Email RE: Texas Lawyer Article with Cover Sheet

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From: Dennis Parker 

Subject: Holiday Greeting from John Brittain 

Date: December 6, 1999 

Pages: 11, including this cover sheet. 

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; DIANE SIMMONS - Holiday Greetings from Brittain in TX 
  

From: "John C. Brittain" <jbrittain@TSULAW.EDU> 

To: "dparker@naacpldf.org™ <dparker@naacpldf.org> 

Date: 11/27/99 3:40PM 

Subject: Holiday Greetings from Brittain in TX 

[Please distribute to the Sheff lawyers and plaintiffs on e-mail list. 

Thank you.] 

November 27, 1999 

Dear Sheff Lawyers and Plaintiffs: 

| wish all of you a happy and prosperous holiday season from your dear 

friend in Texas. 

| send along my photograph as a greeting card in the attached Texas Lawyer 

article. | am not responsible for what the writer incorrectly said about 

Sheff v. O'Neill. But the state of Texas lawyers know about you now. 

love you and miss you. John. 

Click on below. 

http://www. lawnewsnetwork.com/stories/A9541-1999No
v12.html 

Dean John C. Brittain 
Thurgood Marshall School of Law 

Texas Southern University 
3100 Cleburne Avenue 

Houston, TX 77004 

713/313-1076 tel. 
713/313-1049 fax. 
e-mail: jbrittain@tsulaw.edu 

 



  

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12/6/99 

A Yankee’s New Workshop 

Dean John Brittain Rolls Up His 

Sleeves to Build a Better Law School 

Nathan Koppel 
Texas Lawyer 
November 15, 1999 

  

  

    

If being a good law school dean was 

strictly a matter of physical grace, few 

would be better than John Brittain, the 

new head of Texas Southern University 

Thurgood Marshall School of Law. 

| A strict vegetarian and runner — at age 

55, he runs a 5:15 mile, three miles in 

under 19 minutes and marathons in 

about three hours — Brittain is a 

specimen of good health. 

He was once part of a research study on 

whether serious running can retard 

osteoporosis. As part of the study, 

scientists tried to float Brittain in a 

saltwater pool, he says, but his body fat 

is so negligible he sank. 

Brittain came to Houston this fall from 

his 20-year teaching post at the 

University of Connecticut School of Law 

to achieve the opposite effect — lift a 

struggling law school trying to stay 

afloat. 

In 1947, the Texas Legislature created 

Texas Southern University and its law 

school, later named Thurgood Marshall, 

as a "separate but equal" school for 

Heman M. Sweatt, who was refused 

admission to the University of Texas 

School of Law because he was black. 

He later got into UT, thanks to his 

famous discrimination suit, argued at the 

U.S. Supreme Court by Thurgood 

Marshall. 

   

  

    

‘Dean John Brittain 

U.S. Firm Helps 
Win EU Case 
November 12, 1989 

A landmark British 

High Court ruling 

may affect public 
procurement 

contracts 

throughout the 

European Union. 
m Full Story 

  

  

  

  

  

A Firm Effort for 
Women 
November 12, 1999 

Talk to the women 

lawyers at Holland 

& Knight and you 

will find some 

happy campers. 
m Visit The Law Biz 
  

  

  

Craig's List 
Gets Dissed 
November 12, 1999 

Hot Web site in   
11:14:15 AM 

 



  

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But "the house that Sweat built," as a 

banner at Thurgood Marshall proclaims, 

still stands. Incredibly, over 50 years 

later, it is still largely separate and not 

yet equal. 

Its problems have run the gamut from 

high attrition rates to low bar passage 

rates and, unfortunately, it does not 

have the money to ease some of its 

problems. 

State funding keeps the school afloat, 

but the private sector has been a dry 

well. In a 1999 performance report on 

Texas Southern, the Texas 

Comptroller's Office criticized the 

school’s private fund-raising efforts, 

noting it took in, on average, a paltry $2 

per year from each of its 30,000 alumni. 

This shows in the law school’s facilities 

— the carpeting is stained in places, the 

walls look like they could use a fresh 

coat of paint and in some classes, 

students are forced to sit in the aisles. 

Brittain can add capital improvements to 

a long checklist. 

Much is riding on Brittain’s success. For 

many Texas minority students, 

Thurgood Marshall is the only option for 

law school. 

The Texas Higher Education Board 

recently reported that the school 

educates 90 percent of Texas’ first-year 

black law students and 52 percent of the 

state’s Hispanic first-year students. 

These percentages are likely to remain 

skewed thanks to Hopwood v. Texas, 

the 1996 ruling outlawing affirmative 

action in Texas law schools. 

Meanwhile, the Texas bar is starved for 

competent minority lawyers. According 

to State Bar of Texas’ figures, only 9 

percent of the state's lawyers are black 

or Hispanic, even though those 

12/6/99 

  

fight with former 

CEO over domain 

names. 

