Ted Shaw Interview (Pt 2) Transcript

This item is featured in:

Ted Shaw Oral History

    Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project  

 

Theodore (Ted) Shaw, Pt. 2 

Interviewed by Seth Kotch 

June 22, 2023 

Chapel Hill, North Carolina 

Length: 02:16:59 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 Theodore Shaw, the Southern Oral History Program, and LDF. 

It has been lightly edited, in consultation with Theodore Shaw, 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] 

 Seth Kotch: This is Seth Kotch from the Southern Oral History Program at the University of 

North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is June 22nd, 2023, and I’m here in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 

with Mr. Theodore Shaw in Mr. Shaw’s home office to conduct an interview for the LDF Oral 

History Project. Thank you very much.  

 Theodore [Ted] Shaw: Thank you, Seth.  

 SK: Of course. And this is part two here, so I’m not going to ask you to introduce yourself, 

but I do want to travel quickly to 1987 to the creation of the Western Regional Office in Los 

Angeles. Can you talk a little bit about the creation of that office, what its goals were, what your 

goals were? 

 TS: Julius Chambers was the Director-Counsel and President of the Legal Defense Fund in 

1987. And Julius asked me to relocate to Los Angeles to open a Western Regional Office. I was a 

New Yorker by birth and grew up in New York, and I had no desire to go to Los Angeles. But I 

wasn’t going to say no to Julius. And so, I did go to L.A., and the purpose was to get a Western 

Regional Office started. And it was not the first time there was a Legal Defense Fund office in 

California or on the West Coast. The first time, there was an office in San Francisco. And that office, 

I don’t remember how many years it was in operation, but at some point it closed. [00:02:07] And so 

part of the Legal Defense Fund’s thinking at that time was in California there was this shift from 

Northern California to Southern California in terms of not only the economy of California, but even 

for purposes of having a presence in California for the Legal Defense Fund. Everything was 

happening in the southern part of Los Angeles by this time, and in L.A. in particular. So we started a 

West Coast office. I was joined by a lawyer who actually had been at the Legal Defense Fund even 

before I joined LDF, and that was Patrick Patterson. Originally, Patrick was from Indiana. Patrick 

and I got the office started and we were eventually joined by a third lawyer who had also been in the 

New York office of the Legal Defense Fund. So, it worked out there were three of us who at one 



 

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time or another had been in the main office of the Legal Defense Fund. The third lawyer was Bill 

Lann Lee. And I remember when Patrick and I got the office started, we thought strategically about 

what kind of cases we were going to bring. I remember, I thought we should bring housing 

discrimination cases. I had some experience in housing discrimination cases, but the idea was that 

those cases were somewhat manageable in terms of the size and the complexity. [00:04:15] And not 

only that, the facts were, they were of a nature where they could be dramatized, and discrimination 

could be dramatized, you know, you do tests on apartment owners and find out if they’re engaging in 

discrimination. It’s pretty straightforward stuff. But we were also trying to increase the penalty for 

housing discrimination. Of course, housing discrimination plays such a central role in the lives of 

Black folks. You know, school segregation is in part related to housing discrimination. But also, 

other forms of discrimination — employment, you know, where you live impacts where you work. 

And even when you think about issues that we now call environmental justice issues, where you live 

means you may be exposed to certain risks, health risks, etcetera. So, we did in fact start with 

housing discrimination cases, and we won at that time what was the biggest settlement in housing 

discrimination in Southern California. And I think really, probably, the largest settlement not only in 

California, but one of the largest, if not the largest in the nation, when we litigated this case. That 

was a great experience, but we also filed employment discrimination cases. [00:06:14] We filed 

cases involving voting rights, or rather we got involved, we intervened in a voting rights case. The 

politics of the Los Angeles metropolitan area were in some ways, I don’t want to say they were 

unique, but there were things that were different from what I had experienced in New York. Growing 

up in New York, African Americans, Black folks lived with and interacted with people who were 

Latino or Puerto Ricans. And you know, cheek by jowl, interacted all the time. In California there 

were real tensions, particularly in Southern California, between African Americans and Mexican 

Americans. And I remember we consciously wanted to work as allies with people in the Mexican 

American community. We had some folks in our community, Black folks said, well, wait a minute, 



 

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you know, Mexican Americans are trying to challenge us for political power. They are taking our 

jobs, et cetera. And we worked closely with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund. Had a good 

working relationship with MALDEF, and I remember they told us sometimes that their constituency 

would sometimes rather, say, “Why are you working so closely as allies with African Americans? 

You know, we’re trying — this is our time. This is our day, you know, not theirs, anymore.” As if it 

ever were. So that was, that was different. [00:08:16] But we were very conscious about those 

politics. And it was a good three years for me. It was a good experience. I’m glad I lived in Los 

Angeles, even though I always stayed, in my mind, an East Coast person, a New Yorker. Some 

people go to L.A. and they never look back. I wasn’t one of them. But it was a good experience. I 

think if you understand not only the culture of the United States, but indeed in some ways culture 

that has impacted the world, the television and movie industry in particular, you got to understand 

L.A. And so I had that experience. I was only out in L.A. for about three years. In fact, almost as 

soon as I got to L.A., I got a call from a lawyer I knew who did capital punishment work as a 

cooperating attorney for the Legal Defense Fund. And he had gone into academia. He was at the 

University of Michigan, and he called me asking whether I was interested in teaching. And it was 

hard for me to keep a straight face because the one thing I never thought of doing when I got out of 

law school was teaching. I had no interest in teaching. I wanted to practice. And I said, I can’t do 

that. And in any event, I just came out here to L.A. to start a West Coast office. And he said, “Well, 

how long do you think you want to do that?" “I got to give it at least three years,” I said, I don’t 

know where I pull that out of, but that’s what I said. And he said, "Can I call you then, after three 

years?” [00:10:12] And I said, “Yeah, you can call me.” And he did. And that’s what led to me going 

into academia. But those three years in L.A., and it was not only L.A. We opened a West Coast 

office, so I remember we did a case in the Palm Springs area, a small town called Indio in which we 

represented Black and brown people who lived in a fairly poor community adjacent to Palm Springs. 

And there was a shopping mall that wanted to expand, and they wanted to have the city of Indio take 



 

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the homes of these folks so they could expand the mall, wanted to take them by eminent domain. We 

represented that community, and we got a fairly good outcome there. But we also did some work in 

Northern California. We were concerned with what was coming down the track at the University of 

California at Berkeley. The issues that we began to see developing around the country with respect to 

challenges to diversity efforts by colleges and universities. So, higher education issues we were 

thinking about. And it was a good experience for me to be out in California.  

 SK: You raise a couple of big questions. I want to touch on one of them because I think a lot 

of people see Brown v. Board and believe or hope that that resolves segregation in schools and I 

think perhaps don’t imagine that even if it did, which it did not, those people are then going home to 

integrated neighborhoods and they’re shopping in integrated stores and things like that. Can you talk 

a little bit about what it meant to be an attorney working against housing discrimination, employment 

discrimination, racial segregation in these different spaces when Brown had presumably swept away 

that problem?  

 TS: [00:12:50] My first experience with working on issues of housing discrimination, and the 

relationship between housing and school segregation, was even before I came to the Legal Defense 

Fund, when I was at the Justice Department, Civil Rights Division, right out of law school. And in 

fact, the Civil Rights Division at that time, under the leadership of a former Legal Defense Fund 

attorney Drew Days, Drew S. Days III, who would go on in a later administration. I was there under 

his leadership in the Civil Rights Division in the Carter administration. And I think it was the Clinton 

administration he became Solicitor General. I may have that wrong. I think it was the Clinton 

administration. It could have only been Clinton or Obama, but I think it was Clinton. And the point is 

that the Civil Rights Division actually melded two of its sections together, housing and education, 

because of the theory and the consciousness that those two things were closely related. And in fact, 

the idea was to work with them in a way that recognized that connection. That’s how I ended up 

working on the Yonkers case, which was the first joint school-housing discrimination case. But even 



 

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after I ended up with the Legal Defense Fund, cases like the Kansas City Case, which consumed a 

great deal of my life for a number of years, we put on evidence that demonstrated how the Kansas 

City, Missouri metropolitan area — actually, when you say the Kansas City, Missouri metropolitan 

area, you really are also talking about Kansas City, Kansas metropolitan area — came look the way 

they did, and to be segregated. [00:15:14] Massively segregated. When I was at the Justice 

Department, I worked on a housing discrimination case in the largest suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. 

And again, we put on evidence to show how the Cleveland metropolitan area came to look the way it 

did. That this was at the same time that there was a huge school desegregation case being litigated by 

the NAACP, our sister civil rights, or more accurately our parent civil rights organization. So, the 

connection between schools and housing, huge. But also, other areas of life. Transportation, you 

know, how highways were built, who got displaced, where they were displaced to, and the 

segregation that came along with those practices and policies. Certainly those of us who did that kind 

of work were conscious of the long history of the connectedness of all those walks of life and areas 

of life. It’s what Richard Rothstein has written about now, not only Richard, but very powerfully 

Richard. You know, in his The Color of Law. So, yes, we litigated those kinds of cases. And we were 

very conscious of those connections.  

