Peggy Cooper Davis Interview transcript

This item is featured in:

Peggy Cooper Davis Oral History

    Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project 

   

  

 

Peggy Cooper Davis 

Interviewed by Melody Hunter-Pillion 

November 25, 2024 

New York, New York 

Length: 00:54:15 

  

  

  

  

  

  

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 Peggy Cooper Davis, the Southern Oral History Program, and 

LDF. It has been lightly edited, in consultation with Peggy Cooper Davis, 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] 

Melody Hunter-Pillion: [00:00:00] This is Melody Hunter-Pillion from the Southern Oral 

History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is November 25, and I’m 

here in New York City with Ms. Peggy Cooper Davis, Professor Peggy Cooper Davis, to conduct 

an interview for the Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project. And Peggy, thank you for being here 

with us, sharing your stories and your experiences.  

Peggy Cooper Davis: [00:00:25] Thank you for listening to my stories.  

MHP: [00:00:29] Let’s start from the beginning. You were born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1943, 

but you grew up in Hampton, Virginia.  

PCD: [00:00:37] Yes. 

MHP: [00:00:38] So tell us about the Hampton of your youth and sort of paint a picture for 

us, if you will, of Hampton and your community.  

PCD: [00:00:47] Well, my father was head of the trade school at Hampton Institute. It’s 

now Hampton University. So, we lived basically on the campus of a Black college, and that was a 

kind of special island. But if you left the campus, or certainly if you left Hampton, you were in a 

very segregated and racist context. So, it was a strange juxtaposition. 

MHP: [00:01:34] What was that like, sort of what were the indicators to you, especially as a 

child, of that segregation when you would be away from the bubble of Hampton, the university? 

PCD: [00:01:49] The most vivid memory I have is probably not a memory. It’s something I 

know because it was told to me many times. My father was much darker than I, and I think he was 

pushing me in a carriage or something, and a couple of people approached him and said, “What are 

you doing with that white baby, boy?” So that was the, you know, if you left the campus, something 

like that might happen. 

MHP: [00:02:28] What was campus like for you as a child growing up with that being your 

neighborhood? 



 
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PCD: [00:02:33] That was pretty good. There was an education department at Hampton, and 

like most [education departments], they had a lab school. And that’s where I went to elementary 

school. So, it was a special environment. And the campus is beautiful. I haven’t seen it in many 

years, but certainly when I was there it was gorgeous. 

MHP: [00:03:06] Tell me a little bit more about your parents. So, your father was the head 

of the trade school. Tell me a little bit more about him and also your mother, who was a librarian 

and a genealogist. Tell me about them. 

PCD: [00:03:20] Well, she wasn’t a professional genealogist, but I’ll start with my father. 

My father was from North Carolina. And he had done his undergraduate work at Hampton, and 

that’s where he met my mother, who did her graduate degree in library science at Hampton. We left 

Hampton when I was about 10, and my father wasn’t in academia after that although my mother 

remained a librarian in various contexts throughout. We moved to Dayton, Ohio, and there my 

father had various jobs with the city of Dayton, ultimately being a commissioner. And as I’ve said, 

my mother continued to be a school librarian. She was a children’s librarian. It was kind of a culture 

shock moving to Ohio because, as I’ve said, the campus of Hampton was a very protected and 

protective community. And in Dayton, I was in what seemed to me, at that age, a big city with all of 

the racial and class clashes that you find in a big city. So, it was very different. It was as if the story 

I told you about my father and the baby carriage and the story I told you about the campus got all 

jumbled. 

MHP: [00:05:39] How do you think, would you say that your mother and father—and in 

seeing their careers also and their knowledge—how did that experience impact, you think, you and 

your career path? 

PCD: [00:05:57] I don’t think people do it anymore, but people always used to talk about 

someone being a “race man” or a “race woman,” and my parents were both that. It was almost 

inevitable that I would do some kind of public interest work. Although, I say almost inevitable 

because when I was young—it’s embarrassing to say now because I was so bad at it now—but I 



 
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worked as a singer and performed a fair amount in Ohio. And so, it was kind of a choice whether to 

stay in music or to get into civil rights work. And I went to law school because I wanted to be a 

civil rights lawyer. 

MHP: [00:07:11] So, I’m just curious. It’s a little bit of a tangent. We won’t go into it 

much, but this is so interesting, the singing thing. I didn’t know about that. So what genre were 

you? Was it like—? 

