, going up to the Eighth 

Circuit. Can you help?” I said, “Yeah.” So, we helped write the brief to the Eighth Circuit, got EEOC 

to write a brief. Got somebody else to write an amicus brief. We did okay in the Eighth Circuit. 

Would have preferred Judge Lay’s dissent or concurring opinion, as opposed to the majority’s, but in 

any event, it went up to the Supreme Court. And Lou once again came and said, “Okay, Bill, it’s 

going to the Supreme Court.” Okay. This is the horse we’ve got, we got to ride it. We wanted, 

frankly, a more streamlined approach. But the one we got, the disparate impact formulation in Green 

v. McDonnell Douglas served us well for a long time. I’ve forgotten the litany of, I should know it 

by heart and do, but can’t call it up to you right this minute. And anyhow, it gave us what I was 

looking for, a formula that said, “Here’s how an individual, a lawyer who doesn’t handle these cases 

day in, day out, can use this approach to presenting a case of discrimination and make out a prima 

facie showing of discrimination.” [02:06:12] And so we had our disparate treatment, disparate 

impact, present effects of past discrimination theories. And those are the high water marks of the 

employment case now. McDonnell Douglas was again a case where our cooperating attorney, Reese 



 
 
 

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Marshall, a partner of Earl Johnson, he had the case. And he had the case, you know, Ida Mae 

Phillips had knocked on lots of doors and nobody would take her case.  

SP: This is Phillips —  

BR: Phillips v. Martin Marietta. And she knocked on Johnson and Marshall and met with 

Reese. She said, “They wouldn’t hire me because I had preschool aged children.” He said, “That’s 

wrong.” So, he took the case. Lost in the district court and lost in the Court of Appeals. Well.  

SP: What, is that the Fifth Circuit? 

BR: Fifth Circuit. Saying that essentially it was not sex discrimination to discriminate against 

a woman because she had preschool age children. Of course, it almost seems ludicrous on the face of 

it, but there you have it. And Reese gave me a call. He said, “We’ve got this decision. I can’t, I don’t 

know, I’m not a Supreme Court lawyer, Bill, can you help me?” I said, “Of course.” So, we filed a 

petition and cert was granted, now all of a sudden everybody wants the case. [02:08:09] And it 

turned out Reese had left private practice in the interim and gone to become a public defender for 

Jacksonville, city of Jacksonville. And so, it’s now LDF’s and Earl’s case, but Earl had never had 

anything to do with the case. It was just in his office. And we wrote the brief, and it was time to 

decide who was going to argue. Jack called me into his office. Well, at this point, that was not an 

unusual occurrence, for Jack to call me down to his office. And it could be about any number of 

things. He said, “We’ve got Phillips going to Supreme Court, Bill, I want you to argue it.” [laughs] 

Of course, I was delighted. And he said, “Don’t worry, I’ll be right there with you.” And of course, I 

was, and we were lucky enough to win. And during the course of the argument, it seemed like we 

had the court on our side, so it seemed like we were going to get a favorable ruling. So, we were all 

pretty happy. I was kind of taken aback between argument in chief and rebuttal. The marshal comes 

over and gives me a note, saying, “See the clerk after the argument.” What’s going on? I go to the 

clerk’s office after the argument and say, “I got this note from the —”  He said, “Yes, your wife’s in 

the hospital. You’re having, your baby is being delivered.” [laughs] So, I come back out, and I say, 



 
 
 

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“Hey, look, Arlene, you know, she was supposed to wait until I got back.” [02:10:07] But Debbie, 

Debbie Greenberg says, “Get in the taxi. I’ll pack, I’ll check you out of the hotel and pack your bags, 

you just go.” Jack escorts me to the plane. Puts me, says, “Look, you need a drink, I’m buying you 

one.” [laughs] I rush in. I get there. I’m, you know, “Am I in time?” “No, no. Mr. Robinson. You’re 

the father of a baby girl.” So, I go up, I view, and there’s our little daughter. And so, I go back in and 

visit with Arlene. And she said, “You’ve seen the baby?” I said, “You haven’t?” She said, “No. I’m 

just recovering—” Ask the nurse, “Can we see our baby?” “Yes, of course you can see your baby,” 

and she went and got Anne and brought her in. First Arlene holds the baby. Then I hold the baby. 