 SK: When you’re thinking about making those connections clear to a judge or to the public, 

and I assume that you were fighting on two fronts here, generally, you need to convince a courtroom 

and you need to convince the public. [00:17:15] And you’re thinking along Rothstein’s lines. And if 

I’m not wrong, and I may well be, you know, he writes about what maybe an attorney would call 

facially neutral laws that result in discrimination. So, we can’t write discrimination into the law 

anymore, but somehow they end up being discriminatory. How do you make that case, to show that a 

law that on its face does not acknowledge even the existence of race can have racially discriminatory 

outcomes?  



 

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 TS: Well, I don't accept much of the jurisprudence that Supreme Court has developed over 

the years. I think that there is a basic insensitivity, if not invalidity, in much of that jurisprudence. 

What am I talking about? With all due respect, the distinction between what’s called intentional 

discrimination — invidious discrimination, based in the belief that people are inferior or superior on 

grounds of race. That distinction that is drawn there and what the Supreme Court has described as a 

non-intentional discrimination. De jure and de facto. By law and by fact, but not by law and not 

intentional. I think that what’s called de facto discrimination isn’t as innocent as it’s purported to be. 

Take Brown versus Board of Education, which you mentioned, and school desegregation, the long 

struggle to desegregate public schools and eventually in many of the southern communities, but even 

northern and western Communities, school districts intentionally segregated maybe in a different 

way. [00:19:36] So, for example, in the South there were these state laws. Schools couldn’t be 

integrated. They had to be segregated. In the north, whether we’re talking about Cleveland or 

whether we’re talking about in the West, Denver and in Boston, for example, again in the Northeast. 

School districts that ended up being segregated because of conscious decisions about where to place 

schools, where to build them, where not to build them. How school zone lines were manipulated, you 

know, all kinds of actions that ended up segregating public schools. Some of them were found to be 

intentional. Some of them, Court said, they were de facto segregated. Didn’t draw that distinction. 

Well take what happened in the South. You finally got, after 20 years or so, some measure of 

desegregation. And then the Court said what? Well, “We’re going to absolve these school districts of 

any further responsibility to consciously maintain desegregation. We’re going to declare that they are 

unitary as opposed to being racially dual school systems. One for Black students, one for white 

students. And we’re going to then withdraw court supervision from those school districts.” Well, the 

courts were saying they had met their responsibilities. They had to borrow some language from one 

of the most important Supreme Court decisions of that era, Green v. New Kent County. [00:21:36] 

They had desegregated their school districts. They had cured their violations root and branch. Then 



 

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what happens? Well, what happens is the Court says, “No more responsibility to desegregate. No 

more bussing to desegregate.” And what follows is that the old patterns of segregation are 

reestablished because the housing segregation that was in part itself a product of school segregation 

once again become operative. And yet, you know, to borrow from the Catholic Church, you absolve 

them from responsibility, go and sin no more. And you pretend that the reestablished segregation has 

nothing to do with all of the discrimination and segregation that happened before. Bussing plans 

didn’t cure the violations. They neutralized them. And the moment you stop that process of 

neutralizing them, the bussing plan is dismantled. Once again, they’re resegregated. So that’s the 

reality of what happened. And segregation stays with us today because we never really got rid of, 

root and branch, the effects of segregation and the interrelatedness of schools and housing with one 

another and all these other aspects of how we live.  

 SK: [00:23:31] The metaphor that I heard, I’m sure I’m stealing from someone, was that if 

you’re standing in the rain using an umbrella and it’s keeping you dry, then that means you can fold 

the umbrella up and put it away.  

 TS: Yeah. Yeah, that that was Justice [Ginsburg] in a voting rights case.  

 SK: Yeah.  

 TS: Not just any voting rights case, but Shelby County.  

 SK: Shelby County, right. Which removed in a similar way to what you’re describing, that 

supervision over voting discrimination in certain parts of, particularly in the South. So you 

mentioned that you were — obviously these issues are so intertwined. I mean, I’m curious how you 

disentangle them in front of a court in a way because you really can’t disentangle these issues. But 

one of the ones that you are, that you say you’re approaching is the question of education and higher 

education.  

 TS: Yeah.  



 

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 SK: And so I’m guessing that you do pick up the phone after those three years when your to-

be colleague at the University of Michigan calls you — and if you can recall who that person was.  

 TS: Oh, of course I can. He’s a dear friend. Sam Gross. Again, a Capital Punishment lawyer.  

 SK: And so, he does lure you into teaching at the University of Michigan Law School?  

 TS: He does. He does. And at the time the dean of the law school there was Lee Bollinger. 

Lee, of course, goes on to be the president of the University of Michigan and then in time goes on to 

be the president of Columbia University.  

 SK: I think he just retired.  

 TS: [00:25:26] He is just retiring now. But while he was both the dean of the law school, first 

at Michigan and then the president of the University of Michigan, he becomes the named defendant 

in two lawsuits that are eventually filed against those entities or institutions. And Lee becomes a real 

champion of the conscious efforts to maintain diversity in higher education. More than that and 

perhaps immodestly, I claim some impact in all of this, Lee ends up being an advocate of 

consciously applying the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause as opposed to, or more 

accurately in conjunction with, the First Amendment’s Academic Freedom Doctrine, which was used 

to support diversity efforts in higher education. Those two things are related, but they’re not the 

same. And Lee ends up as an advocate and one who understands the 14th Amendment and how 

important that is in keeping the doors of selective institutions of higher education open.  

 SK: Can you explain a little bit to those of us who aren’t conversant with the Constitution, 

how the 14th Amendment protects race conscious admissions policy?  

 TS: [00:27:28] So there were, of course, three great amendments to the U.S. Constitution in 

the aftermath of the Civil War. The 13th, the 14th and 15th. The 13th Amendment simply declared 

that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime for which one is 

duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or its territories. That’s different than the other 

two amendments. Each amendment is different or unique. But they are all interrelated in ways that 



 

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the Supreme Court has often failed to recognize. 13th Amendment is in 1865, it’s ratified. End of the 

Civil War. The 14th Amendment becomes, really in the minds of many, the great post-Civil War 

Amendment. The first thing that the 14th Amendment did right out of the box was declare that all 

persons born or naturalized in United States are citizens of the United States and of the states in 

which they reside. That was Section One of the 14th Amendment. And it was specifically enacted to 

overturn the Dred Scott decision, because the Dred Scott decision, written by one of the more 

infamous Justices or Chief Justices now, Roger Tawney. [00:29:34] You know, that case was one 

that said that Black people could not be citizens of the United States. Not only people who were 

enslaved. Because, of course, Dred Scott was about whether Black folks who were enslaved and who 

escaped slavery or were brought out of slavery in that case and then were brought back into a slave 

state, whether they were free by reason of having been brought out of the slave state into a state that, 

or a territory which did not practice slavery. But the Supreme Court said in Dred Scott. No Black 

person, they couldn’t bring the lawsuit. They didn’t have standing. That was a civil procedure case as 

much as it was a constitutional case. They could not bring a lawsuit because they were not citizens. 

They couldn’t maintain a lawsuit. And no Black people could be citizens, including Black people 

who had not lived in slavery. That’s what the Dred Scott case said. Think about how dramatically 

wrong that decision was and what it did to all Black people in the United States, including those who 

either had never been enslaved or, like Dred Scott, who had escaped slavery, or Harriet Tubman, et 

cetera. Section One of the 14th Amendment put that to rest. You know, all persons born and 

naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and the state in which they reside. 

[00:31:32] But went on to do a number of other things, some of which for so long we thought was 

dead letter law but raise questions now about how dead letter they are. So, for example— well, of 

course, before even getting to those parts of the 14th Amendment, the 14th Amendment also 

encapsulated in it a due process clause. One already existed in the Fifth Amendment, but the 14th 

Amendment included a due process clause. But also, perhaps most importantly, the Equal Protection 



 

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Clause. “Nor shall any State deprive any person of the equal protection of the law.” That became in 

time, not right away, but in time the workhorse of the 14th Amendment. But there were also 

provisions that said that those who had engaged in rebellion against the United States could not hold 

public office. And, they had committed treason. They couldn’t hold public office unless Congress 

removed that disability. When I mentioned that that had been long thought to be dead letter law, well 

some of us began to think about that again after the January 6th Insurrection. Some people call that a 

riot. It was more than a riot. You know, it was an insurrection. Those people had taken an oath of 

office. Putting them squarely in the sights of that part of the 14th Amendment that said that 

individuals who did that without that disability being removed couldn’t hold public office any 

longer. [00:33:44] And the 14th Amendment also had a provision that was thinking about all of the 

debt that had been racked up by the United States during the war. And the 14th Amendment said that 

the public debt of the United States could not be questioned. Recently, we had folks raise the 

question of whether that meant that this moment— not the first time it happened, maybe it won’t be 

the last time — this moment in which the question of whether or not the United States would welch 

on its responsibilities with respect to the public debt. Some people were saying, “Well, you know, 

President Biden could look to the 14th Amendment for that.” That’s not what he wanted to do. It 

would have been legally challenged. But I’m saying that’s one of the most important amendments to 

the Constitution, one of the most important parts of the Constitution for all kinds of reasons. Then, of 

course, there was the 15th Amendment. Which for the first time made the right to vote guaranteed 

against racial discrimination for Black men. Because for the first time, of course it also introduced 

the word “male” in three places into the Constitution. Women, white women, who many of them had 

fought to bring about the end of slavery, they felt understandably betrayed by that language. 

