Peggy Cooper Davis Interview transcript
Oral History

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interview for the Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project. Interviewed by . Conducted in collaboration with the Southern Oral History Program at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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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. 2 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. 3 [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? 4 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 5 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? 6 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 7 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? 8 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. 9 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. 10 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 11 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 12 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 13 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 14 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. 15 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. 16 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]