PCD: Jazz. 

MHP: I knew it. 

PCD: [00:07:24] Well, not quite jazz because I wasn’t a good enough musician to be a real 

jazz singer, but I tried. 

MHP: [00:07:39] Do you recall Brown v. Board of Education being passed? And, I mean, 

you were a child, but do you recall that being passed? And did it have any effect on your schooling? 

PCD: [00:07:53] You know, I don’t. I have a very poor recall, and I don’t recall the 

decision. And I’m once again having trouble separating what I learned after and what I would have 

known at the time. But the big effect on my schooling was moving from the kind of cloistered 

atmosphere of Hampton and the protected community into a big, integrated city. And the schools I 

went to were integrated—but not in effect, not in impact. The Black students and the white students 

were very separate, although we were in the same building, sometimes in the same classroom. 

MHP: [00:09:18] How did that experience then sort of inform your sense of perceiving, 

understanding, thinking about, talking about racism, social injustice, and that sort of thing? Were 

you sort of starting to become more conscious of those sorts of issues? 

PCD: [00:09:40] Yes, I was, and my parents had a lot to do with that because they were 

always talking about those sorts of issues. So, it was in the air. 

MHP: [00:09:53] From your understanding, just hearing them talk, what did you kind of 

glean from that, even as a child? And especially as you’re becoming a teenager, what were you able 

to sort of put together from the things they were saying? 



 
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PCD: [00:10:08] Well, from the things they were saying and the things I was observing, I 

concluded that I was living in a racist society. That was easy. 

MHP: [00:10:21] You attended Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, graduating in 

1964, if I have that date right. Is that right? 

PCD: [00:10:28] That’s correct, although I spent the last year of college here in New York 

at Barnard. 

MHP: [00:10:35] Oh, okay. What was that transition like? 

PCD: [00:10:40] Great. It was fabulous. I was very happy to be in New York. Both of my 

parents had siblings who lived here, and so I had visited New York often, and I loved it. And I was 

very happy to get here. Western College for Women was what it sounds like: It was a girls’ school 

where people went kind of to get ready to get married. So, it wasn’t exciting. 

MHP: [00:11:23] Tell me a bit about your college experience at Barnard, right? In the 

1960s, in New York, you’re going there. What was that like for you, and what did you study? 

PCD: [00:11:36] I was a philosophy major, and I had better teachers than I’d had in Ohio, 

and that was great. And I really kind of was hungry for a city like this. So, I did everything I could. 

And then I met my husband over there, and it got even better. So, he went to law school, and I said, 

“Hmm, I think I will, too.” 

MHP: [00:12:22] That was my next question: When did you decide you would be a lawyer, 

and what drove you in that direction other than the fella over there [referencing her husband sitting 

nearby]? 

PCD: [00:12:34] Well, I worked with pretty good musicians and came to the conclusion that 

I wasn’t among them, although they were very welcoming and nice. I don’t know whether this was 

true—because you don’t how you’re going to develop—but I didn’t think I had a good enough ear. I 

had studied piano, and so I knew something about music. But I didn’t have the same comprehension 

of chord structure that a good jazz improviser needs, and I didn’t know whether I could learn it. I 

kind of suspected that some of it was just gift. And by then I was very excited about the Civil 



 
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Rights Movement. I had studied philosophy, and I had been good at logic. And so, I thought I might 

be good at lawyering, and I hope that was true. 

MHP: [00:13:58] Were you active in the Civil Rights Movement? Were you, I mean, 

beyond seeing what was going on, did you take part in some ways? 

PCD: [00:14:06] Not in a major way. That same year when I came to New York, I worked 

in the Northern Student Movement, which was calling itself a Northern SNCC [Student Nonviolent 

Coordinating Committee], but of course it wasn’t. But you know, we did tutoring in Harlem, and 

we did help with rent strikes and things like that. But I wasn’t deeply immersed. The closest I got to 

really being in the Civil Rights Movement was a very brief time when I went south to help with 

voter registration. But that was just during a break in law school. It was not a long-term thing. 

MHP: [00:14:56] What state did you go to? 

PCD: [00:14:57] Mississippi. 

MHP: [00:14:59] You went to the Deep South. What was that like? 

PCD: [00:15:03] Frightening. It was frightening. Even though I had grown up in Virginia, I 

had been much younger then, and I don’t believe I had seen the kind of overt racism that I saw 

there. 