[00:35:38] But as the great historian Eric Foner said, in politics at that time, it was the Negro hour. It 

wasn’t women’s hour. Women had to wait of course, until the 19th Amendment, 1920, to see their 

rights protected. The right to vote in particular. But those are the three great Civil War amendments. 



 

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Changed this country in fundamental ways. And yet most of what happened in those three 

amendments had to wait for another 100 years to have the meaning that the 39th Congress, for 

example, that adopted the 14th Amendment, intended it to have.  

 SK: [00:36:34] Can you explain why, for example, the 14th Amendment applies to the 

behavior of states and institutions, rather the federal government only? 

 TS: Yeah. Well, that’s, that’s an important question. So, the language of the 14th 

Amendment is language, “Nor shall any state deprive any person of the equal protection of the law.” 

So, the Supreme Court has interpreted the 14th Amendment, for example, to protect against 

governmental discrimination, not individual discrimination, private persons. There are many 

arguments that the protections, anti-discrimination protections of the 14th Amendment should be 

applied, but also — should be applied to protect against the private discriminations — but also 

connected to all of this, I think, one has to think about the inter-relationship, at least many people, 

and I’m one of them, who believe that the 13th Amendment has with the 14th Amendment. And the 

13th Amendment doesn’t say anything about the government. It says nor shall, I mean neither 

slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist, period, within the United States, doesn't matter who did 

it. And so, there’s a line of case law that talks about the 13th Amendment prohibiting the badges and 

the incidents of slavery. And that was meant to mean that the treatment of African Americans as 

inferiors, as people who could be discriminated against, would be inconsistent, at least that was the 

argument that was made, with the 13th Amendment as well as the 14th Amendment. [00:38:54] But 

in 1883, slavery hardly cold in its grave, the Supreme Court of the United States decides a case that 

struck down a series of civil rights laws, five cases consolidated, and the cases were called the Civil 

Rights Cases. And there’s this passage in the opinion Justice Bradley wrote in which he says, as 

closely as I can recall it, that when a man who has been subjected to, emerges from slavery and by 

the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the concomitants of that state, that that man, yes, it’s 

sexist language, at some point has to basically stand on his own two feet and cease to be the, quote, 



 

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special favorites of the laws, end quote. Struck down those civil rights laws, but also introduced this 

concept of what’s now called reverse discrimination. The notion that Black people were being asked 

to be treated, they were seeking to be treated as, quote, the special favorites of the laws, end quote. 

Slavery hardly cold in the grave. We’ve been dealing with that ever since then. And even today, as 

we sit here, that concept, that issue is what’s at issue when these cases that are before the Supreme 

Court challenging the notion of affirmative action or diversity efforts in higher education.  

 SK: [00:41:01] And on that, I will note that we were wondering if there was going to be a 

Supreme Court decision before this interview about affirmative action here at the University of 

North Carolina that would obviously have wide effect. A generation or so earlier, you were authoring 

the admissions policy at the University of Michigan. And if I’m not mistaken, and presumably taking 

into account the history that you just laid out for me.  

 TS: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, I was involved, along with many others, in the struggle to 

preserve opportunities in higher education, but was involved in the Michigan cases and a number of 

other cases since then. And as was said during the struggle for liberation from colonialism and 

racism in southern Africa, often the Portuguese phrase a luta continua was used. The struggle 

continues. And that’s where we are today.  

 SK: So you were in Michigan for maybe three years, from 1990 to 1993.  

 TS: That’s right.  

 SK: I don’t know if you were there for the victory of UNC over Michigan in the Final Four? 

[laughs] 

 TS: [laughs] I remember that night so well. I happened to be at a — I was on the board of the 

Poverty and Race Research Action Council and we had a board meeting out in San Francisco and 

that game was that night. And so, I remember watching that game very clearly, but, you know, yes, I 

was gone from Michigan by then if I remember correctly. And back at the Legal Defense Fund. 

[00:43:24] 



 

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 SK: Right, back at the Legal Defense Fund. So, you rejoined LDF as Associate Director-

Counsel. What brought you back?  

 TS: Elaine Jones. You know, you don’t say no to Elaine Jones.  

 SK: Tell me about Elaine Jones. 

 TS: Elaine Jones is a force of nature. I had the good fortune to be Elaine’s colleague at the 

Legal Defense Fund when I first joined LDF, and she was in the Washington, D.C. office. Elaine 

from Virginia. The first Black woman to graduate from the University of Virginia Law School. But 

if you know anything about Elaine, she’s an extraordinary woman, a powerful woman. And when 

Julius decided that it was time for him to end his years as the Director-Counsel and to return to North 

Carolina, you know, Julius from North Carolina, he loved North Carolina. He was always destined to 

come back home. And so, he did. And Elaine succeeded him as the first woman to be the Director-

Counsel and President of the Legal Defense Fund. You know, Elaine had been special assistant to 

William T. Coleman when he was Secretary of Transportation, the second African American cabinet 

official, the first one being Robert Weaver, who headed HUD. Housing and Urban Development. 

[00:45:14] Robert Weaver had been a, a member of the Board of the Legal Defense Fund. While 

William Coleman, a member of the board, in fact the vice chair of the board of the Legal Defense 

Fund. Elaine worked for him for a while. She left the Legal Defense Fund, took a leave, worked for 

Bill Coleman. But then came back to the Legal Defense Fund. There’s a pattern here. You know. 

People who think they’re leaving the Legal Defense Fund being pulled back. But when Elaine was 

thinking about becoming head of the Legal Defense Fund, she called me. I was at Michigan. I was 

pretty comfortable there. I liked Ann Arbor. And Elaine said, in her own way, “Ted, you got to come 

back.” And I said, “Well, Elaine, you know, I’m happy where I am.” But you don’t really say no to 

Elaine Jones. So, I took a leave from Michigan. Which was good enough for Elaine at the time. But I 

think she probably knew that it’d be hard for me to get back to Michigan. And I never did. But I did 

become very involved in the two cases, the higher education cases. One involving the law school, the 



 

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Grutter case, my involvement had to be limited because I had a role in drafting the admissions plan 

that was at issue. I remember I was deposed, so when you’re a deponent in a case, you may be called 

at trial. And one thing you don’t want to do as a lawyer, well there may be a number of things you 

don’t want to do, but you don’t want to be a lawyer and a witness in the same case. [00:47:23] So 

that was my role mostly in that case, although I worked with the lawyers who were representing the 

University of Michigan Law School. My role in the undergraduate case was a more traditional role. 

That is to say I was the lead lawyer for Black and Latino lawyers who intervened in the 

undergraduate case, the Gratz case.  

 SK: So that’s Gratz v. Bollinger?  

 TS: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.  

 SK: Can you talk a little bit more about Gratz and Grutter and about what they meant to the 

LDF’s approach to these questions about what they meant for higher education, etcetera? 

 TS: Well, I chuckle because I remember a meeting in the offices of the Legal Defense Fund. 

I had gone back to the Legal Defense Fund already, as I said, because. Elaine had asked me to. I 

remember when the two cases were filed, there was a meeting that we had with some lawyers who 

came from Detroit. And they wanted to represent the interveners in the undergraduate case. And we 

were of the view that we should represent them, or at least we should work together. There were 

some tensions at first. That’s often the case in instances like this. In the end we worked as co-counsel 

and I’d say for me one of my fondest memories is the relationship we have with the lawyers in the in 

the undergraduate case, the lawyers for Michigan that were very committed to the protection of the 

interests of Black folk. [00:49:41] One of those lawyers had had a close relationship with Malcolm 

X. Another lawyer, the other lawyer was one of the first African American athletes in the SEC 

Division. Southern Education Conference, I think that stood for, but he was a basketball player. One 

of the first ones there. It was wonderful to work with them. They were my kind of folk. The law 



 

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school case, as I said, we could not intervene in and did not because of my issues having been 

involved in drafting the plan.  

 SK: And just for the record, the law school is Grutter and the undergraduate case is Gratz. 