And I said, “Look, Arlene, Arlene, she’s smiling at me.” She says, “Bill, that’s gas.” I said, “No, no, 

she’s smiling, look.” And at that point, my legs starts getting warm. [laughs] And I often tell Anne, 

“It’s been like that, baby girl, from then till now.” [laughs] 

SP: Big day for you. 

BR: Big day, big day, wonderful day.  

SP: I’ve listened, you can listen to those arguments still, and I have a few questions about it. I 

mean, it’s not everyone who gets to argue in the Supreme Court. You know, how did you feel? You 

were excited when you found out. You must have been terrified too.  

BR: I was. I was. You know, Thurgood Marshall established the protocol. If you were 

making an argument on behalf of LDF, you do a moot court. [02:12:13] I had been moot courted 

four or five times, including at the office, including at Jack Greenberg’s class at Columbia. I’d been 

mooted, there was no question they could ask that I had not been mooted on. And so, yes, I was 

apprehensive. Those nine people up high and you’re down below and they are august people. So, 

there was some apprehension. But I knew I was well prepared, and I knew I had Jack right beside 

me. So, I wasn’t really afraid. I wasn’t super confident. As I got the questions, I was comfortable 

with my answers. Comfortable enough to know that some answers I didn’t want to take on head on, 

so the question Burger asked, if you listened, you know, he said. “Well, we all know that women are 



 
 
 

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good at some things, like they have superior digital dexterity.” Well, the real answer to that question 

was that’s exactly the kind of stereotyped view that the statute is designed to prevent. I had to be 

more gentle because he had stuck himself out there with that. But the answer was no. And in fact, he 

may have said something about typing. [02:14:08] Many of the most esteemed law firms have only 

male secretaries, and they type very well. Annually the person who wins the speed typing contest is a 

male secretary, usually an army sergeant. So, no, it’s simply not true. It’s received wisdom, but not 

true that women have greater digital dexterity. That’s the real answer. But I didn’t want to challenge 

him because I had the court going my way. If you listen to the argument, very clearly, if I didn’t 

upset the apple cart, I was looking at a victory. And later on, Burger, it’s reported in other articles 

that Burger reported back, made the comment, “Well, I did the best I could, but I just couldn’t pull 

the court my way.” And I think I was correct then in not challenging and taking him on, but kind of 

deflecting him. But I had an answer for every question they conceivably could have asked, just as 

Jack did for Griggs. And it all flows back to how Thurgood set up lawyering at LDF, continued by 

Jack and I know continued right straight through to the present by Julius and Elaine and others, right 

down to the present.  

SP: I was struck listening to it, by the amount of laughter. Chief Justice Burger made a 

couple of jokes. Do you recall? 

BR: I don’t recall the jokes.  

SP: They were remarks along the lines of, you know, “There are some things women can do 

that men can’t,” you know, things. And there was laughter. [02:16:04] And, you know, when you 

respond, you sort of laugh but it’s like you’re ready to get on with it, you know, the clock is ticking. 

It seemed, though, like it, even if the jokes were misplaced, the atmosphere felt more relaxed. I don’t 

know if you felt that way.  

BR: I felt that the tone of the argument was going my way, but I also felt that I needed to be 

very careful with that and not overplay my hand. Sometimes you get set up. And I wanted to be 



 
 
 

42 
 

careful with that. I have the sense that Thurgood thought I was being a little too careful with it. And I 

have the sense that he thought I should have been a little more trenchant with my argument. But I 

didn’t think that was the right way to handle this one. 

SP: Did you ever talk to him about it?  

BR: No. And that would have been inappropriate for me to do if I’d had the opportunity, but 

no. During my time, I, there was only one occasion Thurgood came back to visit at LDF while he 

was still on the Second Circuit, before he got elevated to the Supreme Court. Other than that, I really 

didn’t have any face-to-face contact with him. And it was funny because he came to the office. And 

we all gathered in the library and there was a ladder that you used to reach the books on the higher 

shelves. And he sat on the edge of that ladder. [02:18:00] And he told one funny story and one joke 

after another. And he was so relaxed and fun and funny. And I understand that he often would tell 

jokes, and he never told the same one twice. And he had great timing. And later, Jim Nabrit said to 

me, “Well, you know what?” He said, “Cissy was calling around. Finally, she got a hold of me.” He 

said, “Thurgood was playing hooky.” Thurgood was supposed to go to the dentist, and Thurgood 

was afraid of the dentist. He didn’t want to go to the dentist. So, what he did was he came over to 

LDF to pal around with his old buddies instead of going to the dentist. Cissy was trying to find him 

and get him into the dentist chair. [laughs] But that was the only time I really had any exposure and 

interaction with Thurgood. Of course, I was just a junior lawyer and sat in the back and listened and 

enjoyed him being a raconteur.  

