Conrad Harper Interview transcript

    Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project 

 

Conrad Harper 

Interviewed by Melody Hunter-Pillion 

January 25, 2024 

New York City, New York 

Length: 02:03:51 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 Conrad Harper, the Southern Oral History Program, and 

LDF. It has been lightly edited, in consultation with Conrad Harper, 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: This is Melody Hunter-Pillion from the Southern Oral History 

Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Today is January 25th, 2024. I’m 

here in New York City with Mr. Conrad Harper in the law offices of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett 

to conduct an interview for the Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project. And we want to thank 

you very much for being here and sharing your story with us. 

 Conrad Harper: Pleasure. Thank you. 

MHP: Let me have you introduce yourself. 

CH: Okay. Well, Conrad Harper, I was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1940 and in my 

early years, I lived in Detroit. I did spend a couple of years in Atlanta during the Second World 

War. My father was in the Army Air Corps. But essentially, I grew up in Detroit, and in the late 

[19]40s, my parents moved us, meaning my brothers and me, out of the projects in Detroit to the 

East Side, which was then a predominantly white area in Detroit. And that was a pretty 

interesting place because a few blocks away was the home of Henry Ossian Sweet. The Sweet 

case was notorious in the early part of the 20th century. Dr. Sweet had bought a house in that 

neighborhood. It was in an all-white neighborhood and a mob, a white mob, gathered to throw 

him out with guns, and he defended himself and a person was killed. So, he was brought up for 

trial on murder charges before Frank Murphy, who would in later days be, I think, a mayor of 

Detroit, an attorney general of the United States, and finally, a Supreme Court Justice. But at this 

point, he was a recorder’s court judge. There was, I think, a hung jury the first time around. 

Second time he was acquitted. His lawyer was Clarence Darrow, the greatest criminal lawyer of 

the early part of the 20th century. [00:01:59] And as a kid, I would ride by the Ossian Sweet 

house and see it and have that sense of history. My father was a lawyer, and I grew up thinking 



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maybe that’s what people became when they grew up. It didn’t occur to me really, to think about 

being anything else other than, a conversation I had with one of my aunts, I called her, although 

she was really a cousin. I was about 10 years old and she said, “What do you want to be when 

you grow up?” And I said, “Well, either a doctor or a lawyer.” She said, “Well, if you’re going to 

be a doctor, you’re going to have to deal with blood.” I decided right then I would be a lawyer. 

And I didn’t really waver from that, though I didn’t really know much about what being a lawyer 

meant. My father didn’t really talk about it, except he would bring home what we called advance 

sheets. These were paper bound volumes of appellate cases in Michigan and surrounding states. 

And I would read the cases, not for the law, but for the stories. And I was intrigued. In any case, 

I did finish high school in Detroit and went on to Howard. I can say a word about Detroit in the 

1950s. It was, as I later understood, quite a segregated town. I didn’t feel it at the time, but there 

were a couple of instances that burned in my memory. One was I was in high school and the 

then-principal called me into her office one day, I thought for something that I had done wrong. 

Not at all. She called me in because she wanted to know if I would agree to go to the junior 

prom, pointing out that while there were Black students in the high school, none or very few of 

them ever went to the proms and she thought maybe I would be willing to do that. So, I agreed. I 

asked a young lady who went to another high school to be my date. And then in those days, one 

got a card. About 12 places on this card were to be filled in as partners for one’s date. [00:04:08] 

So, I began making telephone calls to my, I thought, white friends in my honors class at 

Southeastern High School. And none of my white friends who were men would agree to dance 

with my Black date. In the fall of my senior year, I can recall vividly that Little Rock Nine were 

in the newspapers every day, school desegregation in that city. And we had a weekly time when 

we would report on current events. And when it came time for me to be called on, I said, “I want 



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to talk about the Little Rock Nine case.” And the teacher interrupted and said, “No, we can’t talk 

about that. That’s too controversial.” So, those two memories of high school and race do burn in 

the mind. I must say, my parents never really talked about race issues. They had grown up in 

Atlanta. My mother had gone to Atlanta University and my father went to Morehouse and they 

moved to Detroit in the late 1930s because there were jobs in Detroit, as there were not in 

Michigan or in, sorry, in Atlanta. So, that’s why I wound up being in Detroit. 

MHP: So, we’re going to go back a little bit and you were telling these stories that are 

what I would see as coming of age stories and your sort of awareness of race as a factor because 

your parents really hadn’t talked about it that much, you said. But in high school, though, you 

had these two instances that are memorable for you, one, that you weren’t allowed to talk about 

the Little Rock Nine, even though you knew this was something that was going on and that was 

important. And then the incident with the dance card for your African-American friend. And so, 

it sounds like the, you know, the school wanted or was encouraging African-Americans through 

you, maybe as a leader, to come to the prom. [00:06:06] But somehow, though, your white 

friends sort of had some issues around race maybe that you weren’t even aware of. Do you 

remember at all what, how did you, how did that strike you as you were sort of encountering 

those incidents? 

CH: Well, I was very hurt, of course. And that’s why it’s still in my memory. But I don’t 

think I was all that surprised. I didn’t expect it, but it was after all, America in 1956, [19]57, 

[19]58, and race was very much in the newspapers, even if it was not being talked about in my 

own home. 

 MHP: Do you have some, or have you thought about that? Why your parents, being from 

the South, didn’t talk about race a lot? 



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CH: You know, I think it’s maybe comparable to situations where people are in war and 

they don’t talk about that experience afterward. Growing up in the [19]20s and [19]30s in 

Atlanta must have been quite something. I can tell you that much later, my father told me about 

his father, my grandfather, and why my grandfather, whom I knew only very slightly because he 

died when I was about five, and I met him when I was about four. So, it’s a very hazy memory, 

but I do remember him. But the reason my grandfather, when I came to know him was a 

junkman, was the following, according to my father. In the early 1920s, [my grandad] was 

working for a white man in Atlanta. The white man called him a n---. And my grandfather 

vowed he would never work for a white man again. And he never did. But that meant that he 

therefore had a very, very difficult time making a living. And by the time of his death, which was 

caused by a railroad train colliding with his junk wagon being pulled by a horse, he was at that 

point in his life where he was not earning very much money. [00:08:16] 

 MHP: You’re, you mentioned that your, your dad was an attorney. You followed in his 

footsteps. Tell us about your mother. What was her occupation and just also sort of conversations 

you had from her, how she influenced you? 

CH: If my wife were here, she would say that, of course, I was influenced by both 

parents, but that my mother had by far the more profound impression on me. And I think that’s 

right. Mom finished college at 19. She was an English major. She went on to study [in] graduate 

school at Atlanta University but did not write the thesis. So, she didn’t get a master’s degree. 

And she taught English in high school and the college level in various southern states in the mid 

and late 1930s. She was very much a lady and she was proper in everything. And I think that had 

a great effect upon me. Much later, when I came to work at the Legal Defense Fund and was 

representing a lot of schoolteachers who had been dismissed, Black teachers, because the district 



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had been desegregated and they lost their jobs. In a sense, I always talk about the, thought about 

the fact that I was actually representing my mother as I was representing all of these teachers in 

those circumstances. Mom and Dad were both great readers. My mom loved poetry as well as 

other things, and I think I came away from my years at home with the sense that I was very 

fortunate to have these two highly educated, highly motivated, highly inspiring people every day 

in my life. [00:10:03] I had two younger brothers, I should add, and if they were here, they 

would say I paid no attention to them. And that’s probably right. One was six and a half years 

younger and the other was nine years younger. So, as Marsha, my wife, would say, I grew up 

essentially an only child for a long time and never got over it. 

MHP: So, there were, so just two siblings. You didn’t have any sisters, just brothers? 

CH: That’s right. No sisters. 

MHP: Tell me about a little bit about that. What was life like in your household with 

your brothers, your mom, your dad? What was that, would we think of it as, you know, sort of 

typical American household where, you know, especially at that time families gathering at night 

for dinner and what conversations were like at the dinner table? 

CH: The dinner meal was less often a complete family affair than the breakfast meal. 

Dad was usually working late, so many evenings he was not at home when the rest of us had 

dinner. But [in the] morning we all had breakfast together. Dad read the newspapers and would 

periodically interrupt himself to comment on something in the news. My mother was a great 

peacemaker, and so when Dad would say something she thought really wasn’t something we 

should pursue, she would manage to change the conversation very adroitly. My brothers, of 

course, were interested in things I was not interested in and vice versa. So, we had little to talk 

about at the table. During the weekends, we did tend to have real meals at home together. The 



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whole family. I didn’t watch very much television. Television was a new thing. I think we got 

ours when I was about 11, one of the few people on the block to have one then. But I missed 

essentially the television generation, and so my younger brothers knew all the programs, but I 

paid very little [attention]. I read a lot. My mother, I realized, was very happy when I finally got 

old enough to take the bus to the main branch of the Detroit Public Library every Saturday, 

which I loved to do. It was a great building, a beautiful building, lots of books, where I would 

spend most of the day. [00:12:12] I realized subsequently that when I became a parent, that was 

wonderful for the parent to know that the child had disappeared to the library for hours at a time. 

I also contracted another disease at that time, which was I love to go to used bookstores. And 

over time I acquired a fair number of books. And to this day, we probably have more books than 

we need. So that was another enjoyment. I also played the baritone horn in the band, in junior 

high school, senior high school, and in college for that matter. And that was great fun, playing 

with some friends, who, we’re still friends. And music was very important in that regard. Both 

classical music as well as the more popular music at the time. 

 MHP: So, music lover, obviously a voracious reader, even at a very early age. I want to 

ask you about your development of a political consciousness. And I don’t know if it was because 

you were someone who was already well read or when do you have the sense of developing a 

political consciousness and being more sort of aware of the cultural and socio-economic 

environment around you in Detroit? 

 CH: Well, I’ll give you two ideas, because they occurred roughly the same time. One 

was in the early 1950s, the rise, the ascendancy of Joseph McCarthy, the senator from 

Wisconsin, who was busy finding communists everywhere. And I saw a little bit of the Army-

McCarthy hearings as they were broadcast and evening news in that period. I remember that. 