MHP: [00:15:32] It’s interesting because you said you weren’t involved in the movement. 

I’m thinking to myself, “You were involved in the Civil Rights Movement.” That’s pretty active to 

me. 

PCD: [00:15:41] I don’t know, when I think of some of my friends who were really 

involved, I feel pathetic. [Laughter] 

MHP: [00:15:49] So you finished undergrad, and then you went to Harvard for your JD and 

graduated in 1968, is that right? 

PCD: [00:15:57] I think so. 

MHP: [00:16:00] Talk to me about your decision to apply to and attend Harvard Law. Why 

Harvard? 



 
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PCD: [00:16:07] Well, Gordon, my husband, was a year ahead of me. And he went to 

Harvard, so I was chasing him. That’s why I went. [Laughter] 

MHP: [00:16:20] Describe your experience at Harvard. Any particular classes or teachers, 

peers who stand out to you? 

PCD: [00:16:30] In the beginning, it felt exciting, like intellectually exciting. But I soon 

discovered that I couldn’t really do well there or compete there in the way I’d always been able to 

in other schools, because I was sort of the top-of-the-class kid. And so that was kind of a blow. And 

it was an intimidating environment. But it was always challenging and felt like it was going to be 

useful. And so, it was a mixed bag, but I’m glad I went there. 

MHP: [00:17:59] Was there a professor who really made a difference or made an 

impression on you, that you can think of? 

PCD: [00:18:05] Not really. You know, you and I were talking about dissertation advisors. 

There’s nobody like that. You know, you were in a class of hundreds of people, and I didn’t have 

close relationships with faculty. 

MHP: [00:18:29] However, early in your career, after you graduated from law school, you 

had a tremendous mentor. And so, you began your legal career as a staff attorney for the 

Community Action for Legal Services in New York. And then you went to work for, if I’m getting 

this right, a private firm before working as a clerk for Federal District Court Judge Robert L. Carter. 

PCD: [00:18:56] Yeah, that’s all correct. And it was exciting to be at the firm, in important 

part, because Bob Carter was a partner there, and he was a hero to me. He had argued Brown v. 

Board of Education. He was in a leadership role at the Legal Defense Fund before it had that name. 

And he was a great human being. So, when he was appointed to the federal bench, I sort of begged 

him to take me with him because I wasn’t enjoying corporate law that much. And he did, so that 

was wonderful. So, I clerked for him, and we kind of set up shop together at the courthouse. 



 
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MHP: [00:20:00] You talked about how Judge Carter, who again played a pivotal role in 

developing strategy for Brown v. Board of Education, how did those experiences of working with 

him, learning from him, affect how you thought about law and civil rights in America? 

PCD: [00:20:29] It’s hard to say because times have changed in such interesting ways. I 

think it was possible to be more optimistic then than one is now, right after the 2024 election. But 

you know, Bob was a deeply committed and wonderfully warm and humane person, and brilliant. 

And so, working with him, I understood that taking that kind of a role would be challenging and 

satisfying and might do some good. 

MHP: [00:21:28] So was that the point when you decided to sort of stay the course and 

continue in civil rights work? 

PCD: [00:21:36] After my clerkship—I’m confusing the order now. But yes, it was 

certainly after I clerked for Bob that I went to LDF. 

MHP: [00:21:58] During the time, I think if I have this right, your time as a law clerk, at 

that same time you attended the New York Society of Freudian Psychologists, and graduated there 

in [19]73. 

PCD: [00:22:10] I didn’t graduate. 

MHP: [00:22:11] You didn’t. Okay, all right. 

PCD: [00:22:13] I have no credentials as a psychologist, but I had always been very 

interested in psychology and psychiatry, I mean. I was in treatment at the time and became even 

more interested because I was beginning to see the process of discovering the unconscious as 

something that was curative and helpful for me. So, I was very curious about it, and I wanted to 

learn more than I was learning in my own treatment. So, I took courses for a year there, and it has 

helped me a lot. Certainly, in the death penalty work I did, it was very important to understand both 

the psychology behind support for the penalty and the incredible psychological and psychiatric 

issues that emerged in sentencing and even in appellate work, as you tried to humanize the client. 



 
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And I have found, in every kind of work I’ve done since then, that even my rudimentary 

understanding of human psychology was helpful. So, I’m glad I did it, but I’m not credentialed. 