SP: Going back to you being in the Supreme Court, there is a moment at the very end, it’s 

after your initial summary. You summarize basically what you’re trying to do in this case in regards 

to Title VII. And one of the justices, it’s not clear who in the transcript, I guess the mic isn’t loud 

enough so it’s not clear who, says, “It does away with the age of chivalry.”  

BR: I don’t recall that, and I don’t recall who said it. Yeah. [laughs]  



 
 
 

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SP: Broadly speaking, you know, there’s that case. But broadly speaking, in those years, how 

did you feel like the Supreme Court handled LDF’s litigation?  

BR: I thought the court and all of the justices had enormous respect for LDF’s lawyers and 

lawyering [02:20:14] and the cases that LDF brought to the court. I don’t know whether that 

continues to be the case. I’m just not close enough to it. But I think that was appropriate. LDF had 

more cases before the court than anybody other than the solicitor’s office. And our cases presented 

the court with, well, more — arguably the ACLU had a lot of cases also. But our cases presented the 

court with an opportunity to rule on the basic areas of injustice that affected American life. Moreso 

than any other organization, perhaps even including the Department of Justice, because often Justice 

was in on our cases. And the court, even the conservative justices took very seriously the 

responsibility of the court to rule on those kinds of issues. And even where I thought they were too 

persnickety, they tried to be very careful of when they and how they weighed in. So, if you look at 

other areas, for example, the political questions doctrine. You know, they initially stayed out of that 

whole area in Colegrove v. Green, which was then later overruled. [02:22:21] What was it, [Baker v. 

Carr]? But only once — it was one of the several instances where Congress couldn’t reform itself. 

There’s no way you could get a constitutional amendment through. The rotten boroughs, the 

fundamental flaw of our democracy would be perpetuated indefinitely unless the court stepped in 

and took action. Monumental. Took them a while to come to it, but they did. Racial segregation 

divided our country. Could, can you imagine a Major League Baseball team or a Major League 

Football team in Atlanta, Georgia if we were still racist, segregated? I can’t. Our country would be 

fundamentally different. And the court had created the legal doctrine, and it couldn’t be undone 

unless the court came in and they were very mindful and stopped and look at how they dealt with 

Brown. I mean, Brown was argued initially, what, in [19]52? They set it back down for re-argument 

in [19]53. They waited a year before finally deciding Brown v. Board in [19]54. The Court — and 

the Court had additions and so forth that affected how it ultimately came to that conclusion. 



 
 
 

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[02:24:28] But I still say — all the members of the court are very mindful of the Court’s 

responsibility. This current court, I think, is not sufficiently mindful with the possible exception, I 

mean, Roberts is concerned. I think Kavanaugh is concerned. But by and large, the right wingers are 

not, I think, sufficiently concerned about the role and responsibility of the Court. But overall, the 

Court has been very concerned and mindful of its responsibility for ruling on the fundamental issues 

that affect the operation of our society. A lot of LDF’s cases brought that to the fore and LDF 

brought those cases in, I would argue, a very thoughtful, responsible way that reflected how LDF 

sees its responsibility for handling cases, not just an individual case, but an individual case that fits 

into the fabric of society and how society is structured and how segregation is a societal problem, 

and how then getting relief in this case will affect that social fabric in a positive way. And although 

perhaps my formulation is unique to me, I think that lots of LDFers and lots of thoughtful justices, 

judges, and indeed lawyers on the other side think about these issues. And in that regard, let me say, 

school desegregation cases, the lawyers on the other side were political. [02:26:24] And they handled 

the cases in a political way. And it was more than just lawyers on the other side. Lawyers in the 

employment area, that’s not true. They were representing corporations. They were making arguments 

for their company. A lot of times we were able to sit down with them and persuade them to counsel 

their clients. “Look, it’s not just the law. This is the right thing to do. This is the right way to 

structure your company as it fits into the larger society.” You couldn’t have gotten a school 

desegregation lawyer to look at things that way, but I know a number of employment lawyers did 

look at things that way because I’ve shared conversations with some of them. 