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Brown v. Board of Education was decided, of course, in 1954. And perhaps it’s surprising for me 

to tell you, I don’t remember that as an event, probably because I was in a school that was 

largely white and so it would have been something that was happening, but it was far away and 

not having immediate consequences. I didn’t realize until later on how profound that case was 

for my own life, but at the time of its decision, I was blithely unaware, I think, of the fact that 

that occurred. [00:14:21] In fact, it was not even the Montgomery bus boycott that grabbed my 

attention so much as the Little Rock Nine, in part because they were my contemporaries. And 

indeed, there came a point where I met them because in the summer of 1958, I participated in a 

lot of oratorical contests, which helped me to make some money to go to college. And among 

them was one, I think it must’ve been the Elk Oratorical Contest, the finals for which were in 

Washington. And the persons to be celebrated were Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine. So I 

met them at that point. But when you ask me about the origins of political consciousness, it may 

have been in a quite different way that I became sensitive to political developments. I recall my 

father, I guess, gave me a book on the ordeal of Captain Dreyfus, who had been a French army 

officer in the 1890s, who was cashiered because he was Jewish, ultimately winding up [for] 

several years in jail before being freed of the charges that he had been involved in some scandal 

involving national security. But I read the book, Captain Dreyfus: The Story of a Mass Hysteria, 

and I was amazed that a country essentially would go so completely crazy over something that 

had no substance. So, in a sense, my political consciousness was a function of reading about a 

crisis somewhere else and later on understanding that crises happen like that all the time, 

everywhere. 

MHP: How did you become involved in these oratorical sort of contests or conferences 

that you were attending? [00:16:06] 



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CH: My first year in high school, 10th grade, I was in the English class taught by Mrs. 

Winifred Blacklock. Mrs. Blacklock had gone to Olivet College in Michigan, I guess, in the 

[19]20s, and among her teachers there had been Robert Frost. And she was about four foot ten, a 

bundle of energy. And for reasons I don’t understand, but she took me aside one day and asked 

me whether I would like to have some additional coaching for public speaking. And of course, I 

said yes, why not? And for the next year or two I would meet her, I think twice a week, seven-

thirty in the morning, I believe, at our public high school where she would coach me on public 

speaking. This was her own time, her own initiative. But it introduced me to how to act on a 

platform and how to behave in a public setting. And there were contests, oratorical in nature, that 

were sponsored by or involved college – high school students, sorry. And I participated in a 

number of those, so that by the summer between high school and college, I was in effect on the 

circuit participating in all kinds of contests. 

MHP: And it’s interesting how all of these things intersected, though, because that, you 

know, that experience you had with the oratorical contests and training not only helped you to 

develop this political awareness and consciousness, but also later, like you can see how it 

informs you as a professional, right, and your ability to do it. So, I’m just thinking about that, 

how that added to different layers of your life. [00:18:07] 

CH: Well, I’ve always thought that the written word is powerful to communicate, but 

when you have a written word reinforced by an actual in-person delivery, it really sticks in a 

different way. I think sometimes people are rightly suspicious of the person who’s too good as a 

public speaker. But if you do marry principle and the power of appropriate speech, it can be 

transformative. 



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MHP: Let’s move on to your undergraduate days in college. So, you attended Howard 

University, graduating in 1962, is that right? 

CH: That’s correct. 

MHP: Describe what it was like at Howard in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. 

CH: I didn’t know a thing about Howard University before my parents announced to me 

in the fall of my senior year that I was going there. As I mentioned, each of them was from 

Atlanta and had gone to college in Atlanta. But their view was that Atlanta in 1958 was too 

segregated. They did not want to send their oldest child to that place. So, they did not. And as I 

say, they told me I was going to Atlanta—sorry, going to Howard. And, so I, being a dutiful 

child, said, “Of course,” and off I went. And I never saw Howard until the day I arrived after an 

overnight train ride with a number of people from Detroit who were also going to Howard, either 

for the first time or returning for later years. You probably can’t imagine what it was like to get 

to the Howard campus in September of 1958 and see absolutely the most beautiful women I had 

ever seen anywhere, any time. Hundreds of them. [00:20:00] [laughter] And being surrounded by 

people of color in every way. I mean, I’d gone, as I say, to a predominantly white high school. I 

lived in a predominately white neighborhood, so I’d never seen so many able Black people in my 

life. It was very exciting. But it also had an immediate effect that I didn’t realize until I felt it, 

which was that the burden of being Black in a white environment was no longer a factor in my 

life. I was now clear that I was being judged for who I was and not by the extraneous factor of 

my skin color. And that was powerfully liberating. I was in the honors program at Howard, and 

so early on I was grouped with another 30 or so students from around the country, and we spent 

four years together in various honors programs, which was wonderful in itself. But in addition, 

my greatest educational experience at Howard was this. Beginning of my second year, when one 



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began a major, I signed up for history. I always wanted to read history, and that’s what I was 

going to read. And the introductory course, History of the World to 1650, was taught by a man 

named Harold Lewis. Lewis was a longtime professor at Howard, but the prior year he had not 

been on campus. He had been at Harvard on his sabbatical, and he had become enamored of the 

seminar method of teaching. So, when he got back to Howard in the fall of 1959, he decided 

after, I guess, the first test that was given that he would pick four people who might be interested 

in being in a seminar rather than going to class three times a week. [00:21:55] So, I was one and 

three others and each of us said yes. And what that meant eventually was that for the next three 

years, every week we met with Dr. Lewis for three, four hours and the regime was always the 

same. The prior week we were assigned a book, each of us a different book, but in the same 

general topic. We had to write a report and come to the seminar session with that report. But the 

seminar consisted of several hours of argument, back and forth among the students and with Dr. 

Lewis about what we’d read and what it meant. It was a powerful shaping tool for intellectual 

engagement, and it went on, as I say, for three years. The final examinations by Dr. Lewis were 

horrific. They were open book, which meant, of course, books were entirely not useful. We were 

given the papers at 10 o’clock in the morning in the library, and we had until midnight and we 

used those hours to try to answer these very difficult questions. Never in my life have I had 

questions so hard and worked so hard at them. Any case, that was a great educational experience. 

MHP: Let me ask you then. So, there’s this history course that you’re taking. It’s just a 

few students, a seminar, Professor Lewis. But were you a history major? 

CH: I was. 

MHP: You were a history major. What were some of the other subjects that you studied 

that you really enjoyed? 



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CH: Well, it was quite a star-studded faculty. Sterling Brown was alive and on the 

faculty, English professor. And one of the honors courses was his on American literature. And 

the most startling part of that semester was this. Brown announced one day that we were not 

going to talk about what had been assigned. He had invited a friend. The friend came in. The 

friend was Willie “The Lion” Smith, the great pianist who had played behind Bessie Smith and 

others. [00:24:04] And he talked for the next hour and had a piano there about what it was like to 

play behind the great jazz greats, the preceding generation. It was marvelous. Okay, so that was 

one thing. Another teacher was Rayford Logan, who was the head of the history department. 

Logan turns out to have an absolutely decisive effect on my life, and so I’ll go slightly out of 

order to give you a connected story. I took his course on the Nadir, which is the period that he 

called between 1877 and 1901, when the country turned away from Reconstruction and became a 

full Jim Crow operation. And I took the course, and I thought it was okay. But subsequently, by 

subsequently now I mean 1965, 1966, I had finished law school. I am now classified 1-A, and 

I’m looking at going to Vietnam and I unfortunately still had my draft board in Detroit, even 

though I was living in New York. You couldn’t change your draft board. So, the draft board in 

Detroit decided I was fit and I passed the physical examination. I got in touch with one of my 

college classmates, Michael Winston, who had also been in the seminar with me for [three] 

years. And Michael was then working at Howard, working on his Ph.D. at Berkeley, but working 

at Howard at that time and working with Dr. Logan and I told him my problem. He said, “Let me 

talk to Dr. Logan.” The reason he decided to talk to Dr. Logan was this. Logan had gone to, I 

believe, Williams College, back in the early part of the 20th century, where he had a great 

academic record. [00:25:59] And when World War I came, he decided to try to qualify to be an 

Army officer, which he did. He went to Army officer school and was commissioned an officer in 



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the U.S. Army and went to France and fought in the First World War. After the war, he was so 

disgusted with what was going on in race in the United States, that he decided to stay in France. 

He worked with Du Bois, 1919, and the [Pan African] Congress, and he was in France for the 

next five years, ultimately coming back to the United States, ultimately taking his Ph.D. at 

Harvard, and ultimately, after other teaching posts, teaching at Howard for many, many years. 

One of his colleagues in France was a man named Campbell C. Johnson. Johnson, also Black, 

decided to stay in the Army and to return to the United States, which he did. And by 1940 he was 

still in the Army and he was seconded to the Office of Selective Service, which was set up 

pursuant to the statute passed that year. In 1965, 1966, Colonel Campbell C. Johnson was still at 

the Office of Selective Service. Rayford Logan got in touch with his former army buddy, told 

him about Conrad Harper, and one day a very slim envelope arrived at my home. Marsha, my 

wife, has said many times, “I never opened Conrad’s mail, but this time I couldn’t resist because 

the return address was Selective Service.” And she opened it and saw that I had been reclassified 

pursuant to the order of Colonel Campbell C. Johnson because my job was in the national 

interest. What was that job? I was a staff lawyer at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational 

Fund Inc. [00:27:54] 

MHP: That’s amazing. [laughter] That is amazing. 

CH: Yeah. 

MHP: I love this story. It’s a great story. So, let’s go back to Howard now [laughter], 

right. So, this is good. We’re going to go back to Howard, undergrad years, history major, 

honors, doing great with that. And that argument practicing that you guys are having in this 

seminar with Professor Lewis is really helping to develop you. When did you decide, though, 



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that you wanted to be a lawyer and more specifically, when did you decide what kind of lawyer 

you wanted to be? 

 CH: Well, as I indicated, I knew pretty early I wanted to be one without really 

understanding what that was. I can tell you that that summer of [19]58, when I was doing 

oratorical competitions, there was a long article on me in the Michigan Chronicle, which was a 

Black newspaper of that era. I had forgotten this, of course, until many, many years later, my 

mother, who saved everything, said, “By the way, do you remember this article?” And she 

showed it to me and I read it. And I was startled because in this article, the 17-year-old Conrad 

Harper was interviewed by a reporter who asked, “What do you want to be?” “I want to be a 

lawyer.” “Where do you want to go to law school?” “Harvard.” I mean, why at 17, I thought I 

would or should go to Harvard, I have no idea. But that was clear at least very early. The 

problem with answering your question more precisely is at some point I just accepted the fact 

that’s what I was going to do. But I did have a problem in my senior year in college because I 

took the law school admission test, of course, and then got the materials to apply to Harvard, 

Yale, Columbia, NYU Law schools. The last three, Yale, Columbia, NYU, had a requirement 

that you write an essay describing why you wanted to be a lawyer. Harvard did not have such a 

requirement, so I sent the Harvard materials off. And while I was trying to answer the questions 

for the other law schools, I was accepted to Harvard. So, I never answered the question. And you 

might argue maybe I never have answered that question. [laughter] [00:30:08] 

MHP: So, you move on then to Harvard for your LLB? 