 TS: Is Gratz. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, at the end of the day as you probably know, those 

cases were decided in a split fashion. The law school admissions plan was upheld. You know, the 

thinking, at least my thinking, when I was on the faculty at the law school and I was, I was assigned 

by Lee Bollinger, as you know, the dean, to be one of the faculty members on that committee, and at 

least my thinking was we wanted to make sure that that admissions plan was completely compliant 

with the only governing precedent at the time, which was Board of Regents of the University of 

California versus Alan Bakke. Decided in 1978. [00:51:45] You know, even as we sit here, I think 

I’ve said this before. But I remember as a law student, a rising third year law student being in the 

Supreme Court on the day that Bakke was decided. I remember, I’ll remember that all my days. And 

here we are. All these years later. Almost 50, 50 years later now and we may be on the verge, 

although I hope it isn’t so, of what victory was snatched from the jaws of defeat in the Bakke case 

being overturned by this conservative Supreme Court. The undergraduate case, for some very 

pragmatic reasons, was not the same as the law school admissions case, even though at that time, I 

can tell you I think I can say this now, I had urged some changes in the undergraduate admissions 

plan. You know, Bakke said that you couldn’t have quotas. You had to have one standard for 

admissions that applied to all applicants. Said a number of other things. But those were two of the 

most important things that the Supreme Court said in Bakke. When I say the Supreme Court, it really 

was Justice Louis Powell because he wrote an opinion that straddled two camps of justices and they 

did not agree on the rationale, or there wasn’t a clear agreement on the rationale that supported race 

conscious admissions. [00:53:52] So it’s a very complicated case, but that was the case that we were 

trying to agree with. The problem that the undergraduate institution had is a problem that many large 

colleges and universities have in their undergraduate admissions program. They get so many 



 

18 
 

applicants. They’re looking for a fairly manageable way to evaluate these applicants. And usually, 

they apply a process of dividing the applicants into three pools. Presumptive admits, presumptive 

denies and then the discretionary pool, that’s where they have to do all the work. And what they use 

very often is standardized tests in determining who gets into what pool. And they overvalue 

standardized tests in admissions when they do that. And so, you know, the College of Literature, 

Science, and the Arts, the undergraduate part of the University of Michigan, used that. And it 

weighted applicants, and particularly minority applicants — I mean, it was weighting all the 

applicants, trying to give them scores, scored weighting. And they gave Black and brown students 

points and a point system for being minority students. That made them vulnerable if you understood 

what the Supreme Court opinion in Bakke or Justice Powell’s opinion said. That at least seemed 

pretty clear to me at the time. [00:55:50] But the undergraduate institution didn’t change that, and 

that ended up being struck down by the Supreme Court. Not a surprise. Actually, I thought, when, on 

the day it happened, after the law school admissions plan had been upheld, I thought that wasn’t the 

worst outcome. You know, give some red meat to the conservatives on the court, but then send the 

undergraduate institution home to work on becoming more compliant with the general principle that 

institutions could consciously try to achieve diversity and say, okay, you didn’t do it the way it needs 

to be done, go back to work, which is what happened. So that was the essence of it. There’s a lot 

more it could be said, because in fact we took the position, Black and brown students, that the 

University of Michigan in some ways discriminated against Black and brown students even as they 

were trying to achieve diversity. What do I mean? Well, they weighted the high schools that Black 

and brown students came from, and white students, for that matter, and they gave them more points 

or credits if the high schools had higher S.A.T. averages. Well, we know that Black and brown 

students in general don’t score as highly as white students or Asian American students, and before 

white students start feeling smug about it or white folks start feeling smug about it, white students 

don’t score as highly as Asian American students do or Asian students do. [00:57:45] I draw a 



 

19 
 

distinction because it’s not only Asian Americans, it’s Asian applicants, it’s an international 

university in many ways. But the point is, is that we made that point and that argument because, you 

know, a Black student who attended a school that was a highly segregated Black school, no matter 

how highly they performed on standardized tests or on their GPA, would still lose some 

competitiveness as compared to white students who went to schools in predominantly white districts, 

school districts. Kind of a complicated argument, but not that complicated. For that matter, white 

students who attended predominantly Black schools in Detroit, and there weren’t a lot of them by 

that time, they also suffered that same disability. Black students who attended predominantly white 

schools in suburban districts would get the benefit of the advantage of the white schools being 

weighted more highly. So, there’s a lot that was going on in the undergraduate admissions scheme 

that was problematic. It wasn’t just the part that the Supreme Court fastened on to and striking it 

down.  

 SK: Well, and that points to one of these, it feels the eternal complexities of white 

supremacy, which is that generally white people benefit, but some white people pay a specific price 

in the same way that sometimes Black people benefit from white supremacy. But generally, Black 

people pay a heavy price.  

 TS: That’s right. That’s right.  

 SK: [00:59:49] One thing that I was surprised to learn about LDF was that the role of 

Associate Director-Counsel is a fairly rare role. It hasn’t existed all that often. It’s not a very good 

way of putting it, but there have been, I think, fewer Associate Director-Counsels than there have 

been Director-Counsels.  

 TS: Wow.  

 SK: [laughs] 

 TS: I’ll have to think about that for a minute because not in my time.  

 SK: Right.  



 

20 
 

 TS: By — I’m not sure how true that is. Let me, let me just — and it’s worth, it’s worth 

thinking about. And I say that because during Thurgood’s time, Thurgood Marshall's time as 

Director-Counsel, that, you know, Thurgood was the show, so to speak. Although I often say, I’ll 

say, I used to say it while he was alive. And I’ll say it now he’s gone. Bob Carter deserved as much 

credit for Brown as anyone in his time, dead or alive. Bob Carter wanted to succeed Thurgood 

Marshall. It’s no secret. He and Thurgood Marshall had some huge and bitter differences, I think, 

over the fact that he was not Thurgood’s successor. Thurgood Marshall chose his successor. And he 

never really felt compelled to justify how he chose Jack Greenberg. But it was a controversial 

decision. What I’m struggling to remember, though, I think maybe you’re right, insofar as I’m not 

sure that Bob Carter had a formal designation as the number two, although I think he may have been 

broadly understood to be the number two person at LDF at the time. [01:02:02] But I think after Jack 

became Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, it wasn’t that long after that, at some point 

after that, I need to go back and think about this, that Jim Nabrit, James Nabrit III, his father being 

James Nabrit Junior, who was on brief in Brown, litigated the Washington, D.C. case that was one of 

the five Brown cases and eventually became the president of Howard University. But James Nabrit 

III, Jim Nabrit, was the Associate Director-Counsel of Legal Defense Fund for many years. 

Certainly, before I got to the LDF and during my first years at LDF it was Jim Nabrit. And for many 

years after he was Julius’s Associate Director-Counsel throughout his, his time there. And I think 

when, I’m trying to remember when Jim left LDF, but certainly, obviously by the time Elaine 

became Director-Counsel, she was asking me to come take that position. So, I guess Jim had left. I 

want to say a word about Jim Nabrit. When I first came to LDF, I was so intimidated by him. I 

thought that he was, he was a lawyer’s lawyer. He was s taskmaster, I thought. I just didn’t know if I 

could ever live up to Jim Nabrit’s standard that he set. [01:04:02] In time, as I came to know Jim and 

work with him over the years, and certainly by the end of his life, I wasn’t intimidated by him 

anymore. And in fact, I came to really love him. But he never lost that aura of being a lawyer’s 



 

21 
 

lawyer. He was a tremendous lawyer. And what he meant for Jack Greenberg as his Associate 

Director-Counsel, he also meant for Julius when Julius came on. At some point, he left because I 

guess Elaine — yeah, Elaine had to become the Associate-Counsel during Julius’s time there. 

Because when Julius left, I remember many of us wanted Elaine to follow. Elaine wasn’t necessarily 

so anxious, at least I don’t think she was, to follow. But thank God she, she did. I think Elaine knew 

what that job meant and what it took out of people, it could take out of people. And so. But she took 

the job, and it was, it was important. It was great for LDF and beyond. 

 SK: So, you were the Associate Director-Counsel during 9/11. The terrorist attacks. And the 

offices were, I understand, fairly close to Ground Zero.  

 TS: [01:06:01] On September 11th, yeah. Yeah.  

 SK: Yeah, yeah, [inaudible]. And —    

 TS: Yes. Yeah. I also want to give some perspective to this. I’ll never forget, I — in the 

weeks, a month or so before 9/11, I and some others at LDF, but also beyond LDF and the civil 

rights community, many of us were in South Africa, in Durban, at the World Conference Against 

Racism. And there’s a whole story about that conference that still has never been told. Because 9/11 

happened and it, it kind of superseded everything. But I remember landing at JFK a few days before 

9/11. And there was this young white fellow who was on the plane. He was South African, and he 

was so excited about landing in New York. And we have been talking on the flight a little bit. And as 

we landed at JFK, he asked me if you could see the city from there. Because, you know, JFK is a 

little ways out. And I pointed to the Twin Towers. And said, you know, there, those are, there’s the 

World Trade Center. I remembered that a few days later after they fell. Our offices were eight or 

nine blocks from the Twin Towers. And you know, of course I remember that day. You know, that, 

that day is one of the most consequential days now in American history. But certainly, you know, in 

in my life. I remember that day very clearly. [01:08:18] And I remember beyond that, some of the 

things that played out in the days after 9/11. I remember bringing the state attorney general from 



 

22 
 

Georgia to the office, he wanted to visit the offices of the Legal Defense Fund. Most of these stories 

haven’t been told. We were involved in a struggle with the state of Georgia at that time over one of 

these higher education access cases involving the University of Georgia at Athens, the flagship 

campus. And there was a case that was being brought against the University of Georgia that’s very 

much like the Michigan cases and the UT cases and these other cases. And the attorney general for 

Georgia at that time was an African American. And he was, could have been Republican, but he was 

certainly more conservative. And he also was ambitious. He wanted to be governor of Georgia. So, 

he was playing to a white constituency and a more conservative constituency. But I remember he 

wanted to come up not long after 9/11 and he wanted to visit us in the office. What he really wanted 

to do, we went up to our — we had roof rights. He wanted to go up to our roofs and we could look 

over and, a few blocks down, and we could see the smoldering remains. Literally still smoking, 

smoldering. And the acrid smell that was in the air for months afterwards. You know, he wanted to 

see that. We took him up to the roof and we showed him that, et cetera. But we also continued to do 

some battle with him, and Georgia, about that. [01:10:27] But I can remember all of that very clearly. 