MHP: [00:24:28] So, you became, somewhere in there, [19]73 or [19]74, you became 

Associate Counsel for an NAACP LDF initiative called the Capital Punishment Project, working 

with LDF for four years, is that right? Four years? 

PCD: [00:24:44] I think so. 

MHP: [00:24:48] Talk to us about how you became part of that particular project and then 

learning more about what—obviously because of your association with Judge Carter, you knew 

about LDF and knew what it did. But again, talk to us about how you became involved in that 

particular project. 

PCD: [00:25:10] It’s hard to, in retrospect, say how I became involved, but I can tell you the 

things that attracted me to the work. Because I guess, technically, death penalty work is not civil 

rights work, although in some respects it is. Capital punishment had always seemed to me inhumane 

and a regression as people, hopefully, became more civilized. And so, I was drawn to that work as 

well. And that project was headed by Tony Amsterdam at the time, who was legendary. And 

working with him was an education because he was such a skilled and thoughtful lawyer, and kind 

of like a machine—a mind like a machine that kind of considered every possibility and formulated 

arguments brilliantly, and supervised closely. So, you asked me about my education in law school. I 

think I got an even better education working with Tony. And, as I’ve said, I was drawn to the work 

because I thought it was kind of putting humanity on the right track. 

MHP: [00:27:38] What was it, what was the atmosphere like? I mean, especially when you 

first started at LDF, working for them full-time. You’re there in the office. What was that, can you 

kind of describe the atmosphere, the office environment for us? 

PCD: [00:27:54] It was great. You know, because it’s this, I think by then, two floors of 

really talented and dedicated lawyers working all the time. But the atmosphere was very casual. It 

wasn’t like the law firm I’d worked at. I think I mentioned, after my baby was born, I brought her to 



 
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the office, and that was fine with everybody. It was just a very warm environment where people had 

a sense of common cause, and you can’t say that about [every] law firm. 

MHP: [00:28:47] You talked about Anthony, or Tony, Amsterdam. And I was just 

wondering if there are any other colleagues that come to mind when you think about working 

relationships. I wrote down Kendall [and] Himmelstein. 

PCD: [00:29:10] Himmelstein, yes. 

MHP: [00:29:10] Or anyone else you want to mention other than Amsterdam? 

PCD: [00:29:14] Well, David [Kendall] and Jack [Himmelstein] and Tony [Amsterdam] 

and I were, in some sense, a foursome. And so that was very important. I was inspired by their 

dedication and the level of work they did. 

MHP: [00:29:38] And when you say David, that’s Kendall—David Kendall and Jack 

Himmelstein? 

PCD: [00:29:51] Yeah. I remember Jack Greenberg as being, in a sense, a wonderful 

presiding presence because he obviously cared deeply about the work and had very high standards, 

but he was not committed to the formality and trappings that you find in a law firm. So, it was a 

kind of warm and comfortable environment, but just as intense. So, I loved that. 

MHP: [00:30:36] What about some of the cooperating attorneys that you guys would work 

with through those years? Can you talk about the dynamics of those relationships of the LDF 

attorneys working with the cooperating attorneys in these different local offices? 

PCD: [00:30:54] The Capital Punishment Project was a bit different than other LDF projects 

in that we would cooperate with whoever had represented a death row inmate. And those people 

were not necessarily civil rights lawyers, and they were not necessarily in the South. And so, our 

relationship with them was not the same as the typical cooperating attorney relationship at LDF. But 

representing someone on death row, particularly after they’re sentenced, is very stressful. And so, 

people were welcoming of help and particularly of Tony’s expertise. So, we weren’t comrades the 



 
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way LDF attorneys are with civil rights attorneys in the South, but the relationships were important 

and good. 

MHP: [00:32:23] We were talking earlier about identifying priority cases. And you said 

there’s that set of cases that became really important when talking about the constitutionality of the 

death penalty. Let’s talk about that some. And one of the cases that you mentioned was, well, you 

mentioned [00:32:50] “Gregg and Georgia” [the U.S. Supreme Court case Gregg v. Georgia]. Can 

we talk about that and sort of more general, in the whole, why this was such an important set of 

cases? 