CH: Yes. 

MHP: Right. And graduated in [19]65. 

CH: Right. 



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MHP: You’ve told us about your decision to apply and attend Harvard, how that went. 

But can you describe your experience at Harvard Law School? Any particular classes, teachers 

or peers who really continue to stand out for you? 

 CH: Let me begin by saying that going from Howard to Harvard was like going from a 

warm bath to a cold shower. Okay. It’s a very different environment. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 

is a great place to go to school. And I loved the three years as a student there. But law school, 

particularly the first year, was anything but pleasant. However, there were certain things that 

would be of fundamental importance for me. Midway through my first year, I got a notice to go 

see the Dean. I did not know the Dean at all. Erwin Griswold. I couldn’t imagine why he was 

asking for me. I hadn’t even taken any examinations. But I went to see him, of course, and he 

said that he was a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and he wondered whether I’d 

made any arrangements for employment between my first and second years the coming summer. 

No, I had not. I thought probably I’d go back to Detroit, work for my father. He said, “Well, if 

you’re interested, I think probably I can arrange for you to work at the U.S. Commission.” So, I 

said yes, and I went to work there and had a marvelous summer, very important for me as a law 

student, because it gave me the sense that actually maybe law school really fit. Up to that point, I 

really wasn’t sure. But spending the summer writing reports about my friends, many of them 

who’d gone South to work in the movement, who were now writing reports about what they 

were doing. This is the summer of [19]63, and working at the commission was really very, very 

good for me to understand why what I was learning in law school had some relevance to the real 

world. [00:32:16] The next year, now I’m a little hazy, but I think Dean Griswold must have had 

a role in my getting a job at the Legal Defense Fund. I took his course that year on income tax 

law, but I don’t have a recollection of how it came to be that I got an offer to go to the Inc. Fund 



17 
 

that summer of [19]64. But I did work there that summer, and I’ll come back to that probably 

later on. But let me talk about the other part of your question, which is the people at Harvard 

Law School. I’ll mentioned two, maybe three of them. One was a man named Mark De Wolfe 

Howe. Howe was a professor of legal history. I took his course on the legal status of the Negro, 

which dealt with the Antebellum Period. Very difficult-to-read cases, I found, where Black 

people were treated as chattel, which is what the jurisprudence of Antebellum America was like. 

But it was a very, very enlightening course and very important for me to get grounded in that 

part of legal history. Another course that was quite important to me was taught by Henry Hart. 

Hart taught a course called Federal Courts in the Federal System. It was a third-year course, it 

was kind of an advanced constitutional law course. I knew that I wanted to take the course, but I 

wasn’t sure at all that I wanted to hear Henry Hart’s views of the federal courts and the federal 

system because he had a reputation of being somewhat conservative. But I took the course 

anyway, and now I have to go back to the summer of 1964, the [summer] before I had that year 

long course with Hart. The summer between my second and third years in law school, because I 

was working at the Legal Defense Fund. And there, among other things, I spent time working 

with Charles Black, who at that point was on the Yale Law School faculty. [00:34:24] He 

subsequently went back to Columbia. And he was working on briefs the Legal Defense Fund was 

going to file in Hamm v. City of Rock Hill. Hamm v. City of Rock Hill was a case involving 

Blacks who’d been arrested for sit-in demonstrations, and they’d been prosecuted for violating 

segregation laws in South Carolina. And the case was, as I say, at the Supreme Court level. But 

what had happened while the case was pending was that the U.S. Congress had passed and the 

President had signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which had the consequence, in Title II, of 

substituting a possible crime, namely trespass, for a right, which was a right to public 



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accommodations. So, Charlie Black’s briefs argued that the [19]64 Civil Rights Act had abated 

all the criminal prosecutions then pending, and therefore the Hamm prosecutions had to be set 

aside. It was a beautifully written piece of [work]. I was delighted to be able to chase some 

footnotes for him in it, and when I entered Henry Hart’s class in September of 1964, I felt with 

some foreboding that when that case came down, if it came down on the side that Charlie Black 

had argued for, Henry Hart was going to savage it. So, the semester went on. We got to 

December. It was the last week before Christmas break. And that Monday, court in those days 

handed down decisions only on Monday, that Monday the court decided Hamm v. City of Rock 

Hill. [00:36:06] Our class met on Thursdays and Fridays. Thursday, Henry Hart said nothing 

about Hamm v. City of Rock Hill. Friday came, the class opened. “The Supreme Court,” said 

Hart, “decided the case called Hamm v. City of Rock Hill. These are the facts.” And he would lay 

out the facts, as he always did, with absolute clarity, absolute fairness. By the way, Henry Hart 

sounded like God. Okay. He had this huge mane of white hair, a beautifully resonant voice. After 

he laid out the facts, he called for discussion. My 150 classmates. I didn’t tell you, by the way, I 

was the only Black person in my class. There were 550 in the entire class, and I was the only 

Black. In this particular class therefore, of 150, I was the only Black. And they understood what 

they thought was Henry Hart’s view. And so, they began to parrot things they thought he would 

say were wrong about what the Supreme Court had done, which, by the way, had decided the 

case five to four, in an opinion by Justice Clark that was not a model of clarity. I did my best to 

try to defend what the Court had done. But the reason I tell you the story is now this. The last 

five to 10 minutes of the class, Henry Hart gave us his [views] about that case. I don’t remember 

anything specifically he said, except one phrase, which I shall never forget. He said, “There 

comes a time when we need constitutional heroes. This is such a time. The court decided this 



19 
 

case correctly.” It was so stunning that the entire class stood up and gave him a standing ovation. 

I thought to myself later on, maybe Henry Hart was not as conservative as I thought he was. 

[00:38:00] Now we have to go forward 30 years. I’m sitting in my office at the State 

Department. I’m legal adviser of the department of those days. And a book that Henry Hart had 

worked on with a man named Al Sacks called The Legal Process. I’d also taken that course from 

Sacks, but this book, which had always been mimeographed, was now published in hardcover, 

and there was a long explanatory essay of the editors about the piece and about Henry Hart, 

among others. So, I read this piece and I learned for the first time, many, many years after 

finishing Harvard Law School, that in the early 1950s, when Henry Hart was living in Belmont, 

Massachusetts, then and now, a place where many Harvard faculty live, he was on the streets 

protesting against racial segregation in housing. It taught me, you never really know who people 

really are until there’s a crisis that shows who they really are. 

MHP: And then you really see the middle that’s there. 

CH: Yeah. Yeah. 

MHP: Wonderful story from your years at Harvard. Let me ask you one more thing 

about Harvard, because you and especially now that you’ve given me visually, right, I can see 

you there, the only African-American in a class in that classroom of 150. I’m visually seeing you 

there, what was – and you’re working on civil rights cases. You have friends who are working 

down South on cases. But what’s the climate, if you can describe the climate at Harvard during 

those times, if you had a sense of what, you know, of what it was like there? [00:39:46] 

CH: Well, there was no, how shall I say, no real issue about race in the classroom or 

among my fellow students. But bear in mind, we’re talking at a time when the number of Black 

faces was of almost infinitesimal. In the class preceding mine, there were three Blacks. In the 



20 
 

class succeeding mine, there were seven. And so out of a school population of 1,500 or so, we 

were a very small number of people. And so, you didn’t have a feeling of exclusion, if you will. 

There were too few of us to be excluded. [laughter] We were there, but the regime was a 

different regime. This was a time when the tide of the Warren Court was at full crest. And so you 

had many decisions every year that were affirming the rights of the disadvantaged, the 

disfranchised, and that was the milieu of the school mostly. And the faculty. It became 

unfortunately very different, as we know, in subsequent years. But you had the feeling in those 

years that you were riding the horse of history and it was going your way. When I got to the 

Fund, I might add parenthetically, it was often the case we would lose cases in the district court. 

We could almost always count on getting a reversal and winning in the Fifth Circuit or the 

Fourth Circuit or the Eighth Circuit. And so, it was a very different climate, if you will, from 

what people now experience. 

 MHP: I’m going to circle back to your work at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. 

The summer of 1963, to see if there’s anything else you want to say about that before we then 

move on to LDF. So, during that summer of [19]63, you’re still in law school. How did that 

experience affect how you thought about law and civil rights in America? [00:41:59] 

 CH: Well, I think it’s fair to say two things. First, it did show me that law was really 

important in understanding society and that having to write about what was going on from a legal 

perspective on matters that were of immense importance to me personally reinforced that. But 

the second thing I have to say is somewhat off the point, but worth saying. Martin Luther King 

Jr. When I was at Howard, I would hear King probably three or four times a year. He would 

appear on campus and preach at Rankin Chapel. He, by the way, I did not think was among the 

most impressive preachers of that time. I heard many people who were better. Mordecai Johnson, 



21 
 

for one, who was president of Howard. Benjamin Elijah Mays, who was president of Morehouse. 

Buell Gallagher, who was white. He was president of City College, New York. So, I heard 

excellent preachers. And King was good, but not at the front rank or so it appeared. In the 

summer of 1963, I was working in Washington as a result of being at the Civil Rights 

Commission. And so, I was there on August 28th when he gave the I Have a Dream speech at 

the Lincoln Memorial. And what was my reaction? I was not particularly impressed. Why? 

Because I had heard him rehearse, many times, many of these famous phrases now indelibly 

fixed in the American mind. But he had worked them out over a long period of time. Many 

sermons at Howard had been studded with them. It wasn’t until two years later, my last year in 

college – in law school, that I had a fundamental change in my perspective on Martin Luther 

King Jr. In March of 1965, Selma exploded. [00:44:00] And as Marsha, my wife, would say, if 

she were here, that would seem to be an irrelevance. But the night before the Pettus Bridge 

imbroglio, I gave her an engagement ring. And ever after, we always celebrate March the sixth 

as ring day in our house. March seventh, Pettus Bridge. March eight or so, I got a call from a 

friend of mine who was white, lived not far from Cape Cod, saying, “I’m going to Selma and I 

want you to go with me.” I said, “I can’t go to Selma. I don’t have any money. I’ve got to study. 

I mean, what are you talking about?” He said, “We’re going to raise the money locally, send 

people to Selma. But I want to go and I want you to go with me.” So I went to Selma. I was 

terrified for the next three nights. We slept on the floor in peoples’ homes near Brown’s Chapel. 