SP: That’s such an interesting point, because I think about these lawyers, you know, many of 

these cases were rooted in these small towns. And you think about lawyers who are representing a lot 

of time white, blue collar workers, you know, in these industries and protecting the white power 

structure.  



 
 
 

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BR: Well, if you were looking at just a local lawyer, a lot of times they would feel that way. 

But remember, the companies, particularly the larger companies, were often represented by major 

law firms from New York or Chicago or Washington. D.C. or Los Angeles or San Francisco, who 

had a more cosmopolitan perspective and who were not wrapped up in the local, social political 

infrastructure.  

SP: You’ve mentioned this before, that, you know, a lot of the work that you did lives on and 

has spread beyond the workplace that you mentioned, disparate impact in housing. What is it like for 

you to see these things that you’ve worked on enter so many different aspects of American life and 

law? [02:28:47] 

BR: Well, you know, it’s gratifying, but you can’t get too full of yourself. And look. The 

world has moved on, blessedly so. And LDF has moved on. I mean, Sherrilyn and Janai provide 

leadership of a different LDF. I earlier mentioned that historically the framework for civil rights 

change involved agitation, litigation, legislation. And that has served us well. But I think Sherrilyn 

has done a brilliant job of leading LDF beyond that. If we’re to have real movement in terms of the 

basic change in the fabric of our society, how we interact with each other, how opportunities are 

genuinely available to African-Americans fulsomely, then it involves making the case more broadly. 

[02:30:10] So she has taken LDF beyond just agitation, litigation, legislation. She continues to have 

very effective approaches in all of those areas, but she now has a very effective, broader campaign to 

take the message beyond the courts and into the media, including the mainstream media, the social 

media and not just the historic, social organizations that LDF has been successful with, the sororities 

and fraternities and the Masons and so forth, but more broadly into the African-American 

community and beyond. And I just think that that’s brilliant and called for. And we have to move 

forward with additional broader ways to communicate our message and be persuasive beyond just 

the courts and the halls of Congress and so forth. And Sherrilyn and Janai are providing brilliant 

leadership in that regard. And when I was heading up the Lawyers’ Committee, I didn’t see all that. I 



 
 
 

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was still basically, you know, agitation, litigation, legislation, how do we put it together? And that 

was okay. That was fine for the times, but they’ve moved beyond that now. And they’ve moved 

beyond me. [laughs] Like I said, again, from time to time, they’ll trot me out, give me a lifetime 

achievement award, some stuff like that, or humor me by saying, “Oh Bill, can we have lunch?” or 

whatnot. [02:32:11] 

SP: So, can you talk and, and we’ve been talking for over an hour and a half now, so thank 

you. I know we’ve taken a lot of your time today, but I just have a few more questions.  

BR: Sure. 

SP: Talk about leaving LDF and going to EEOC and that being, in a way, a continuation of 

your work. But I’d be interested to hear how it did differ. 

BR: Well, yeah, it was a continuation. Look, I thought we were really accomplishing some 

great things at LDF, and I boldly thought that if I had all those lawyers at EEOC ready, that I could 

lead, that the amount of change and good things we could do would dwarf what we were 

accomplishing at LDF. And boy, was I ever wrong. It’s different. LDF is nimble and quick, and 

we’re bringing cases that, we were highly selective in terms of the cases we took, and the cases we 

took up on appeal. The EEOC is a bureaucracy. It has to hold itself open to all claimants and process 

their charges with all with due process. And it is a bureaucracy. And bureaucracies function 

differently and slower. And LDF, I don’t want to put the EEOC lawyers down. They’re good, solid 

lawyers. LDF was getting really a special breed of lawyer. A lot of really super lawyers at EEOC and 

other government agencies, but the uniformity of super talent at LDF was not replicated with a 

uniformity of super talent at the bureaucracy. [02:34:28] And of course, when you’re leading, you’ve 

got to lead all your lawyers, not just your elite lawyers, not just your superstar lawyers. You’ve got 

to provide opportunities and supervision and guidance to all of them. And that means that you’ve got 

to modify your approach in ways that were a learning experience for me. I think I did a pretty good 

job of it, particularly in our pattern and practice cases. And a few specific cases. But by and large, at 