PCD: [00:33:04] Before I got to the Legal Defense Fund, the Supreme Court had struck a 

number of death penalty statutes because a majority of the Court felt that the selection of people to 

suffer death had been arbitrary. And I mean, there was an undertone of that, but not really explicit, 

that it had also been racist and sexist, I guess—reverse sexism. So, as a result of that Supreme Court 

decision, we were able to stay the executions. Well first, as a result of that Supreme Court decision, 

most states whose death penalty statutes had been invalidated enacted new ones. And so, everyone 

knew that the time would come when the new ones would get tested. And the new ones had tried to 

address the arbitrariness of the old ones in a variety of ways: some by making the penalty 

mandatory for a narrower category of cases, and some by guiding sentencing discretion with things 

like aggravating and mitigating factors. I joined LDF between that case that had caused a 

moratorium. And it caused a moratorium because I think everybody realized that the question of the 

success of these new statutes in meeting the Court’s requirements had to be resolved. So, there was 

what’s been termed a “pileup” on death row: There was a huge number of people on death row in a 

variety of states. And finally, the Court granted cert [writ of certiorari] in four of those cases, testing 

the constitutionality of sort of a sample of the different varieties of statutes that had been enacted. 

And the expectation was that the Court would decide whether the states had succeeded. And so, 

much of our work was leading up to the argument of those consolidated cases. And of course, the 

stakes were extraordinary. And we all did our best to persuade the Court that the death penalty 



 
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could not be carried out in a humane and constitutional manner, but they didn’t listen. So, they 

upheld all the statutes, except, I think, one mandatory one. So at that point, executions could begin. 

And at that point, other states, with more guidance from the Supreme Court, enacted new statutes or 

modified their statutes to comply. In preparing those four cases we had great hope. And of course, it 

was enormously discouraging to realize that all of the people who had been collected on death row 

over those years were now vulnerable. 

MHP: [00:38:41] What was that like? I mean, obviously, you used the word discouraging, 

very disappointing. But just a loss like that after working on this for so long, ably arguing—just 

what was that like? And then, how do you guys move forward from that sort of a loss? 

PCD: [00:39:08] Well, it’s interesting. And I think it’s a tribute to the way LDF lawyers 

work, that one of the first moves was to kind of recreate the network of lawyers who were 

representing these people and establishing a new network of lawyers who would represent people 

under the new statutes. But the immediate reaction was to examine the four opinions in the four 

cases and see whether we could salvage anything. The Texas statute had been the closest to a 

mandatory statute, so we began working toward getting re-argument in that case. 

MHP: [00:40:27] Now the Texas statute, was that Jurek [v. Texas]? 

PCD: [00:40:30] Mm-hmm. 

MHP: [00:40:31] Okay, Jurek. 

PCD: [00:40:36] But that didn’t work either. So, then the whole thing begins again, you 

know, setting up the network and representing people who had been sentenced and people who 

were newly sentenced—of course, not all of them, but trying to be of as much help as we could. I 

think your question is calling for the emotion of that, or the emotion behind that. It was, of course, 

tremendously discouraging, and it was also enraging because—and I’m speaking personally here, 

but I may be speaking for my colleagues as well—the idea that the law would suddenly sanction so 

much killing was enraging. And I think we had hope after the first decision, the decisions that set 



 
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off this round of reenactments, that we would be able to go the whole way. But it didn’t happen. Of 

course, now it’s 2024 and prospects at the Supreme Court don’t look good at all. 

MHP: [00:42:22] Believe it or not, I only have a few more questions. Can you talk about 

how your work with LDF informed your later work as an attorney, but also as a law professor? 

PCD: [00:42:37] Sure. [Pause] I wanted to teach and write about the issues that I had 

worked on at LDF, and it was satisfying to have an opportunity to do that. But the work that 

initially—and I wrote a few things about the death penalty when I first started teaching—but what 

fueled a great deal of my scholarship in the early years of teaching, and even now, was the work I 

did as a Family Court judge. Because I think in part having been schooled at LDF, I was, when I 

was appointed to that bench, just staggered by how cavalierly the law could disrupt families and 

evaluate families. So, the constitutional law that I had learned in fighting the death penalty got 

channeled into trying to protect families from a system that was judging them harshly and 

disrupting so many of them. Then after time, I think the constitutional law that I had to learn in 

working at LDF merged with that. I tried to develop arguments that the Reconstruction amendments 

had been a rejection of the denial of family in slavery, and therefore, that the liberty promised in the 

13th and 14th Amendments was a liberty that included family integrity. So, it was a blend, I guess I 

have to say, of what I had done at LDF and what I had done in family law. 