The regimen was always the same. You got up in the morning, you went to march, to the 

barricades. The state troopers were 10 feet tall, or so they appeared. You’re walking with little 

kids who are eight, nine, and 10, and they’re singing freedom songs. And, you know, you just 

don’t know whether you’re going to get back. And every night you would meet in Brown’s 



22 
 

Chapel and there would be speakers. Andy Young, a host of other people, always capped by 

Martin Luther King Jr. And I saw King under pressure because here he’d been there all day. He’s 

tired. You can just see he’s at the end of his rope and yet he stands up and he encourages us, 

stimulates us, inspires us. And there was one occasion, and I never met him. I was never 

introduced to him, though I was near him sometimes. And the most near I got to him was in 

Selma. One day after we’ve been turned back at the barricades, I found myself literally next to 

King and Andy Young and two or three other people. They were having a furious argument 

about tactics. And somebody was saying to King, you know, “We really have to have a plan, 

Martin.” You know. “We just can’t keep marching. I mean, we’ve got to have something. We’ve 

got an objective.” [00:46:15] And King said, “I don’t have a plan, I have a purpose.” So, when I 

look back at the times I saw him, I thought I didn’t really see who he really was. I didn’t really 

understand. With all of the issues that surround his personal life, I realize he’s one of the great 

figures in American history. 

MHP: It’s when you saw him in that moment of tension and in that sort of in the fire, 

right, when you could really see the true grit there. 

CH: Yeah.  

MHP: So, we’re going to move on to the summer of [19]64 then, unless there’s more that 

you want to say about that summer of [19]63. [laughter] So, the summer of 1964, you worked for 

LDF, and I think you’ve told us how you came about working for LDF that summer. 

CH: In the sense that I think Erwin Griswold intervened for me with Jack Greenberg. 

 MHP: Right. So, you were not expecting that particular assignment or that position, and 

you’ve told us how you came to learn that you’d be working with them. But when did you learn 



23 
 

and how did you learn exactly what the assignments would be? And then describe the office for 

us, what it was like, the atmosphere. 

CH: When I got to the Fund in 1964, there were maybe 10, possibly 12 lawyers, and of 

course there were other staff, secretaries. And so, it’s a relatively small operation. Jack 

Greenberg was the Director-Counsel. The Associate Director-Counsel was James M. Nabrit III. 

[00:47:57] And then there were other lawyers there, the most prominent of whom was Constance 

Baker Motley, who was the [second] ranking person on the staff. And the first time I actually 

met Connie, I came to know her fairly well in later years. And it was a very close-knit happy 

group. I mean, I had great fun that summer. I found myself at one point having to jump on a 

plane and fly to St. Louis because we had to get an application in to the Eighth Circuit for a man 

on death row. I literally had only hours to get it filed properly. Mercifully, we did get it filed. 

And I recall just feeling very, very happy to be at the Inc. Fund and writing briefs and doing 

things that I thought really made a difference. And I was grateful for that. And as it turned out 

happily, I was later asked to join the staff. 

 MHP: So, you joined the staff permanently. What was, did you see a difference in your 

role as you know, when you were working in the summer and then now you’re a permanent 

member of the team? What was the difference in that for you? 

CH: Nothing specific, except of course, I couldn’t sign papers. I couldn’t have my name 

on the papers. I couldn’t appear in court to argue anything. But I was doing a lot of the same 

work my first six months or so that I had been doing the prior summer, you know, writing briefs, 

writing pleadings and meeting to some degree with local lawyers. Of course, as I stayed on the 

staff, I started traveling a lot, meeting with cooperating lawyers, meeting with clients, and then 



24 
 

getting involved fully in the fray when I was finally admitted to the bar in the spring or late 

winter, I guess it was of 1966. 

MHP: Let me ask you to talk, if you would, and I know you’ve named some of your 

colleagues already, but if you could talk a little bit more, name some of the LDF attorneys that 

you worked with and also just talk about sort of the professional, social, and intellectual climate 

in the office. I’ve got some names here I can name some or I can let you just do some names. 

Which way do you want to do this? [00:50:15] 

CH: I’ll go first and then we’ll see what you want to pursue specifically. In a sense, in 

those days, one was an independent contractor on the staff. You would be given – I was given 

assignments by more senior lawyers, but that meant, “Okay, Conrad, you take this case,” 

whatever it was. It might be responding to correspondence about the case, talking with the local 

lawyer, drafting the pleadings, working on the discovery materials, could be any range of tasks, 

but it became my case by virtue of assignment. Which meant that when I had a problem, I had to 

go find somebody who might be able to help me. Of course, I could draw on other things that 

had been done in the office that were similar in nature. You know, by the time you work on your 

fifth school desegregation case, you basically know how it goes. And your 10th public 

accommodations case. But the first two or three times around, you need help looking at models 

and other things. The lawyers I worked with most closely. Michael Meltsner, on cases involving 

desegregation of hospital facilities. I worked with Jim Nabrit a little bit, not very, very much. I 

didn’t really work with Jack Greenberg at all, I think. And I worked with Leroy Clark, who 

subsequently became a law professor at the law school in Catholic University. Did I mention 

Norman Amaker? Maybe not. [00:52:00] 

MHP: You did not. 



25 
 

CH: Okay. Norman Amaker subsequently left the Fund and went to work, went, I think, 

to teach in Chicago. Norman’s important because he gave me one of the greatest gifts anybody 

ever gave me in practice. There came a time when our local lawyer in Arkansas, John Walker, 

wrote in to the Fund, I think he wrote directly to Norman saying, “I just lost this case in the 

Eighth Circuit. And are you willing to ask the Supreme Court to take it, to take the case?” And 

Norman was a very busy guy, so he turned to me. He said, “Conrad, see what you can do with 

this.” So, I wrote the certiorari petition as it was called, the request for the Court to take the case. 

The Court took the case. Norman: “Well, since you got the case taken, write the briefs on the 

merits.” So, I wrote the briefs on the merits. Meanwhile, Norman had argued his first case in the 

Supreme Court of the United States, so he was very happy about that. And he turned to me one 

day and said, “Conrad, would you like to argue this case in the Supreme Court?” Now, I was at a 

point in my life when I wasn’t even a member of the New York Bar long enough to be a member 

of the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. But he offered me this opportunity, and I 

accepted it and I had that great experience. Last year of Chief Justice Warren’s tenure as Chief 

Justice. When I stood up to argue the case, Thurgood Marshall was on the bench. He looked up, 

looked at me and said in a stage whisper that the entire courtroom heard, “Who is that?” And 

then his, one of his colleagues to his right, I guess, said, told him, I guess. He didn’t ask me any 

questions. Many years later, thanks to Connie Motley, I met Thurgood for real at a Second 

Circuit Judicial Conference. [00:54:05] I said, “Justice Marshall, I’m sure you don’t remember.” 

He cut me off. “Of course, I remember who you are.” [laughter] And then some years after that, 

the last couple of years of his life, I had two notable occasions to sit next to Thurgood at dinner 

at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Now, Marshall was one of those people 

who was, by any measure, much more impressive than anything you ever read about him and 



26 
 

you read a lot about him and he was a very impressive guy. But in person, he was a giant. Funny. 

He would tell story after story and you would be laughing. At the same time you realized there 

was a kind of a dig in it, you know, kind of a point that you were supposed to get. So, I had a 

wonderful experience, and I’m going to tell you a story that probably, probably he never told 

many people. So, I never knew it from anybody else. It deals with Lou Redding. Lou Redding 

was a Black lawyer in Wilmington, Delaware, finished Brown and then Harvard Law School in 

the 1920s. And though he lived in Pennsylvania, refusing to live in segregated Delaware, he 

practiced in Delaware. And much later he would be one of the lawyers involved in the Brown 

cases and alone among the Brown lawyers, he won his case in the court below, in the Supreme 

Court of Delaware. And so, he was on the winning side going up to the Supreme Court. 

Everybody else had lost below. But the story is this. Lou Redding was head of the ACLU in in 

Delaware in the early 1930s. And one day, according to Marshall, he went to his office and there 

was a letter from Roger Baldwin, one of the organizers, founders of the ACLU, directed to Mr. 

Redding and the burden of the letter was as follows. [00:56:00] “Mr. Redding, it has come to our 

attention that you are a Negro. You cannot be the head of the ACLU in Delaware. You are not 

any longer the head of the ACLU in Delaware.” Not the kind of letter you would expect to learn 

that Roger Baldwin had ever written. But according to Thurgood Marshall, that’s what had 

happened. 

MHP: So, let me ask you this, because when, as soon as you said Thurgood, okay, one, 

how old are you when this opportunity, because of your colleague Amaker, right? Is that right? 

CH: Yeah. Amaker, right. 

MHP: To, you know, argue in front of the Supreme Court and Thurgood Marshall is on 

the bench still. 



27 
 

CH: I was 28. 

MHP: That’s pretty amazing. What an amazing opportunity and then the stories that you 

got to hear from Thurgood Marshall. And to tell us a little bit more about his personality. Let me 

ask you more about your colleagues. So, there’s this extraordinary opportunity that you come by 

because of Amaker. But what was he like? 

CH: Norman Amaker? 

MHP: Yeah. 

CH: Norman Amaker had gone to Columbia Law School. He was a guy who had a keen 

sense of irony about life, okay. And would always see the somewhat peculiar circumstances, 

either of our cases or of our colleagues. So, it was always fun to talk to Norman because he had a 

kind of wry humor that made it a pleasure. 

MHP: Any other colleagues who really stand out to you, and if so, tell me what they 

were like personally. 