Visit the IP Law 

Center 
  

  n 

Losing It 
November 11, 1989 

How did a brilliant 

lawyer end up sued 

by the SEC, under 

investigation by the 

D.C. bar 

association, and on 

the hook for almost 

$20 million? 
Visit the Corporate 

Law Center 
  

Eo m— 
  

Retaliatory 

Discharge 

Claim Rejected 
November 11, 1999 

Worker alleging he 

was fired for filing 

complaint against 

union cannot 

sustain claim. 
m Visit the 
Employment L.aw 

Center 
  

8   

Disbarred, 

Unbowed 
November 10, 1999 

Arizona ex-lawyer 

offers legal tips, 
products on Web 

site; state does not 

sanction 

unauthorized 

practice of law. 
m Visit the Tech Law 

    

  

  

  

11:14:16 AM 

 



  

Law News Network -- A Yankee’s New Workshop - Microsoft Internet EPage 4 of 10 

12/6/99 

  

minorities make up 37 percent of Texas’ 

population. 

Brittain is a natural choice to be thrust 

into the middle of these troubled waters. 

He has scant administrative experience, 

a fact cited by some who opposed his 

deanship, but he’s spent a lifetime 

fighting for the underprivileged. 

As a specialist in international human 

rights, he has traveled to troubled spots 

around the world, including Haiti, 

Northern Ireland and Nicaragua. Closer 

to home, Brittain has been a tireless 

advocate for African-Americans’ civil 

rights. 

Looking at Brittain now, it is hard to 

picture him as an activist. With his 

close-cropped gray beard, penchant for 

bow ties and formal, precise manner of 

speaking, he is the classic vision of a 

Northeastern intellectual. 

"Have you seen [Brittain]?" asks Robert 

Alton Jones, a Houston alum of 

Thurgood Marshall. "He looks like a 

dean. He sounds like a dean." 

True, and he has traveled a long road to 

achieve such stature. 

Brittain was born to a working class 

family in Norwalk, Corin., a bedroom 

community outside of New York City. His 

parents worked as domestic help for 

Chandler Dobbs, the former president 

and CEO of Coca-Cola Bottling Co. 

Brittain’s mother was Dobbs’ maid and 

his father was the butler, chauffeur, 

captain of a 45-foot boat and, in his 

spare time, a self-taught pilot of Dobbs’ 

single-engine airplane. 

Brittain says his parents stressed 

education, and he heeded their 

message. In the fall of 1962, he entered 

Howard University, a historically black   

    po Fo rma 

High Court 
Skeptical of 
Self-Defense 

November 10, 1899 

Justices are 

unconvinced that a 

convicted 

defendant has a 

constitutional right 

to represent 

himself on appeal. 
m Visit the Supreme 

Court Report 

  

  

  

  

  

  

Check out Law 

News Network's 

Law Firm 

Sponsored Briefing 
  

Papers, covering 

more than 25 

practice areas. 

  

11:14:16 AM 

 



  

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12/6/99 

university. There he came alive 

politically. 

Brittain spent seven years at Howard, 

graduating in 1969 with a law degree. It 

was a tumultuous time when the nation’s 

social fabric seemed to come unglued. 

Howard, located in Washington, D.C., 

offered a front-row seat to the unfolding 
civil rights drama and a receptive 
environment for activism. 

Charles Hamilton Houston, the famous 

dean of Howard University School of 

Law, had a saying: "You are either a 

social engineer or a parasite on society." 

Brittain was the former. He mobilized 

against Vietnam, marched in the Poor 

People’s Campaign after Martin Luther 

King was assassinated in 1968 and 

fine-tuned his legal skills, helping defend 

Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a black U.S. 

congressman accused of misusing 

public funds. 

"[Brittain] had an incredible amount of 

energy. | used to get tired just thinking of 

all the things he would do," says Warner 

Lawson, one of Brittain’s law school 

cohorts, a group that immodestly called 

itself The Magnificent Seven. 

Unlike many '60s idealists, Brittain’s 

crusading spirit survived graduation. 

In 1969, with his law diploma in hand, he 

headed to Mississippi to take on the 

white establishment as a civil rights 

lawyer with the Office of Economic 

Opportunity. 

Brittain calls his four years in the Deep 

South the defining period of his life. 

Shortly after arriving, he was issued a 

gun, his first hint of what was at stake. 

The black families fighting racism on the 

front line, he learned, faced losing their 

homes, their income and even their   
11:14:16 AM 

 



  

Law News Network -- A Yankee’s New Workshop - Microsoft Internet EPage 6 of 10 

lives. His campus radicalism slowly gave 

way, he says. 

"| learned about compromise and 

incremental improvement and that you 

have to attack racism in a systematic 

manner," he says. 

Brittain did just that, waging successful 

legal campaigns against discriminatory 

voting and employment laws. 

This litigation, though significant, was 

only the beginning. Brittain’s crowning 

civil rights victory would come some 25 

years later in Hartford, Conn. 