I can remember those offices being closed for a while because we couldn’t get access to them. But I 

remember Elaine and I got on a plane. I’m trying, I can’t remember how long after 9/11 — for a 

while you couldn’t even fly. Nobody was getting on commercial planes. As soon as they started up 

again, though, Elaine and I were going down to Georgia to see that, the state attorney general. His 

name was Thurbert. Thurbert Baker, I think his name was. And I remember, we got on this plane. 

And it was a pretty big plane. I don’t remember if they were running 757s, probably not by then. But 

whatever it was, it was a pretty decent — and we were almost alone, except for the flight attendants 

and the pilots on that plane. I remember that very clearly. And there’s another story that Elaine and I 

have hardly told, and I’ll mention this, but Elaine and I hardly ever flew together. You know, we 

were trying to kind of cover more ground, so it was rarely that we flew together. We went to a fund 

raiser. I don’t remember whether it was in Boston or in Chicago, but we were flying back. This is 



 

23 
 

before 9/11. Maybe a few months before 9/11. I'm hesitant to tell this story, but I’m going to tell it. 

And the reason I’m hesitant to tell it is because it, it makes me think that even civil rights lawyers 

like myself, I won’t speak for Elaine, are subject to engaging in certain ways of thinking that, you 

know, on reflection, I’m uncomfortable with. [01:12:50] Elaine and I got on this plane, this flight. 

And we passed through first class because, you know, we were good stewards of LDF’s money. We 

sat in coach. And as we passed through, there were about six Middle Eastern men who were sitting 

in first class and I’m conscious of saying this too. When I saw people of color on planes, I didn’t 

take it for granted in first class or whatever. Usually, you know, you kind of nod. Or, you know, 

make eye contact or whatever. That happened often. It was a two-way street. There was something 

about them. None of that. I looked at them and whatever. But it was something about that. And 

Elaine and I, I, I don’t remember whether we said anything in that moment. But there was something 

uneasy about that, passing by them. I don’t know to this day whether the thought that came later had 

anything to it. But after 9/11, Elaine and I both, it occurred to us that we might have seen some of 

those guys when they were doing test runs, as we read that they did or whatever. Could have been. I 

don’t know. But I do remember that moment of passing through, there was something about it. So, 

I’m saying that 9/11 stays very much in in my mind. [01:14:49] And our experiences around that 

time, the offices being closed for quite some time. And then, that — we didn’t wear masks. I saw 

some people wearing masks for, in the months, weeks and months after 9/11. I was too much of a 

knucklehead to put on a mask. You know, I’m, you know, macho or whatever it was. I should have 

been wearing a mask then. You know, that acrid smell stayed. Were you in New York around that 

time? Did you pass through there?  

 SK: I left a few months before.  

 TS: Yeah. Yeah. That acrid smell stayed in the air for quite some time. Yeah.  

 SK: We hadn’t yet been trained to use masks.  



 

24 
 

 TS: No, we hadn’t been. We hadn’t been. So, 9/11 had a tremendous impact. In fact, I mean, 

this is more personal and not LDF. I remember one of the first days after 9/11 that I could, I could 

come into Manhattan. You couldn’t drive into Manhattan. I rode my bicycle. I lived in Brooklyn at 

the time. I rode my bicycle across the — I can’t remember whether it was the Brooklyn Bridge or the 

Manhattan Bridge. It might have been one in one direction, the other one the other. [01:16:16] And I, 

when I crossed the bridge and I came to Tribeca where our offices were, and then I rode north, it 

was, it was quite a moving experience. People were different. We had all these tensions before 9/11 

with the police, with Giuliani and his police department and, there were tensions between Black 

folks, particularly Black men and police. And I remember the interactions riding my bicycle through 

Manhattan, and everyone was much more civil to one another. I mean, it was not the New Yorkers 

that I knew, not the New York that I knew. And I rode all the way up through Manhattan. I stopped 

at the convention center, which they had, they had turned into an emergency site. They expected the 

victims of 9/11 to be brought there. But there was no one coming in. There, you know, in the 

Village, in the West Village, I remember as people began to put up these photographs of people on 

fences and they were asking, “Have you seen this person?” Because they couldn’t find them 

anywhere. Their relatives, their loved ones. You know, and I rode all the way up through Manhattan. 

All the way up to Harlem. And then cross into the Bronx up near Yankee Stadium. And then came 

back all the way back down. Slightly different route, a little bit further east. [01:18:14] Stopped by 

Union Square, which over the years Union Square got its name and its, what it meant to New 

Yorkers and Manhattan in particular from even the Civil War days as a gathering place, which it was 

again and again during the First World War, the Second World War. But it once again was, all these 

people had gathered there. They had just come to be together. And to support one another. And it 

was an incredible moment when I think back on what that was like in that time. I’d forgotten about 

that for the most part over the years. And somehow riding a bicycle as opposed to, you know, I 



 

25 
 

couldn’t be in a car. You know, the best way to sometimes see places is on a bicycle, you know, and 

it was an amazing experience. 

 SK: Definitely feels like — 

 TS: I don’t know if any of that made sense, but it just came into my head. And, you know.  

 SK: No, it absolutely does. I haven’t had that experience myself, but I knew lots of people in 

New York at the time, lots of people who crossed those bridges, some of them by foot right as the 

towers were falling. But it strikes me that, you know, you’re mentioning this moment of crisis, 

intense crisis, that both drew attention to all of these rifts and disagreements, significant 

disagreements, but also to some extent, drew people together. And it didn’t last.  

 TS: Well. And the other thing about it is that Black people who were often, so often 

demonized, you know, Giuliani — long history, you know, of demonizing Black people. I kind of 

was biting my tongue a little bit. But most of us thought he was a racist. Most of us knew he was a 

racist. But during that time, it was like Black folk were being treated by the police as we should have 

been treated every day. [01:20:20] But the people who were being demonized very quickly were 

Middle Eastern people in particular. I remember I was interviewed by the Rockefeller Brothers 

Foundation. I think it was Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, but it could have been just Rockefeller 

Foundation, one of those two. And it was in the days after 9/11. And they asked me what fears I had 

for the country, if any, at that time. And, you know, I remember that, that interaction, that interview. 

And I can’t quite remember exactly, maybe it’ll come back to me. But the essence of what I said was 

that I feared that somehow we were being turned into something different from the America that I 

knew, imperfect as it was, you know, in that moment. I’m trying to remember exactly what I said, 

maybe it’ll come back to me. But I remembered that there was something I said that captured what I 

felt. But that was such an extraordinary time in so many ways. And of course, the world changed.  

 SK: Absolutely. 



 

26 
 

 TS: I used to go to the airport to get on planes. I lived on planes and in hotels. But I showed 

up at the airport, at LaGuardia, you know, 15 minutes before a flight. You remember those days? I 

used to get on planes like I would take the subway, but you didn’t have to stop and show any I.D. Or, 

you know, you just got there, got on the plane, you know, all of that changed. [01:22:21] 

 SK: Yeah. You could fly from Raleigh to LaGuardia for about $90. Door to door, you know, 

3 hours, maybe.  

 TS: Yeah, yeah. Without security.  

 SK: I mean, different world. I pity our subsequent generations who have to remove their 

shoes.  

 TS: Yeah, yeah.  

 SK: So how did you and Elaine in particular, how did the two of you handle LDF leadership 

when, first of all, you couldn’t be in an office together? But then also presumably, this is a group of 

people who are shaken, just like everyone else.  

 TS: Yeah. So. Wow. You know, it just occurred to me, as you asked that question, that I 

don’t think we had at that time any way to operate remotely as we do now, like we didn’t have, there 

was no Zoom. We talked on the phone. We didn’t see each other. I’m pretty sure about that. And 

Elaine and I were talking, you know, regularly, although when 9/11 happened, here’s the question. 

And I would have to rely on what Elaine said about this. Chances are Elaine was in Washington. I 

spent a lot of time — I was a New Yorker. Elaine had an apartment in New York, and she spent a lot 

of time in New York, but she was mostly in Washington. And so she and I had to be talking on the 

phone, as I remember at that time. Either way I don’t think Elaine was in New York for 9/11. But I 

can’t swear that she wasn’t. But I know that she was, that we were talking on the phone often. But 

the truth is, is that almost everything came to a halt. [01:24:29] There were no trials of, there wasn’t 

any — I mean, this is all coming back to me as I think about it. It wasn’t like we were filing briefs. 