CH: Well, not really a colleague. He was much more important than that. Anthony 

Amsterdam. Amsterdam was a longtime member of the NYU faculty, but at the time I knew him 

he was on the Penn faculty. Tony had, I guess, still has a photographic memory, and so 

sometimes I’d be working late at night at the Fund and I would hear Tony dictating a brief. Now, 

what that meant was the following. [00:58:13] Tony would sit at a desk or walk around the office 

dictating to a secretary, and he would dictate sentences and he would follow the sentences with 

the name of the case that he was quoting in his dictation. Give you the page number where the 

quote appeared, both in the official and the unofficial court reporters, as well as the complete 

citation. Mind you, he’s got no paper in front of him. It’s all in his mind. One of the few geniuses 

I’ve had a chance to work with. I’ll tell you two quick stories. Number one, Tony was the genius 



28 
 

behind something the Legal Defense Fund undertook to do in the mid-[19]60s, which was to 

have a survey made in many of the southern states of filling out questionnaires of all the people 

on death row in those states to see whether, particularly for Blacks, the reason so many Blacks 

were there could be isolated as race being a factor. These questionnaires were many pages, and 

they covered every conceivable, supposedly, circumstance to try to isolate statistically. We never 

could get a court to void a death sentence on the grounds of the survey. But we did spend a lot of 

time and a lot of energy, a lot of years, putting together this approach. In fact, I argued one of the 

cases in the Fifth Circuit that involved whether or not we had the right to do this. As it turned 

out, in the early [19]70s, Tony, to his shock and mine and the rest of the world, actually got the 

Supreme Court to throw out the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia. It didn’t last very long and 

it wasn’t relying upon the survey, but it was fascinating to have had some small role in that 

activity. The other story I’ll tell you about Tony is this. And I wasn’t there, so I can’t vouch for it 

as being something I actually saw, but I heard from people who were there and therefore I 

believe it completely. Tony was arguing in the old Fifth Circuit, which then covered all of the 

former Confederate states. And the story goes as follows. In the middle of his argument, one of 

the judges, three judges sitting on the bench, and one of the judges apparently sent for books and 

a law clerk came and put a lot of law books on the bench in front of him. [01:00:40] And he 

interrupted Amsterdam and said, “Professor Amsterdam, you have cited X versus Y for a 

particular proposition. And I have the reporter, the bound book, in front of me, and I’m looking 

at the page and it’s not there.” Now, I often say to lawyers when I tell this story, “What would 

you do in the circumstance where a judge said that to you?” And, of course, everybody sort of 

mumbles and bumbles and shuffles. I’ll tell you, said I, what Tony Amsterdam did. He told the 

judge the book was misbound. And so, the judge sent for another copy of the same book, opened 



29 
 

it up and indeed the book had been misbound. Now it takes confidence to tell a judge that under 

those circumstances. But if you’re going to prepare for an oral argument, I always say that’s the 

gold standard, to be able to tell a judge if you have to, that the law book he’s looking at, has been 

misbound. 

MHP: Let me, just so I can clarify Professor Amsterdam’s role with LDF. He was not an 

attorney for LDF. Was he a cooperating attorney or was he like an expert? 

CH: An expert. And he also wrote briefs and he argued cases for the Fund. But he was, 

you know, able to do everything. [01:01:58] 

MHP: I do want to ask you about any cooperating attorneys that you worked with, 

especially frequently, over the years. Kind of tell us a little bit about the dynamics and the 

relationships between the LDF attorneys and working with the cooperating attorneys and sort of 

how those relationships were established and even maintained over the years. I know there was a 

lot in one question, but. 

CH: Well, the cooperating attorneys were essential to the functioning of the Inc. Fund, 

and I worked with a number of them very closely. Weldon Berry in Houston was one such. I did 

a lot of school cases, teacher dismissal cases in Texas, and worked with Weldon on those cases. 

Typically, the cooperating lawyer would ask the staff lawyer to prepare the relevant papers in a 

case, and the staff lawyer would be largely in charge of the case until we got to trial, when you 

might share some of the trial burden with the local lawyer. It varied from local lawyer to local 

lawyer, but many of them were people who were brave enough to take the chance of representing 

people who were themselves brave enough to bring these cases at a time when their way of being 

there, being able to make a living, their being able to be safe in their homes. All of that went 

under threat because they’d had the temerity to come forward and charge the powers that be with 



30 
 

racial discrimination. So, I was always grateful that there were lawyers of that quality who were 

willing to do it in Alabama, Georgia, Texas, particularly where I worked. Now, Georgia for a 

moment. Howard Moore. Howard Moore was a lawyer in Atlanta and I worked with him on the 

Isaac Sims case. Sims was a Black man who had been convicted of raping a white woman and 

sentenced to death. [01:04:00] So one of the things we wanted to do was get the Supreme Court 

to overturn that, either because there was a coerced confession or because there had been 

discrimination in the selection of the jury. Supreme Court of Georgia had no time for any of that, 

affirmed the convictions. And I wrote the briefs for the Supreme Court to take it up. The Court 

took the case, but did not grant any oral argument. It simply reversed on the papers, saying there 

was a failure to hold a hearing that should have been held to see whether or not there had been a 

coerced confession, the so so-called Jackson v. Denno hearing. So, Howard and I went back to 

Georgia for this hearing in a superior court in Okefenokee. Now, folks in Georgia, in the 

Okefenokee Swamp. And we had an idea, which was that if we appeared before the judge, same 

judge was going to hear this application, who had tried the case, and said, “Look, you don’t have 

to have another hearing. You could just rely on the papers.” That he would do that because he 

didn’t want another case to try and the other side would probably agree because he didn’t want to 

be bothered again. And we’d go up again to the Supreme Court and we’d get another reversal, 

this time on the merits. So that’s exactly what happened. We went in. We made that plea. The 

judge didn’t want to hear a case. The other side didn’t want to be bothered. Affirmed, Supreme 

Court of Georgia affirmed, back up to the Supreme Court, reversed. Isaac Sims now is entitled to 

a new trial. I went down to see Isaac Sims, first with a psychiatrist from M.I.T. And so, Howard 

and the psychiatrist and I arrived in Reidsville, Georgia, where the maximum-security prison is. 

And we saw Sims. He was interviewed in his cell by the psychiatrist. As we left, we thought, 



31 
 

well, maybe we’ll get something to eat. [01:06:01] Now, mind you, this is 1966 or [199]7. And 

so, the 1964 Civil Rights Act has been on the books for a few years. We went into a local 

luncheonette, and as we sat down, we realized that maybe this was not the greatest idea in the 

world. And a few guys came over and made it clear to us that we had a minute or two, but if we 

didn’t get out of there, we were not to be going anywhere. So, we literally ran out of this place, 

ran to our car and got out of town. Okay. Sometime later on we were in Folkston for a hearing on 

the case, with Isaac Sims. And to show you what happens in places like that, at least in those 

times, we – we being Howard and I think another lawyer and I – entered a long hall on the first 

floor heading toward the courtroom. At the opposite end of the hall, the grand jury, which had 

been sitting on the second floor, was coming down. Twenty-three, more or less, white men. 

Sims, who was with us, saw these white men coming toward us because we were all heading into 

the center of this hall. And he cannot walk. His legs collapse under him because he is terrified 

that what might happen. We assure him, and nothing happened, of course, but it was a reminder 

of the kind of fear that he probably suffered from for many days. I might add one other thing, 

since we’re talking about capital punishment cases, another case involved a man named Drewry 

Aaron in Alabama. I worked with Charles Connolly on that case. Showed up in Montgomery, 

Alabama for the hearing for post-conviction proceeding. [01:08:03] Coram nobis, they called it, 

in Alabama. And the young judge on the bench, who’s probably in his late 30s, said, “I’m sorry, 

Mr. Connolly, but I can’t hear you or Mr. Harper because the Chief Justice has entered an order 

that no out-of-state lawyer is permitted to appear in the Alabama courts unless with his specific 

approval.” So, Connolly then asked for an adjournment so that we could go over to the Supreme 

Court. Which of course is in the same city, as it turned out, to see whether he’d get that approval. 

So, he granted it, and Chuck and I walked over to the Supreme Court of Alabama, to the 



32 
 

chambers of the Chief Justice, Livingston, and we were granted an immediate audience. Walked 

in, Chief Justice Livingston asked us why we were there, Connolly explained. Livingston looked 

at me and said, “Where are you from?” And I said, “I am from New York.” “No, no. Where were 

you born?” I said, “I’m born in Detroit.” He said, “Detroit, that’s where that n---- loving Viola 

Liuzzo was from, right?” Now, you may not remember, but after the march on Selma, there was 

a return of people to their homes. And a white housewife from suburban Michigan had read 

about what was going on in Selma. And she said to her family of, I think a husband and three or 

four children, “I have to go to Selma.” And so, she flew down to Alabama and was in the march. 

And after that, she had rented a car and she was driving back from Montgomery to Selma. And 

one the young Black people who’d been involved asked for a ride and she granted it. And so, the 

two of them were in this car on the highway where they were seen by several Ku Klux men. And 

one person in that car was, although they didn’t know it at the time, an FBI informant. The car 

pulled alongside Mrs. Liuzzo’s car and shot and killed her. [01:10:22] So, a year plus later, I’m 

in Alabama before the Chief Justice, who is attacking me for being from the same state that this 

woman who had been murdered had been from. And I realized that every now and then you have 

to remember what the real agenda is. The real agenda on that day was not “Conrad Harper is 

vindicating [himself as] a man who went before the Chief Justice of Alabama.” The real agenda 

was representing Drewry Aaron. To do that, I had to keep my mouth shut, which I did. And we 

got the permission and we went back and ultimately got his death sentence set aside. 

MHP: So, it’s interesting because that was what I was going to say, how did you 

respond? And then what you’re telling me is that you’re having to do this internal processing of 

which way do you go with that? Which battle are you picking? 

CH: Right. 



33 
 

MHP: And you picked this larger battle to win. 

CH: Yep. 

MHP: You have some amazing stories. Tell us a little bit. Well, I think, we’ve talked 

about the Drewry case. That was Alabama, Sims is in Georgia. I’m going to get to some more 

cases that you mentioned earlier before we began the interview. Let’s hear a little bit about the 

Marable, is it Marable?  

CH: Marable. 

MHP: The Marable Case. 

CH:. Marable was an inmate at a hospital in Alabama, a hospital that was for people who 

were mentally ill, who were Black. And even though the law required that all facilities run by the 

state be desegregated, Alabama, of course took the view that “not yet.” And so, the Justice 

Department or maybe it was HEW at that time, started a proceeding to force the desegregation of 

that hospital. And we in New York decided we would join that case. And Marable was the 

plaintiff in our case. And we asked that the two cases be heard together. And they were. 

[01:12:33] And I went down to Montgomery to appear in federal court before the legendary 

Frank Johnson. Frank Johnson was a white man who had been a marine in the Second World 

War and was from originally northern Alabama, which is important because during the Civil 

War era, northern Alabama was sort of very different from southern Alabama when it came 

secession. Any case, Frank Johnson grew up in that part of the world and in the course of time 

became a U.S. district court judge. And he became an absolute friend to the issues that Brown v. 

Board had brought to the attention of the world and spent a good part of his judicial life 

desegregating all of Alabama in a variety of ways, including, as it turned out, this case involving 

Marable and the U.S. government against Alabama for segregation in the mental hospitals. I 



34 
 

appeared before Johnson, as I said, once. And it was wonderful to see this man of complete 

integrity, who, of course, had been subject to all kinds of threats against his family and himself 

for years because of what he’d been doing. But he was absolutely crystal clear about what had to 

be done. And he made it very clear to the state of Alabama that there was not going to be any 

fooling around. And in due course, he issued an order desegregating the entire mental health 

facilities in Alabama. [01:14:08] 

MHP: How did LDF prepare for that case? How did you guys prepare for it? 