 
 
 

47 
 

the end of the day, at the end of a number of years, I came to the conclusion that I’d be better served 

moving back into an organization like LDF. I didn’t want to go back to LDF. And I had the 

opportunity to become a director of Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. And did that. I 

must say, one of my most satisfying personal cases was at EEOC, where I represented the agency in 

the nationwide negotiations with the steel industry. It culminated in that nationwide settlement. And 

in terms of providing relief to large numbers of people, that case probably brought relief to a larger 

number of African American workers than any other case that I ever had anything to do with, at least 

as a single case. [02:36:10] And it was really funny because — my mother and I share the same 

birthday. And it’s always been a special occasion for me to get together with her on her birthday. 

Turns out she was living in Lorain, Ohio, and they’ve got a steel mill. One of the local steelworkers 

also has a birthday on July 15th. And he would recognize my mom and give her a bouquet of flowers 

once a year. And I was there, and I met him and he said, “Oh, yeah. I know who you are.” I said, 

“Yeah?” He said, “Yeah, you signed the decree, the steel decree.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “That’s 

how I got to be an electrician, because I got to move up because I got to take advantage of the relief 

under the decree. Thank you so much.” Who knew? [laughs] So it was personally gratifying to meet 

that guy who was so kind to my mom and, you know, in Lorain, Ohio. I didn’t expect that. But that 

was nice. At Lawyers’ Committee, you know, when you’re Executive Director, you don’t really get 

to do a lot of cases yourself. Jack was unusual in that regard. I spent most of my time fundraising, 

mapping out programs, stuff like that. There was only one personal representation that I’m proud of. 

I argued a couple of cases, but the only one I’m really proud of was the one involving the King 

Holiday. The Jesse — Helms v. SCLC, where Jesse Helms was trying to reopen the old Martin 

Luther King tapes that had been placed under seal. All he wanted to do was spread dirt. And Wiley 

Branton had handled the case, but he had just left Howard and gone to work at Sidley and Austin, 

and he didn’t know whether the firm was going to allow him to do it. So, he asked me. “Bill,” he 

said, “Bill, you’ve got to take this case and you handle it personally.” Okay. And he got a hold of the 



 
 
 

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case, out of file. And I read the case and wrote a brief. And by the time it was ripe for arguing in the 

district court, Wiley had gotten approval from the firm to join me, and he made the argument in the 

district court. I had written the brief, but he made the argument. But then when it went up on appeal, 

he said, “Okay, Bill. You’ve written two briefs. Now you can argue the case on appeal.” And I got to 

argue that case on appeal. And it was gratifying in part because we defeated Jesse Helms and his 

attempted mischief, but it was also a big honor and privilege for me to work directly with Wiley 

Branton, somebody who I had known for many years and admired. I knew Wiley, Wiley knew me, 

but we really had never worked together. And that was a great pleasure. And then later, when I 

became Dean of the law school, Wiley again was very helpful because he was former Dean at 

Howard. But he was also very active and very high up in the ABA and its accreditation hierarchy. 

And so once again, he was very helpful to me as a dean of a fledgling law school. [02:40:19] And so, 

that, again, was something that was easier. Wiley was very approachable and would do the right 

thing no matter who it was. But it was me and he helped me. And I’ll always savor the occasions 

where Wiley and I worked together on the Jesse Helms case, on law school matters, and a couple of 

other ABA things where we worked together. And so, in addition to all the cases and everything else, 

I’ve just had a wonderful opportunity to work with some of the truly great and special people in the 

legal profession, people like Jack. And got a chance to do some things with Bob Carter, Julius 

[Chambers], Wiley Branton, Elaine [Jones], so it’s, I’ve really been blessed along the way. Couldn’t 

have planned it better if I had [laughs] written the script myself.  

SP: Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you want to talk about? We’ve covered a lot. I 

know there’s so much more we could talk about, but.  

BR: You know, I’ll probably think of something tonight [laughs] right before I fall asleep, 

but for the moment, no, you’ve been very thorough. And I must say, it’s been very delightful to talk 

with you.  

SP: It’s been delightful to talk with you. 



 
 
 

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BR: All right. 

SP: Thank you so much.  

BR: All right. [02:41:49] 

[END OF INTERVIEW]