Almost everything came to a standstill nationwide. For a while at least. I don’t remember whether it 



 

27 
 

was a matter of weeks, or whether it was a month or whatever, but almost everything came to a 

standstill. There was nobody coming in and out of Manhattan, for the most part. And most of our 

work stopped. Sure, we were communicating by phone. Because we couldn’t communicate any other 

way. That’s why I remember how eerie it felt when Elaine and I got on that plane to go down to 

Georgia to see Thurbert Baker. And we were basically the only ones on the plane. Nobody else was 

flying back then.  

 SK: So, another three years later, you are Director-Counsel. I believe 2004 you take that 

role? 

 TS: 2004, yeah. You know, I’ll say this about that. If somebody had told me some years 

earlier that I would be Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund and, you know, hold that role 

that Thurgood Marshall had held. Not that I ever was under any impression that I was a Thurgood 

Marshall. I was always clear on that. [01:26:22] But there might have been a time when I would have 

kind of had, might have gotten a little giddy about that possibility. By the time Elaine was ready to 

leave, I was not. And I remember, I remember more than anything else, I was sobered by it. I knew 

what that job took. But the other thing about it was that I had already learned that — it’s not only 

true for I think the Legal Defense Fund, it certainly was true for me. There are some jobs where if 

you come up through the ranks and you become the leader of the organization, you’re not doing what 

you love doing anymore. And I was conscious of that. The thing that I loved doing was being a Legal 

Defense Fund lawyer. A litigator. I loved doing the cases, you know? And when you become the 

Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund — and that job was changing, by the way, in many 

ways and has changed. But you know, you’re doing administration. You know, you’re hiring and 

firing people. You know, you hope to God you don’t have to do much firing, but sometimes you do. 

You are taking care of administrative matters. [01:28:21] God knows you’re fundraising. You know, 

you’re interacting with the board. And that was one of the things that changed even more as time 

went on. It wasn’t the job that I loved best at LDF. The job I loved best was being an LDF lawyer. 



 

28 
 

And litigating the cases. And even being the Associate Director-Counsel, frankly, is a job that I love 

more than being Director-Counsel. Because Elaine, she entrusted a great deal to me. It wasn’t like 

whatever ego ya-yas I needed to, you know, get off on. I didn’t have those opportunities because 

Elaine would, you know, ask me to go and meet with the Black Caucus in Washington, D.C. And I 

knew all those folks. I was doing a lot of that stuff already. Plus, I was still engaged more closely in 

the cases. If that makes sense. I was Associate Director-Counsel when I argued the Kansas City case 

in the Supreme Court. And so, I had already whatever I want, you know, that was the best part of it 

for me. And then, you know, probably discretion would tell me I shouldn’t talk about all of this. But 

when I got to be Director-Counsel, part of that job for me was miserable because of a relationship 

that I had with a board member in particular that for me polluted the whole experience. [01:30:24] 

So that was, that’s what I would say about — when I got to be head of LDF, though, in 2004, that 

was the 50th anniversary of Brown. There’s a lot that was going on around that. There was the 

Brown versus Board of Education commemoration in Washington, D.C. that we did in cooperation 

with Howard University and the NAACP. And that was the moment that, you know, you may have 

this in here. I don’t know. That was that Bill Cosby moment. Do you know anything about that?  

 SK: Tell me about it. 

 TS: No? 

 SK: I don’t know.  

 TS: It’s funny. When I’m going through all my sister’s stuff, last night, I found, among other 

things, a photograph of Bill Cosby that he had signed to her. I have it right around here somewhere. 

Maybe it’s right out there. And I thought to myself, what do I do with this now? You know, I mean, 

Bill Cosby, you know. So, at that, this is held — you don’t know anything about this? It’s held at 

Constitution Hall. You know, Constitution Hall, famous for — or infamous, depending on your point 

of view for, Marian Anderson. I have her autobiography right up there. Not being allowed to sing 

there, you know, because she was Black. [01:32:24] That’s what I thought about when I thought 



 

29 
 

about Constitution Hall most of my life. I still think about it. But that’s where we, in conjunction 

with the NAACP and Howard University, the three institutions that really had more to do with 

Brown than any others, we decided we wouldn’t be in competition. We would hold the 

commemoration together. All of us can lay claim to Brown versus Board of Education. And that 

evening, everything was scripted and planned and all of that. I don’t know how many thousands of 

people were there, but it was pretty full. And Bill Cosby, when he got up to speak, gave what, in the 

moment, I considered to be this weird and inappropriate speech in which he talked about how Black 

people were failing those who had won Brown. You know, Marshall and Bob Carter — I think Bob 

Carter was there that night. But you know, he started calling all these names and he started talking 

about Black people engaging in — poor Black people. Do you remember this? You know, engaging 

in inappropriate conduct. Mothers going to see their sons who were wearing orange jumpsuits 

because they had shot somebody in the head for stealing, you know, to steal a pound cake or 

something, didn’t make sense. [01:34:36] Sneakers that cost hundreds of dollars. I got that point. 

You know, instead of buying Hooked on Phonics, they were spending all this money on, on sneakers 

for hundreds of dollars. I get that. But it was an attack on single mothers. My grandma on my 

father’s side was a single Black mother when that was a, a scarlet letter. And, he was talking about 

all of those things. And it was a criticism. Look, we have a lot of demons in African American 

communities, but frankly, we have demons in all our communities. But yeah, there are some that 

African American — but that wasn’t — when he talked about all these Black folks who weren’t 

behaving inappropriately. And I remember I was thinking, you know, Amadou Diallo, remember 

him? Amadou Diallo, you know, he hadn’t shot somebody in the head to steal a pound cake. All the 

things that we were doing at Legal Defense Fund and fighting against racism, it seemed that Bill 

Cosby was focusing on the failures of poor Black people. [01:36:21] And I remember, I wondered 

whether he was intoxicated, inebriated that night. I think maybe he was. But I was, I was the first 

person up after he spoke. And when I got up, you know, I said that, I said words to the effect that, 



 

30 
 

you know, Amadou Diallo didn’t steal a pound cake, you know, or shoot somebody in the head or 

some — we were, I talked about the, the case that we had been doing in Texas. The Tulia, Texas 

case. You know about that case? Tulia, Texas. I have a book down here about it. But Tulia was a 

small town in Texas where a, the Black community there, very tiny town, a huge percentage of the 

Black community in this tiny town were arrested. Their homes were raided at about five in the 

morning. They were arrested on charges of, of running crack cocaine and all this other stuff, all in 

the word of one undercover police officer, a white police officer, who was later proven to be racist 

and making up all of this stuff. I can make the book available to you. But I talked about that case. I 

mean, I was really talking about the work that we did and how institutional racism continued to be a 

reality, and that Legal Defense Fund was committed to eradicating, you know, I mean, I said 

something to the effect that personal responsibility is important. [01:38:29] It’s fine. Yeah, we’ve got 

to talk about personal responsibility. But, a lot of the work that we have to deal with isn’t attributable 

to failures of personal responsibility, as we talked about. [clears throat] And I was trying to, what I 

was doing was speaking back on what Bill Cosby said that night. That, of course, his, his speech got 

a lot of attention. There were books written about it. There were — and I engaged in a number of 

conversations with Bill Cosby after that. I made clear to him, and I wrote an op ed that appeared in 

the Washington Post. As I look back on it years later, I think I, I made clear the differences between 

Cosby and me. I wished that I had made it even stronger. But it was pretty, it was pretty strong. So 

that was one of the first things after I took the helm of LDF. I remember that very well. Yeah.  

 SK: Yeah. I mean, did the pressure, I imagine, to arrange anniversary events — 2004, 2005, 

Voting Rights Act, Civil Rights Act, Brown, et cetera, et cetera?  

 TS: Yeah. The Voting Rights Act certainly loomed large because it needed to be renewed, at 

least the temporary provisions. I spent a lot of time in that, on that, along with, you know, of course, 

the staff members, who were doing a huge amount of work on the Voting Rights Act and we were 

able to get that done. [01:40:34] But of course in time that was overturned by the Supreme Court in 



 

31 
 

Shelby County versus Holder. So that was a great disappointment. But I was proud of the fact that 

we, we played a role in getting that renewed. Yeah.  

 SK: So, can you talk to us a little bit more about that? I understand that the provisions needed 

to be renewed. I think you may also have played a role in strengthening them in some way? 