CH: I don’t have a specific memory. I know that we had a number of papers, many of 

them created in the first instance by Michael Meltsner, who litigated other such cases around the 

South. So, we had a kind of file that you would go to, and Michael asked me to take on the case. 

I don’t now remember what that meant. I do know that I did sign a number of papers and I filed 

them, my name’s on them, but I don’t recall how they were created. 

MHP: Win or lose, what were the implications of that case? 

CH: Well, if we lost, it would mean that it would continue to be the case that not only 

would it be segregated but, segregated facilities for Blacks, for mental illness in Alabama, but 

they would be inferior. If you forced desegregation, there was more than a chance that over time 

the facilities would become better and the people who needed that medical help would get it at a 

much better, higher level. 

MHP: You mentioned the Harkless case. I don’t think we went into any details. Let’s 

talk about the Harkless case. 

CH: Okay. Mildred Harkless. So, I was a newly minted lawyer in May of 1966 working 

at the Fund, and I got a call to go down to Houston to meet Weldon Berry, the local lawyer who 

had some colleagues and clients in Sweeny, Texas, who wanted to sue because they had been 



35 
 

told they would not be employed the next school year in Sweeny because the schools were being 

desegregated. And as it turned out, all of them were Black and taught in the Black school and 

nobody was going to be taken over to the white school. So Weldon and I drove out to Sweeny, 

which is some miles from Houston. We got there and we met in a garage, as I remember. A 

single light bulb. It’s dark as pitch outside and we are meeting with 12 very scared Black men 

and women about trying to do something about this case. [01:16:14] But they had enough grit to 

say, “Yes, we want to go forward.” And in the event, I think 10 of them ultimately became 

plaintiffs and we filed a suit. Now, there are a number of things that happened in the course of 

this case, and I’ll only mention a few of them. One of them was that there came a time when I 

became a kind of persona non grata in the Southern District of Texas, which is the federal court 

sitting in Houston. I had litigated a number of cases there, including the Houston school case, 

and the word went out among the judges, apparently, they were not going to let me appear in any 

more cases unless I became a member of the Bar of the United States District Court for the 

Southern District of Texas. So, I submitted the papers to do so. And in due course, I received the 

letter saying that I would have to appear before the Character and Fitness Committee of the 

Southern District and a meeting held at the large law firm Baker Botts in Houston, on a day 

certain. And I appeared that day. All white men and, they made it clear to me that I needed to 

answer certain questions, one of which was, “Have you ever been a member of any organization 

that has advocated the violent overthrow of the United States government?” And when that 

question was asked, I said, “You can’t ask me that question. The Supreme Court of the United 

States has said that question is unconstitutional. And a three-judge court in Texas has said the 

same thing within the last year.” “If you don’t answer the question, Mr. Harper, we’re not going 

to approve your application.” “I’m not answering the question.” [01:18:00] I was disapproved. 



36 
 

So, I then wrote a letter to the chief judge, Ben Connally was his name, of the Southern District. 

He was a brother, I think, of John Connally, the governor who was shot at the time JFK was 

killed. Any case, Ben Connally was the chief judge. I wrote a letter to him laying out why I 

thought that question could not be asked. And months went by and finally I got a letter one day 

from Chief Judge Connally accepting my letter and inviting me to come down at my 

convenience to be sworn in as a member of the Bar of the Southern District of Texas, which I 

did. And we had a very nice chat, Chief Judge Connolly and I. Meanwhile, I’d tried a number of 

cases before and after this in the Southern District, as I said, and one of them was the Harkless 

case before Judge Noel. The Harkless case ultimately came to trial in Galveston, Texas, and 

Galveston is a lovely town and the courthouse is a lovely building. It had been built in 1859, one 

of the few U.S. public buildings built before the Civil War west of the Mississippi, and it had just 

been restored. So, it’s a beautiful place. We impaneled a jury of 12 whites to hear this case. The 

judge announced early on that he wanted to make something clear to the lawyers in the case. He 

recognized, looking at our papers, that we had a tendency to talk about Black people. The 

jurisprudence of the 14th Amendment said Judge Noel “is based upon the Negro, not Black 

people. So, you will not refer to Black people in this case. You can talk about Negroes.” “Yes, 

Your Honor.” And I made a mental note to do everything I could to subvert that right after that, 

which I did. [01:20:00] And we went on for several days. And I and my colleague Haywood 

Burns, a wonderful Black lawyer who died too young, and Weldon and I, tried the case. And we 

always talked about Black people. And the judge would get every now and then a little annoyed, 

but he didn’t say anything. And then finally, because it’s so much easier to say Black than 

Negro, the lawyers on the other side were referring to Black people, the judge found himself 

referring to Black people. So that issue disappeared. But another one surfaced. Trying this case 



37 
 

every day, I would get at night what we call daily copy. So, I’d get a transcript of what happened 

the day. And after a day or two, I became really furious about something. And that is this. The 

judge always referred, not to Negroes as I’ve just said a few minutes ago, but to “Nigras.” N-i-g-

r-a-s. But the court reporter would always write Negro. So, when you read the transcript, you 

didn’t see there was any problem. So, there came a day when I just had had it on this issue. So, 

the judge interrupted my cross-examination of somebody and said something that had the word 

“Nigra” in it. And I said, “Well, Your Honor, before I respond to what the court has just said, I 

want to discuss this issue of Negro versus “Nigra.” The court has repeatedly used the word 

“Nigra,” N-i-g-r-a, I’m spelling it so the court reporter writes it that way so it appears in the 

transcript that way because the transcripts up to now have always used the court’s language as if 

it were Negro rather than “Nigra.” And “Nigra” is insulting, and I am objecting to what the court 

has been saying, and I’m asking that the Court do it not again.” I thought I was going to jail. The 

judge got furiously red, slammed [his hand] on the bench and said, “That is the most arrogant 

thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” I didn’t say anything. [01:22:04] A few more minutes went by 

and he said, “Now, proceed, Mr. Harper.” So, we did. Okay. Case went forward. Two weeks. 

The court gave the case to the jury. The jury came back answering special questions, basically 

saying, “We don’t find racial discrimination. But we do find that because they brought this 

lawsuit, they were not permitted to teach.” And so, I took the view that meant that their 

constitutional rights had been violated and we win. The judge, however, decided for technical 

reasons I won’t go to, that we didn’t have a right to [bring] this case at all. He threw the whole 

case out. So, we took it up on appeal. On appeal we got a reversal and subsequently the case was 

settled and the clients finally got some money. Some of them. But there’s one aspect of this case 

that, sounding a little bit immodest, I need to tell you, and that is this. The case as far as I was 



38 
 

concerned, was over at the end of 1970 because that’s when I left the Legal Defense Fund and I 

joined Simpson Thacher & Bartlett as an associate. About a year into my time here at the firm, I 

was assigned to work on a matter for General Motors, one the clients of the firm, and I went out 

to Detroit for that meeting and we were met at the airport by a young lawyer on the staff of the 

General Motors Corporation [who was] to drive us to where we were going. And as we got into 

this young lawyer’s car, he said, “You don’t remember me, do you?” I looked at him. I did not 

remember him, but. And he said, “Well, I was Judge Noel’s clerk when you were trying the 

Harkless case. And I want to tell you that Judge Noel said you were the best lawyer he’d ever 

seen.” [laughter] There you are. 

MHP: After all that with the Negro and “Nigra.” [laughter] 

CH: Right. Right. 

MHP: He was impressed. But words and how we say everything matter. And he knew 

that too. 

CH: Oh, he knew that. 

MHP: He was using it in that way. 

CH: Absolutely. [01:24:10] 

MHP:  So, let me ask you at least, can you just tell me what time it is because I want to 

make sure. 

Jesse Paddock: It’s 11:34. 

MHP: Okay. Oh, this is good, because I think I can get in at least a couple more cases of 

LDF before I move on to at least one of the cases that you did while here at the firm. So, another 

case that we talked about at the beginning. So, you’d done Harkless, Sims, Drewry, you’re 



39 
 

getting through these good. I’m going to ask you, either Daniel v. Paul, I think it was, or 

Hamilton. Was it Hamilton? 

CH: Hamilton, right. 

MHP: Let’s go with Hamilton first. 

 CH: Okay. Hamilton. Hamilton was a man in a maximum security prison in San Quentin 

in California. And this is now 1969 and 1970. He wrote a letter. Legal Defense Fund still gets a 

lot of these letters every year, I’m sure still, and it certainly did then. And the letter was from 

Hamilton saying that he thought that he had had his constitutional rights violated because his 

trial had consisted of a confession, which he maintained had been tricked out of him. And he 

wanted the Supreme Court to reverse. Well, the Supreme Court had gotten his in forma pauperis 

papers], he was representing himself as a poor person, petition. And it had not granted review or 

certiorari. But three Justices had dissented. And so when the letter came to the Legal Defense 

Fund and it got to me just as I guess a matter of chance, we said, “Well gee, three Justices of the 

Supreme Court think this case is worth hearing. Maybe we should look into it.” [01:26:00] So I 

got in touch with a lawyer who was then teaching at Berkeley, a guy named Mike Smith, to see 

whether he would be interested in working with us on this case. And Michael agreed. So, in due 

course, I went out to San Francisco to try this habeas corpus case with Mike, where we claimed 

that the sergeant or detective who had interviewed Hamilton at the relevant time, had in fact 

tricked him and had, through that trick, gotten him to confess. Hamilton, by the way, just so you 

know, had spent maybe half of his life in jail at this point. And this murder had happened when 

he had been out of prison at an earlier time. He went to see his wife, found his wife in bed with 

somebody else, left, went to a store, bought a gun, went back, killed the person who was with his 

wife. And that was the murder he was being charged with. Any case, we went to trial before 



40 
 

Judge Zirpoli in the Northern District of California. And Judge Zirpoli issued the writ of habeas 

corpus. Hamilton was one of the greatest lawyers I’ve ever seen. Meaning by that, the guy had 

never gone to law school. He’d never gone to college, but he had spent his time in prison reading 

law books. And while the case was pending, he would periodically send letters to Mike Smith or 

to me saying, “Have you guys looked at this case yet? And what about this case?” He was a great 

lawyer. And when he took the witness stand, he was a fabulous witness. So, it was an experience 

to realize, as many of us know, there’s such a waste in the prisons, that we have such superb 

intellects that are being destroyed. And at least in this instance, Hamilton did get the writ of 

habeas corpus. 