GO TO HELL Brittain didn’t wait long 

after joining UConn’s faculty in the late 

1970s before he tried a procedure he'd 

learned in Mississippi. The veteran 

lawyers there had taught him that the 

surest way to gauge the state of civil 

rights in a town was to perform a litmus 

test. 

"It was like taking the temperature of a 

person," he explains. "We would look at 

schools in terms of the racial and ethnic 

composition. We would look at election 

systems, neighborhoods, who was 

elected to office. We would study 

housing and economic development. . . . 

This would give us a picture of whether 

there was systematic racial 

discrimination." 

When he performed the test in Hartford, 

he was immediately struck by the high 

concentration of minorities in the city’s 

public schools. Over the next four to five 

years, he says, he watched the schools 

grow increasingly segregated. 

"The symptoms resembled Mississippi,” 

he says. 

In 1989, teamed with the National 

Association for the Advancement of     
12/6/99 

11:14:16 AM 

 



  

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Colored People and the American Civil 

Liberties Union, Brittain filed suit 

claiming that Hartford's schools were 

unconstitutionally segregated. As 

support, the plaintiffs cited statistics, 

which showed that the schools had gone 

from 40 percent nonwhite in 1965 to 89 

percent nonwhite in 1989. At the time, 

Connecticut's nonwhite population 

hovered around 10 percent to 12 

percent. 

The suit, Sheff v. O'Neill, was a 

bombshell. 

"It was a big deal," Brittain says, 

| "because it was so ironic that . . . 

Connecticut, which had cheered school 

desegregation and civil rights efforts in 

the South in the 1960s now found itself 

confronted with a later generation 

version of the same thing." 

As the designated spokesperson for the 

Sheff plaintiffs, Brittain became a local 

celebrity and a lightning rod for criticism. 

Hugh Macgill, UConn law school’s dean, 

says he received so many anti-Brittain 

letters — taxpayers carping about 

having to pay for a public school teacher 

to attack the state — that he devised a 

two-page macro reply letter. "Go to hell” 

| was the essence of it, he says. 

Eventually, against long legal odds, 

Brittain and the Sheff team won the 

courtroom battle. In 1996, the 

Connecticut Supreme Court ordered the 

state to devise a plan to integrate 

Hartford's schools. 

It was a huge victory and one not likely 

to be repeated. Federal courts have 

consistently held that segregation 

caused by white flight, as occurred in 

Hartford, is not unconstitutional. In 

Sheff, however, the plaintiffs had an ace 

in the hole — the Connecticut 

l Constitution, which provides that     
11:14:16 AM 

 



  

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segregated schools are unconstitutional 

regardless of how they got that way. 

Sheff, meanwhile, rages on as the 

parties fight over how to achieve 

integration. 

Many miles away from the battleground, 

in a large office decked out in Texas 

Southern maroon, Brittain is talking 

quietly with a tired-looking student he’s 

enlisted to help in a Connecticut 

fair-housing suit that’s near settlement. 

The suit is one of the last vestiges of 

Brittain’s former life. He has moved 

inside, spending his days putting out 

institutional fires. 

Today, for example, there are a number 

of things on his mind: Finals are coming 

up, next year’s curriculum has to be 

finalized, there is faculty merit pay to 

distribute and he has to decide whether 

| to let the midyear graduates have their 

I own ceremony in December, as they 

wish, or require them to wait until the 

spring. 

Fairly mundane stuff for a man who's 

spent so much of his life in the rarified 

air of legal theory and landmark 

litigation. And then there are the really 

messy concerns, like low faculty morale. 

James M. Douglas, Thurgood 

Mar-shall’s last permanent dean, left a 

tide of ill will when he stepped down in 

1995. Thurgood Marshall professors 

complain that he ruled the school with 

an iron fist. 

"His idea . . . was that [professors] were 

employees to be managed in the 

traditional sense of a business," says 

Otis H. King, a tenured labor law 

professor. "We aren’t people who can 

be pushed around or governed like they 

are postal clerks." Douglas did not return   
11:14:16 AM 

 



  

Law News Network -- A Yankee’s New Workshop - Microsoft Internet EPage 9 of 10 

two calls for comment. 

King thinks that Brittain will turn things 

around. Not only has he proven more 

inclusive, King says, but he has won the 

faculty's respect with his reputation for 

scholarship and intelligence. 

Brittain’s friends and colleagues also 

note that he is a master at forging 

consensus. No matter what the dispute, 

they say, he always maintains a civil 

demeanor, a skill he likely picked up in 

the trenches of various civil rights 

battles. 

The new dean, for his part, is energized 

by the challenges that lie ahead. He has 

already started a Texas litmus test and 

can rattle off key stats, like the low 

percentage of minorities in the Texas 

bar. 

From his new lofty perch, Brittain thinks 

he is well-positioned to address the 

problem. 

"| intend to implement at the top some of 

the things that will make this historic law 

school an equal and very viable option in 

the new millennium . . . for a wide and 

diverse segment of the Texas 

population.” 

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