 TS: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, look, we had, unlike what John Roberts said, we had a 

lot of evidence that we submitted to Congress about the continuation of discrimination in voting that 

required the Voting Rights Act to be, the temporary provisions, to be renewed and even 

strengthened. No question in my mind that what we were doing at that time was necessary and it was 

the right thing to do. And we put in a lot of evidence. Now, we also knew that John Roberts had 

always been an opponent of the Voting Rights Act. And we knew it was going to be attacked. And in 

fact, as I think about it, and some of this has not been fully told, I remember being in the, and you 

stop me if I have said this to you before, I remember being in the Rose Garden for the signing 

ceremony of the 2006 renewal. [01:42:31] And I remember getting calls on my cell phone from, 

from our lawyers, some of whom at that moment we were in the Rose Garden for the signing 

ceremony. They were still working on getting the final version of the act put to bed. And the story 

that you will hear is that there was widespread support for the Voting Rights Act, bipartisan, almost 

complete bipartisan. So, you would think there wasn’t any disagreement. Not so. You know, there 

were Republicans who were trying to drop these, I called them landmines, into the bill which would 

go off and explode in litigation and undermine the act. What am I talking about? So, for example, 

these temporary provisions of the Voting Rights Act. A lot of people, including a lot of Black folks 

who didn’t understand what the law said and what it allowed and didn’t allow, they would say, “Why 

don’t we just make it permanent? You know, all these provisions permanent? Section five, 

permanent?” No! That’s the kiss of death. They would say, “Why not make it apply nationally as 

opposed to just these selected jurisdictions?” No, because there’s Supreme Court case law that would 

make that a kiss of death. [01:44:31] You know, there’s a case called City Of Boerne versus Flores. 



 

32 
 

And basically what it said is that the law, the Voting Rights Act but the law general that if it was race 

conscious, first of all, it had to be what the court said was congruent. And what’s the other, it was 

just in my head and I just lost it. But basically it, it had to fit. The problem you were trying to solve, 

you couldn’t, you couldn’t over address the problem because that would end up making it 

unconstitutional as a provision, as a law. If you made it permanent, if it was race conscious, 

periodically, you had to go back and justify that. You couldn’t just make it permanent because that 

would be unconstitutional. So many Black folk would say, "Why not make it permanent? Why not 

make it national in scope?” Because it would be the kiss of death. And at the same time, there were 

Republicans, conservatives, who were trying to do those two things, which would have, as I said, 

blown up in the course of the inevitable challenges that they knew they would be bringing, or that 

their, the people who were simpatico with them, would be bringing. That was going on even during 

the signing ceremony. It was a fight. It was a struggle to get the Voting Rights Act reenacted. But 

even among people in the Civil Rights community, there were different thoughts about how far we 

should go and how the Voting Rights Act Section Five should be drafted, et cetera. [01:46:37] We 

weren’t all in agreement. And, and so I remember that very well. We did get it reenacted. Some 

people say that, that they thought that we somehow should have done some things differently. Look, 

the reality is, is that conservatives were going to come after the Voting Rights law, Section Five in 

particular. The reality is that John Roberts never liked the Voting Rights Act. And you had these 

conservatives on the court who were going to come after it. Clarence Thomas, you were never going 

to get his vote. You know, and I could go on and on. I mentioned it. And so what happened in Shelby 

County versus Holder. If it wasn’t inevitable, it was very likely, no surprise. And it’s a shame, but 

exactly what we were concerned about, and I take no pleasure in saying this, was borne out. Because 

immediately after Shelby County struck down Section Four, the operating formula for Section Five, 

these jurisdictions, Southern jurisdictions, many of them went back and reenacted all of these same 



 

33 
 

laws or similar laws that were aimed at limiting the right to vote, and that’s a battle that needed to be 

fought today.  

 SK: A lot of what you’re talking about here is political advocacy strategy, publicity work, 

commemoration, networking, fundraising. Does this represent a change for you moving into 

President and Director-Counsel in this new role, or was this a change for LDF sort of moving in new 

directions even as it continued its litigation work? 

 TS: [01:48:41] Well, LDF had been doing advocacy. I do think, but I don’t tell you that I 

trust my memory, I do think that a shift did come under way — when, when I joined LDF, I 

remember Jack Greenberg had no interest in publicity. Jack would say, I remember hearing him say 

these words with respect to, you know, the public knowing who LDF was, what we did and what he 

thought about publicity. “Those who count know who we are. And those who don’t know who we 

are don’t count.” [laughs] Well, you can’t live in that world anymore, you know? But that’s what 

Jack said. That’s what he thought. Jack was not a Director-Counselor who was out there. Jack wasn’t 

doing public interviews or hardly doing public interviews. I’m not saying Jack wasn’t without egos, 

ego, but his — Jack’s ego got played out in the court. Jack was arguing all these cases. And in fact, 

Jack was making sure that he would argue the cases that sometimes when the younger lawyers 

wanted to argue them. But, you know, that’s what Jack did. The idea that we needed to be more of a 

player when it came to, you know, public visibility was something that grew as time went on. 

[01:50:34] PR and all of that. I kind of understood that we needed to have a public presence. Having 

said that, I personally, you know, in some ways I came up as a lawyer under Jack. I don’t think that I 

agree with everything he said about, you know, those who count and those who don’t count, but I 

love the lawyering part of the job more than anything else. But it was necessary to do other things. 

Some of the job was, you know, I think changing, as I indicated before. And there were some things 

that I think either I did not know as well as I should have, or maybe that’s not the way to put it. I 

mean, there were some things I wasn’t as good at as, you know, other persons, other people have 



 

34 
 

been in the position of Director-Counsel. One of the things that I maybe was naive about, but as I 

think back — when Jack was Director-Counsel, I indicated this before, there were some things that 

he was very clear that he didn’t let go of that nobody else did. When Thurgood was Director-

Counsel, he and, and as I said before, Robert Carter, Bob Carter, they did not get along personally. 

[01:52:38] I idealized LDF when I came to it, before I came to it. I came to understand that there 

were great accomplishments. LDF did great things. Often it did them in spite of the personal 

relationships, or lack thereof, of some of the staff people, not because of them, you know. And it, 

maybe it’s human nature. There are always going to be members of the staff who want more. They 

want to be more. They want to do more. And I think there were times when I was perhaps naive 

about that. You know, so that’s one of the life lessons that I learned when I was in that position. Am 

I making sense? 

 SK: Oh, absolutely. I think that — I mean, my immediate response is to think that in any 

organization where people actually care about what they’re doing, they’re going to disagree with one 

another instead of shrug and move forward. So, it might be a privilege to have it in a place where 

people actually care and can see the results of their work as well. But then also to have to return 

endlessly to these same battles, you know, I assume would vindicate one person one day and the 

next, the other day and so on and so forth.  

 TS: Yeah. And look, bottom line is LDF is one of the greatest organizations, in my view, that 

this country has. And has had. The privilege of working at LDF, you know, I can’t, I can’t say 

enough about what that privilege was and what it means, but it wasn’t always easy.  

 SK: [01:54:46] I mean, that’s a perfect ending point, but I’m going to ruin it by asking one or 

two more questions if I can. [laughs] So speaking of wanting more, you’ve actually, you said in a 

previous interview that, that really just to recapitulate what you just said now, that LDF’s work was 

noble and great, that you looked to Thurgood Marshall as a role model, that you looked to Constance 

Baker Motley as a role model, and that — 



 

35 
 

 TS: And Bob Carter and others. Yeah.   

 SK: Absolutely. Absolutely. And the list goes on. And you said in this particular interview, 

“The problem is not that anything was inherently wrong with that effort. The problem is that it was 

not taken far enough.” 

 TS: Well, that certainly I think is true when it comes to — you know, some people criticize 

LDF for its pursuit of, for example, desegregation, which they think somehow or another was 

misplaced, that somehow or another we put too much into that effort, maybe it was a fool’s errand, et 

cetera. I don’t think so. You know, I think that the effort to desegregate this country, whether we’re 

talking about schools or housing. Or whether we’re talking about employment, whether we’re talking 

about voting rights, I think it’s one of the most noble things that have ever been undertaken in this 

country. Are there people who believe that we somehow or another were mistaken to pursue those 

efforts that the effort to desegregate this country was misplaced? [01:56:53] Yeah, there are people 

who believe that and think that. But you know, when people ask what we should have done 

differently, I say, “Well, you know, are you saying we shouldn’t have attempted to desegregate this 

country, that we should have believed in separatism?” Yes, there are people who believe in 

separatism. I’m not one of them. Yes, there are people who believe in, in violence as a necessary tool 

for change. Maybe at times that’s been right. But I’m not a violent person. I believe in the rule of 

law. Even at this time, you know, in 2023, where, you know, law is — and the ultimate interpretation 

of what the law is and what it means is in the hands of a Supreme Court that lacks some credibility in 

many ways. But compared to what? You know, I believe in what has been LDF’s mission and its 

methodology. And it’s not because I believe that law is perfection or that, you know, the way that 

LDF has approached social change is the only way to do it. I don’t think that’s true. [01:58:45] But I 

do believe deeply in the mission that LDF has pursued and in what it’s done. So all these years later, 

for me, I continue to believe in the mission of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Inc. Fund, as I 

came to know it and love it, even while I know that there, yes, there are other tools, other 



 

36 
 

methodologies or other ways that these battles have to be fought. But my way has been LDF’s way. 

Yeah.  

 SK: So, we have been talking about some of these huge events of the 2000s that informed 

your tenure and of course, Hurricane Katrina and then Rita and what they did to school age 

population of New Orleans is a really big story here.  