MHP: What was the larger implication for that case? 

CH: You know, in the short term, that case could not be won today in the Supreme – in 

the District Court of the United States, because in the intervening 40 plus years, the Supreme 

Court has cut back on what you could do by way of attacking in federal court what happened in 

state court. The Supreme Court is very interested in making sure things are final. [01:28:12] And 

so cutting off all avenues of raising constitutional claims, unless somehow you can get around 

these very significant barriers, is a problem. So, the larger message of that case is that that was 

then and this is now. 

MHP: Let’s go to, we talked about Lola Johnson Cole at all? 

CH: No, we didn’t talk about Lola Johnson Cole. Let me say a quick word about Lola 

Johnson Cole. She was a lawyer, sorry, a teacher in Albany, New York. And she wrote to the 

Legal Defense Fund saying that she had been told she was not going to be permanently 

employed and she thought it was racially discriminatory. And would we take the case? We 

looked into the case and we decided to bring it. The case hinged on two white teachers who were 



41 
 

also probationary teachers, and they had heard the principal in the school, the high school, Ben 

Becker, say on numerous occasions in their presence, to white teachers, words that were racially 

discriminatory with respect to how Lola Johnson Cole, who was a Black woman. And so, they 

were willing, at the risk of their jobs, to testify about what Becker had said in these settings. So, 

we brought the case before the State Human Rights Division. Interestingly enough, though I was 

only a few months admitted to the bar, my adversary was one of the three state examiners for the 

state bar who of course meant he had just admitted me in a sense, to the bar, and here I am as 

opposition. We won the case before the hearing officer, we won it on appeal within the state 

division. I left the Legal Defense Fund. [01:30:00] The case went up to the third department, as 

it’s called, where it was lost because the department could decide to reverse on the law and the 

facts. And it did. How you can reverse on the facts, I’ve never understood in this case, and I’m 

still now at the Legal Defense Fund. I asked the Legal Defense Fund – sorry, I’m sorry, I’m still 

at the firm. And I asked the firm would the firm be willing to take this case on pro bono to the 

Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York. And the firm agreed. So I did take the case to 

the Court of Appeals. I argued it and I lost. The Court of Appeals did not reverse. And so, I’ve 

always considered the Lola Johnson Cole case a great injustice. And it has always shamed me 

that I could not win the case. 

MHP: But you’ve won a lot of cases. You won a lot of cases. And might I say that I 

know when a lot of times when we think about civil rights cases, Civil Rights Movement, we 

think of the South, we think about school and education. But many of the other desegregation 

cases that you handled had to do with other spaces. And a lot of times I think we don’t talk about 

that. You’ve already talked about some with the medical facilities or mental facilities, but you 

also looked at cases like restaurants, swimming pools. Again, just how people navigate space, 



42 
 

not just school space, but all spaces in public. How did, how do those cases sort of differ in 

strategy, if you would say that they did, than the school desegregation cases? 

CH: The school desegregation cases, at the time I was actively involved in them, the law 

was pretty clear. The question was whether or not you could get the facts accepted by the trier of 

fact in a way that would help you reach a decision about a remedy that made sense. And during 

the late 1960s, of course, there was a real problem as to whether suburban school districts could 

be forced to bus students with metropolitan areas so that you could have a larger space in which 

to try to desegregate. [01:32:03] And of course, that issue was lost. Also, in the late [19]60s, the 

Supreme Court had never decided a northern desegregation case. And in my last year or so at the 

Legal Defense Fund, I was involved in the Denver case in its early stages and went out there and 

worked with the lawyers who brought that case, ultimately it was taken to the Supreme Court of 

the United States and was won. But that was after I had left. But school desegregation cases, as I 

say, the law was pretty clear. Other kinds of cases, things were murkier. You would have 

situations where somebody would, or might claim that, as I indicated before, that there was a 

problem. Let’s take – one of the cases that I’d like to tell you about, because it’s so unusual but 

it’s not really anything you’re about to ask me. So, let me let me take it, because it has a lot of 

permutations. In my last year at the Fund, Angela Davis, who, well-known communist academic, 

was arrested or was being sought for murder that had happened in California. And this intersects 

with my time at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, and partly because in the summer of 1970, I was 

interviewed at Simpson Thacher and other places for possible employment [upon] leaving the 

Fund. And as it turned out, I’d gotten an offer from Simpson Thacher before Angela Davis’s 

problems became significant to the world. They were significant to her. But shortly after I’d 

accepted that offer, Angela Davis was arrested here in New York, and she was arrested on a 



43 
 

federal charge that she had fled California and thus moved interstate to escape prosecution in a 

state court murder trial. [01:34:10] And that flight was itself a violation of federal law. So the 

issue was, was the Legal Defense Fund going to be involved in this? And there was a tremendous 

concern at the staff level that we do something. Maybe we couldn’t appear as counsel, but maybe 

we could write briefs, maybe we could do legal research, maybe we could even provide the 

Xerox machine. None of that was anything that Jack Greenberg and Jim Nabrit was prepared, 

were prepared to do. And so that led to a rift between the two of them at the top of the Fund and 

the rest of the staff. So, the staff decided we wanted to petition the board or the executive 

committee of the board, not that we necessarily thought it would be a different result, but we 

wanted to make sure we had exhausted the opportunity. And the question became who would 

make the presentation to the board. And since I had a job somewhere else, though I hadn’t yet 

started, and since we all knew this was a career-ending opportunity [laughter], then maybe I 

should be the person who made the presentation to the board. So, I agreed to do it. So, in the fall 

of 1970, there was a meeting between the executive committee and certain members of the staff, 

with yours truly making the presentation. Bill Coleman was the president of the board. A word 

about Bill. Bill, at that point in his life, was still a partner at a major Philadelphia law firm. But 

much earlier, when he’d gone to college, gone to Penn, where his academic record was such that 

he was eligible for Phi Beta Kappa, but because he was Black, the faculty would not elect him to 

Phi Beta Kappa. That’s 1941. A few years later, Bill was at Harvard Law School. The top 

student at Harvard Law School every year is granted the Fay Diploma, which is, I think, a Latin 

diploma. [01:36:24] Very unusual, and it indicates the best GPA. Bill Coleman earned the Fay 

Diploma. The faculty did not grant it to him in the 1940s, although he was number one in the 

class. When Coleman was looking for a job in Philadelphia, his hometown, no major law firm 



44 
 

would hire him because he was Black, even though he’d clerked for Felix Frankfurter, the first 

Black ever to do that in the Supreme Court. He finally got a job at Paul, Weiss here in New 

York. But Paul, Weiss made it clear that he could not become a partner. He could work there as 

an associate, but you will never become a partner. So, he did that for two or three years. Okay. 

Notwithstanding all of that, Bill then became a partner at a major Philadelphia firm. And by the 

time, as I say, he was president of the Legal Defense Fund Board, he was already a very eminent 

lawyer and he’d been a member of the Warren Commission, looking into the assassination of 

JFK. So, a redoubtable person. Okay. We did not win our application for helping Angela Davis. 

End of story you would say, “Why are you telling me this, Conrad?” Well, a couple of things I 

think you ought to know. One is this. Four years later, the spring of 1974, the New York Times 

decided to run a full-page article, it began the first page [and continued on] the third page inside, 

on the 20 years since Brown v. Board of Education. [01:38:02] And in connection with that 

celebration, they interviewed Jack Greenberg. And Jack had some things to say at that time. I 

saw this article that Sunday morning. I didn’t finish it. I read the first part of it. You know, I had 

other things to do. I was working. It was, it was the year I was up partner at Simpson Thacher. 

So, I didn’t read it. But then later on, as the day went on, I started getting calls from around the 

country. “Conrad, have you read the article in the Times today, which quotes Jack, about you?” 

“About me?” So, I got the article and I saw. What Jack said was, the question by the interviewer 

was, “Have you ever had any problems with Black radicals at the Legal Defense Fund?” And 

Jack said, “Well, we only had one, and that one has gone to Wall Street.” Now that described a 

class of one. Okay. I thought to myself, “This is it. I have just had the opportunity to become a 

partner at Simpson Thacher completely shot out of the water.” So, the next morning I went to see 

Cyrus Vance here at the firm. At that point in his life, Cy Vance had already been Deputy 



45 
 

Secretary of Defense, but he was back at the firm and he was head of the firm. He also turns out 

to have been a member of the board of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. He would 

subsequently, of course, become secretary of state, but at this point, he was, as I say, at the firm. 

I went to see him. “Cy, have you seen yesterday’s New York Times?” said I. He said, “Yes, I saw 

something about the Legal Defense Fund on the first page but I didn’t finish it.” I said, “Let me 

show this section to you.” And in the years I knew Vance, I only saw him really angry twice. 

And this was the first time. He said, “I will take care of this.” So, I left his office. Few hours 

later, the phone rang. It was Bill Coleman. Bill [said], “I’ve just been talking with Cy.” “Yes, 

Bill.” “I just wanted to call you and say that I’m calling to apologize for Jack, and you will be 

getting a call from Jack. But I want to tell you myself that I wanted to apologize for him.” 

“Thank you, Bill.” [01:40:15] Another half an hour went by, phone rang. Jack: “Conrad. I just 

called to tell you that, you know, I was quoted out of context by the New York Times.” I thought 

to myself, “What context could that have possibly been that he was talking about?” No idea. But 

that was that. You will say, “Okay, Conrad, I heard the story.” And that’s not quite the end. It’s 

got one more chapter. But now it’s not 1974. It’s like 2002. Okay. I’m at a dinner, sorry, a lunch 

with Bill Coleman, Lou Pollak, who’s another great Legal Defense Fund person, subsequently 

Dean of Yale’s Law School, Penn Law School, U.S. District Judge in Philadelphia, and several 

other people. And for some reason, Bill Coleman brings up Angela Davis. I can’t imagine why 

he’s bringing this up. He and I never talked about it, but he brought this up and then he told this 

story. But he added something I had never known before. He said, you know, “I told Jack he 

should fire you, but he didn’t take my advice.” I said, “No, he didn’t, Bill.” [laughter] Now, that 

had nothing to do with what you wanted to ask me, but I thought it was a good enough story that 

you ought to hear it. [laughter] 



46 
 

MHP: It’s a great story. It’s that inside story that people would never know. And I love 

that. And was that the only time in your life you were categorized as a Black radical? [laughter] 

CH: Maybe so. Maybe so. [laughter] 

MHP: I think we only have about two more questions for you. And then, of course, we’ll 

open it up for anything else that you want to add. And what I want to ask you in very, very 

particular about the, your voting rights work. And down in Mississippi, the one that you wrote 

the essay about, “All My Days.” But before we get to that, when you were with LDF, five years, 

and you’re doing a lot of work in the South and I remember what you were talking about being 

terrified, right, when you were. But just kind of you describe your, had you ever really been in 

the South before you’re working at LDF. I don’t know if you still visited family members. Your 

parents had family down South at some point, but more, a little bit, a few more impressions of 

being in the South and what it was like in the South and in particular, if it was your first time. 