MHP: [00:45:38] And to give folks who are looking at the transcript and listening just some 

context of this trajectory of yours, you did become a professor of law, the first African American 

female professor at Rutgers University Law [School]. Is that right? 

PCD: [00:45:55] That might be right. I don’t remember it. I mean, I remember I was there, 

but I don’t remember— 

MHP: [00:46:01] —the accolades. 

PCD: [00:46:03] I know there was another Black colleague, but the one I remember is male. 

But I could be wrong. 



 
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MHP: [00:46:11] And you taught criminal procedure and civil rights law. And you talked 

about this, in Family Court, you served as a judge of the Family Court of the State of New York 

from 1980 to 1983. That sound about right? 

PCD: [00:46:28] I don’t know. 

MHP: [00:46:29] We’ll check the years. And then [you] returned to academia at NYU 

School of Law, taught lawyering, evidence, and family law. Of course, you write too, this great 

academic research you write and you just talked about, and how you connected Reconstruction law 

to the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. You were, though, named the John S. R. 

Shad Professor of Lawyering—if I’m saying that right—and Ethics at NYU School of Law. You 

served as Director of the Lawyering Program at NYU School of Law, and [you] direct the 

Experiential Learning Lab. That’s a lot. [Laughter] So, you have done this blend of practicing and 

also of teaching. Can you tell me what it was like transitioning, though, from practice to teaching? 

PCD: [00:47:32] You have to remember that I was leaving Family Court, which was a very 

painful environment. I felt guilty about it because I flattered myself to think that I was more 

sensitive to the families that appeared in the court, but the system as a whole seemed impenetrable. 

It was a relief, in a way, to get away from that day-to-day business in the courts. But as we’ve said, 

I tried to meld the issues that I had confronted at LDF and those that I had confronted in the Family 

Court in my scholarship. There’s another dimension, and that is that I felt that I learned so much in 

practice under the guidance of people like Bob Carter and my colleagues at LDF that I was sold on 

the idea of experiential learning in law school. And Tony Amsterdam was teaching at NYU when I 

got there. He had piloted a wonderful experiential learning program called Lawyering. So, I worked 

with him on that, and then at one point took over that program. At one point, [I] got kicked out of it. 

But it was a combination of a commitment to learning in practice that kind of fed the work I did at 

the law school, and a thought that the Reconstruction amendments needed to be understood as the 

anti-racist and revolutionary things that they are—or that they are when the Supreme Court is 

willing to interpret them that way. 



 
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MHP: [00:50:43] I only have two more questions. But I love the fact that, one, Tony 

Amsterdam is directing this experiential lawyering thing. And then, you come, you’re learning from 

him again, but then you also are the one who ends up segueing into that yourself. My next question 

though is: What do you think is the most important area of civil rights legislation today, and how do 

you think LDF, in your opinion, can continue to do meaningful work in the 21st century? 

PCD: [00:51:27] Okay, I’m not going to focus on the 21st century because I want to try to 

be more optimistic and just talk about the immediate future, and this is right after the reelection of 

Donald Trump. I’m having in mind the appointments he made to the Supreme Court and 

anticipating the appointments he might make over the next four years. So, [pause] I don’t know. 

LDF started with very little law on its side and fought to build and develop that law. And I worry 

very much that there has been and is going to be a fair amount of backsliding now. But, you know, 

that’s when the work perhaps is most important because you have to challenge what’s to come. And 

you have keep fighting for the principles that you were trying to establish and that you were 

somewhat able to establish with Supreme Courts that you could feel a little more hopeful about than 

I feel about the Supreme Court of the immediate future. 

MHP: [00:53:30] Is there anything else that you’d like to say that my questions didn’t 

address? 

PCD: [00:53:35] No, I feel I’ve talked too much. 

MHP: [00:53:37] Oh no, you were fabulous. This was great. Jesse, do you have any 

questions? 

Jesse Paddock: [00:53:44] No, I think this was wonderful. 

MHP: [00:53:44] You are superb, thank you. I also like that you’re thoughtful. You take a 

minute to think about it, and that helped me. You actually are training me to be a better oral 

historian. It is very hard for me to be silent, in the silence. 

PCD: [00:54:00] Yeah. 



 
  17 
 

MHP: [00:54:00] There’s something about your, you have a very calm presence. So, thank 

you, and thank you for this wonderful interview. 

PCD: [00:54:07] Well, thank you. It’s been good to talk about those days.  

[END OF INTERVIEW]