 TS: Yeah. You know, early in my career as a lawyer. First, when I was at the Justice 

Department in the Civil Rights Division, but after that, when I came to Legal Defense Fund, I did 

quite a bit of work in Louisiana. And I remember. Wherever I was in Louisiana, I always wanted to 

get to New Orleans. Every chance I got. I wanted to be there for the food, the music, Preservation 

Hall, among other places, I mean, you only paid a couple of dollars and you’d sit there and hear all 

this jazz with these folks who had been playing this music and who were contemporaries of Louis 

Armstrong and all this. I love New Orleans and the culture of New Orleans, which was a culture of 

African Americans, but also all of the mixtures of people there, you know, the Cajun influence. 

[02:00:55] And so I love New Orleans. Katrina, of course, changed all that. And the Legal Defense 

Fund did a lot of work over the years in, all over Louisiana, in Mississippi next door. And we did 

voting rights cases. We did school desegregation cases, employment discrimination cases. I can 

remember, you know, my colleagues, Peter Sherwood, employment discrimination case. Lani 

Guinier, voting rights cases. New Orleans is one of the most important centers of Black life. Katrina 

changed all that. And I remember watching as Katrina was bearing down on New Orleans. I think 

about this and I’ve talked about it over the years. Even in other contexts. Because we saw on the 

news all those people in their cars on the bridge going across Lake Pontchartrain and other places to 

get out. And it looked like everybody was getting out. The assumption was that everybody was 

getting out. And yet after Katrina happened, we saw all these Black folk at the convention center. On 

their roofs of their houses, you know, who couldn’t get out? They didn’t have automobiles. They 

didn’t have the means to get out. [02:02:49] I remember there were, there were swift boats. Various 



 

37 
 

kinds of boats that were, some of them were taking people out. Some of them refused to take Black 

folks out. People were being subjected to old fashioned racism in that moment. But there was this 

slow unfurling of, of the cruelest kind of racism. I remember police troopers stopping people from 

walking across one of the bridges to get out and go to a safe place. Katrina was a profoundly 

important moment for what happened in that moment. And it was also important because there was 

this slow change of New Orleans which gave way to Black people being pushed out and going to 

other cities and communities throughout the south. Houston. Atlanta, other places. And some of 

those folks wanted to come back and never could. There were questions about whether they would 

be able to vote. And they wanted to vote in elections after in New Orleans and stay engaged in New 

Orleans because they planned to get back. [02:04:51] But after Katrina, New Orleans became whiter 

and more gentrified. Maybe that’s redundant. But hundreds of years of the presence of Black and 

brown people in New Orleans was rolled back. New Orleans, in many ways, the schools became 

privatized. There were privatized police forces in New Orleans after Katrina. There were people who 

were, came — were brought in to rebuild New Orleans, but those jobs didn’t go to Black folk. There 

was a profound change in the New Orleans that I and we knew. We tried to protect the interests of 

Black folks. I can remember what had happened to and with and in the Ninth Ward. But you got this 

kind of Disneyfied New Orleans that was emerging from Katrina. You had to have just enough Black 

folk for it to provide that kind of entertainment picture. But in many ways, Black folks were being 

removed from New Orleans. The Legal Defense Fund, we brought voting rights cases. We 

challenged what was being done to, to change the education system by privatizing it there and 

making that school system even more inhospitable to Black and brown folks. [02:07:00] But even 

today, all these years later. You know, we had some successes. But even today, the New Orleans that 

I once knew doesn’t exist anymore. It’s not that it’s completely gone, but there’s been a lot of change 

in New Orleans as a consequence of Katrina. You could see the unfolding long term disaster that 

Katrina was bringing. And all I can say is that we at that time tried to protect Black folks and the 



 

38 
 

lives that they had invested in the place that they knew and loved and where they grew up. To some 

degree, we were able to do some of that, but some of it was lost.  

 SK: Yeah, it definitely feels like one of those situations where, you know, let no disaster go 

unexploited.  

 TS: Yes. Yes.  

 SK: Cleared space for people to come in and remake it. I know, too, that you brought suit in 

order to try to, I believe, ensure that children would be enrolled or enrolled in school.  

 TS: That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, that’s part of what I was talking about when I, because 

there were really powerful attempts to, to change the system of public education, in effect, to turn it 

into a privatized system of education and to close down or remove schools that had been 

predominantly Black. [02:09:02] Yes, we had tried to desegregate schools there. At the same time, 

though, we believed that Black folks should still have a presence and we should continue to work on 

improving those schools as opposed to privatizing all of them for people who were coming in from 

the outside and were not invested in New Orleans.  

 SK: This I think it comes back to this question that you’ve raised a number of times already 

about citizenship and belonging. If you don’t have access to a high quality public education, then 

you don’t have access to the ballot.  

 TS: Well, that’s right. That’s right. The question of citizenship was profoundly important 

before and after Katrina. But we knew that there were, there were people who were being pushed 

out. And some of them, it appeared, could not come back to New Orleans. Some of them ended up 

never being able to come back. And that was profoundly sad. But we tried to protect the ability of 

people to return to New Orleans. I had said earlier that there was this, there was this question of who 

was able to get out. You saw all those people lined up in their cars on the bridge. They couldn’t get 

out. I use that so many times as an example. Because in the years after, there were instances in 

which, for example, I’m not just talking about New Orleans. [02:11:01] I’m talking about the right to 



 

39 
 

vote across this country. And there were these instances in which states started imposing and 

adopting voter ID requirements. And it’s still going on right here today in North Carolina, but 

elsewhere. And people would say, “Well, what’s the problem? Everybody has I.D. You have a 

license. Some people even have a passport. What’s the big deal? Everybody has these, these things 

that we’re saying people should have, just to show who you were.” And we would say, as many 

others have said, that voter I.D. was a solution in search of a problem. But here’s the point. 

Everybody doesn’t have I.D. Everybody doesn’t have a driver’s license. Just like those people 

couldn’t get out of New Orleans because they didn’t have cars. And the poverty that they experience 

on a daily basis meant that the things that most Americans took for granted weren’t available to 

them. You know, that’s what was at issue also, is at issue with voter I.D. You know, it, everybody 

doesn’t have a voter I.D. Everybody doesn’t have a license. Everybody doesn’t have a passport. But 

more importantly, the people who are passing this know this, and they’re putting these requirements 

in place because they want to deprive people of the right to vote, just like people in New Orleans 

took advantage of Katrina to o push out poor people who live there and had intergenerational 

presence there. And they knew what they were doing. Just like they knew what they were doing with 

voter I.D..  

 SK: [02:13:17] If you are experiencing poverty it can be, I think, for many people, 

surprisingly hard to even document who you are.  

 TS: That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.  

 SK: Well, thank you. I’m glad we took a little extra time to make sure we talked about this.  

 TS: Well, I remember when Katrina was unfolding. How it, it was becoming clear that this 

would be a 10, 15, 20, 30 year phenomenon. This slow disaster that impacted Black people, brown 

people, poor people. And it’s still unfolding today.  

 SK: Thank you.  

 TS: All right.  



 

40 
 

 JP: You still seem sound kind of optimistic in a way.  

 TS: Optimistic? [laughs] 

 JP: You know enough about history to have a sense that like, when you were saying about 

the Dred Scott case and those people who would [inaudible] —  

 TS: Well, that’s, you caught the significance of what I was saying. I mean yeah, there’s a lot 

of reason to be pessimistic. That’s the important thing about that moment, I think, that was a moment 

in which despair was fully justified. How could you not despair? But the thing is that you got to keep 

fighting because you don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s like one of the things that I came to 

say and I, I used to say it all the time. I should keep remembering it. You know, if you fight, you 

may win. You may lose. But if you don’t fight, you can’t win.   

 SK: I mean, it makes me think of Jack Johnson, the boxer, you know, who grew up in 

Galveston, which was hit by a [inaudible] hurricane in what, 1890 —  

 TS: That’s right. He did. He did. 

  SK: —or something like that. And that was another blended city. A port city, right, where 

you get all sorts of people coming through it.  

 TS: Yeah. And I had a good friend who is a lawyer there. I haven’t seen this guy in years. I 

hope he’s still among the living. And he lived in Galveston and worked there. He became vilified by 

some of the folks in his own community because he actually took on a case, a work — he was the 

both the NAACP state lawyer, but also the ACLU’s and the ACLU represented the KKK in — and 

so he took on this case. He’s Black. And he took on this case. And the people in the NAACP, some 

of them were saying, “Kick him out of the NAACP.” But he was not doing it because he loved the 

KKK. He was, because he believed in the principle of, you know, everyone needed to have a lawyer 

and they should be represented when it came to First Amendment issues, etcetera. But he was from 

Galveston. Anthony Griffin, I need to find out where he was, where he is now. But yeah, yeah.  



 

41 
 

 SK: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for your work and thank you for taking the time to share 

it with us. Appreciate it.  

 TS: Thank you, Seth. 

 JP: That was inspiring. That was great. 

[02:16:59] 

[END OF INTERVIEW]