But even if not, the first time when you were there doing that kind of work. [01:42:36] 

CH: I first spent any time in the South during [19]44 to [19]46 when I lived in Atlanta 

with my grandmother and my mother and my father was in the Army Air Corps. I have few 

memories, but none of them relates to this. The next time I can recall being there was in summer 

of [19]51, I think, when I went down to see my grandmother. But I never spent any real time in 

the South until I went to Howard and the first debate team trip we had was to Greensboro, North 

Carolina, to participate in a competition at A & T, and the coach was driving the four of us in his 

car and we stopped at a filling station to get some gasoline. I think in Virginia. A white man 

came out, looked at us and said, “I don’t think we have enough gasoline for you.” And the coach 

said, “Is it because we’re colored?” And I had never in my life thought that that kind of a 

question would ever play any role in my interaction with the economic atmosphere of the 



47 
 

country. But there it was. So, I remember that. But when I got to the Fund, to come to grips with 

your question, was when I started spending a lot of time in the South and a lot of that time in the 

South was in Georgia, Alabama and Texas. [01:44:11] Less time in Virginia, less time in North 

Carolina, but certainly – and some in Florida. And I really wasn’t aware initially of a difference 

because, of course, I’m dealing as an Inc. Fund lawyer with a lot of Black people. So, I’m not 

spending a lot of time interacting except in the courtroom and the courthouse with white lawyers, 

white judges. But there I must say, even though we often could not win in the first instance, it 

was always, with a few exceptions, not a problem appearing in the courtroom. It was more of a 

concern that something might happen, that I wasn’t necessarily expecting. But no, I had 

generally a fairly safe situation. 

MHP: You come and you work at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. You end up doing some 

obviously, you know, you do the voting rights case down in Mississippi, before I specifically ask 

you about being down there, I guess it was in [19]71, [19]72? 

CH: Yeah, the voting rights case started in [19]72, ended in [19]74. 

MHP: How do you feel like working for LDF prepared you for that type of work? I 

mean, was it foundational in the work that you were able to do? 

CH: I would go further than that. I realized that I’d been very fortunate. Going to 

Howard before going to Harvard meant that when I got to Harvard, there was a part of me that 

had been annealed that was ready for what was going to be sometimes a very difficult passage. 

And I was, I was safer in myself because I’d had four years of Howard in my life. When I got to 

Simpson Thacher, I, of course, had had nothing to do with the kind of substantive work this firm 

does. No cases at Legal Defense Fund bore any substantive legal similarity to what I would be 

doing here. But I had tried a lot of cases. I had tried more cases than most partners in the firm. 



48 
 

I’d argued more appeals than most partners in the firm. So, the Fund had given me a confidence 

that I wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t first had the Fund under my belt. And I, of course, in time 

needed it.  

MHP: Let’s talk about Midnight, Mississippi. I can’t believe that’s the name of it, right. 

CH: I know. Isn’t it amazing? [laughter] Midnight, Mississippi, yes, indeed. 

MHP: Let’s talk about that case because at that time, then you’re not with Legal Defense 

Fund. 

CH: No, I was here. 

MHP: You’re here with the firm. How did you become involved in that case? And just 

talk to us about that case and your memories of it, because obviously that really left a lasting 

impression on you. 

CH: Yes. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law was established by 

President Kennedy in the summer of 1963. He was worried that especially Black demonstrators, 

sit-in-ers were not getting legal representation from the white bar in the South. So, he called 

leading lawyers to the White House and made the plea that they set up some kind of an 

organization to deal with this problem. Among those in attendance, of course, was Bill Coleman, 

as well as Whitney North Seymour, great senior partner at Simpson Thacher with whom I 

worked, and a number of other people. And it was initially called the President’s Committee, but 

ultimately became the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. And in the fall of 1971, 

this is now [seven] years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act [01:48:01] the Lawyers’ 

Committee decided that it was hearing such bad reports about what was going on in Mississippi 

that it would like to arrange and did arrange for college students, principally, to go to every 

county in Mississippi to act as observers of what was going on in that general election of 



49 
 

November 1971. And when those reports came in, the Lawyers’ Committee then made a 

determination that the worst county in Mississippi for possible constitutional violations was 

Humphreys County in the Delta. Then it wanted to have a law firm get involved, and as often 

happens, it turned to one of the member firms. In this case, Simpson Thacher, through Cyrus 

Vance, and Vance gave me a call. We don’t have time for a lot of things I’d like to say to you, 

but I have to tell you a moment about Cyrus Vance, who is one of the most important people in 

my life. I’ve already mentioned him in another context, but this one is important. I’d been at this 

firm about a year when one of the leading partners asked me to work on a matter for him 

involving a fair housing question, where on the other side was the NAACP, not the Legal 

Defense Fund, but the NAACP. And I said to that partner, “I can’t do that. I just can’t work on 

the case against the NAACP.” Well, I really thought my career at this firm was over. And I’m 

confident – and Vance was not the kind of man who would ever tell you, you had to figure it out 

if you’re ever going to figure it out by yourself, but I’m confident that what happened was that – 

it came to his attention that I had done this. Another, if you will, a career ending opportunity. I 

seem to court them on occasion. And he called me within two or three weeks after that fateful 

conversation, offering me the opportunity to do this case. [01:50:05] And that was my way to 

redemption, I think. The case was fascinating. Not only did it have a place called Midnight, 

Mississippi involved in it where there was a polling booth, two polling booths, but what you 

really want when you have a lawsuit is to have some series of facts that throw into high relief the 

real point you’re trying to make. And this was such a case in this respect. There was one polling 

place where the voters whose last name began with “A” to “L” who were not literate were all 

Black. And the election officials deputed to help them were all white. In that same room for the 

voters from “M” to “Z,” again, the illiterate voters were all Black, but those deputed to help them 



50 
 

were all Black. So, it was a perfect situation. And there came a point in that case where we 

retained a statistician who opined that the likelihood that you would find those Black voters 

helped by white election officials voting at the high rate for the white incumbent that they did as 

compared to the Black voters who were helped by Black election officials voting against that 

person – the chances that that would all happen by chance and have nothing to do with race were 

some astronomical number versus, a billion something. So, it was a wonderful case to try. [There 

was a] very excellent lawyer on the other side representing Humphreys county, a lawyer from 

Jackson, Mississippi. We had a very fine professional relationship, a very hard-fought case. The 

case went on for a couple of weeks in Greenville and it was a non-jury case. [01:51:58] And in 

the course of it, I had one of those experiences which, you know, which I shall go to my grave 

remembering, because there came a point at the trial where I asked the man who had lived a long 

time under those conditions where he couldn’t vote. Just a preliminary question, “How long have 

you lived here?” And he said, “All my days.” And somehow that phrase, when I knew something 

of the pain that meant, because I knew the very courthouse where we had examined the officials 

was a place that three or four years earlier, a Black man been shot to death on the courthouse 

steps because he dared to show up – when this Black man said, “All my days,” I was so 

overcome I had to walk out of the courtroom to get my countenance back. Ultimately, we won 

the case in the sense that the judge decided that it was not right for Blacks to be required or 

illiterate voters be required to accept the ministrations of an appointed election official. They 

could take anybody they wanted. And that was true for anybody who was not illiterate. Why 

shouldn’t it be true for people who were illiterate? And so, we won the case. But I won the case 

after I had become a partner at Simpson Thacher. But thanks to Cy Vance, I had the chance to 

have that happen. 



51 
 

MHP: I’m going to, and then there will be only one more after this. Unless you want to 

add some more. When you were in particular with LDF, doing the type of work you were doing, 

traveling, state, state, different towns, cities, rural travel. What, just what was that like and how 

stressful was it? This sort of just, all this traveling, going from place to place, being in rural 

areas, being sometimes in areas where, you know, that were volatile, right. [01:54:00] And 

where there might be some threat of physical violence. Like how, what was that like to 

logistically get through that?  

CH: First thing I have to tell you is that if my wife were here, she would say that the 

reason we have such a happy marriage, it’s now 58 years, is that the first five years I was never 

there. I was never there because I was traveling. I mean, it was grueling. I loved it. I loved the 

work. I was convinced that it was important work. And when I lost a case, I did on occasion, it 

was really, really heartbreaking. And indeed, one of the reasons I was inclined to think about 

leaving the Legal Defense Fund was that I thought that I actually might be all right working on 

cases where losing did not mean somehow this terrible sense of failure, that it was just a job. I 

mean, I was doing the job as well as I could do it. You can’t win every [case]. But the price that I 

found of losing cases was a heavy one. Notwithstanding that, I had wonderful times there. I met 

people whom I say I revere to this day, and I had the experience of knowing that if the Second 

Reconstruction was going to be a success, it could only be a success because of places like the 

Legal Defense Fund. 

MHP: Are there just any other any other statements you’d like make that our questions 

didn’t address, any other memories you have that you think are really important to put on the 

record that that our questions just didn’t get to? 

CH: No, I think I’ll leave it there. 



52 
 

MHP: Let me see if there’s anything else. Do you know what, this, I think this is a good 

one? [01:56:00] What do you think is the most important area of civil rights legislation today? 

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

CH: Well, I don’t have a real sense of the current docket is, but I can tell you that if 

there’s something that needs to be fixed permanently and it’s not right now, it’s voting. We have 

a system that frankly is indefensible. It should be the case that anybody who meets the 

qualifications of age and residence should be a voter. It should not be a difficult thing to do. But 

we have seen and we are seeing and we continue to see all kinds of methods taken to try to 

reduce the elective franchise. And this will never be a successful democracy until we finally fix 

the voting system. 

MHP: Kayla, Jesse, do you guys have any questions? You sure? You’re an amazing 

interview, by the way. Kayla, can I get you to just do us a favor, if you don’t mind, Conrad, 

would you take just sort of a photo of us in action? 

Kayla Jenkins: Yeah. 

MHP: If that’s okay with you. 

KJ: I was trying to but I couldn’t –  

MHP: Okay, yeah, that’s okay, if you could, if you don’t mind. With all three of us, 

thank you. Jesse, anything? 

MHP: Wow, you’ve got great stories that, a lot of that wasn’t in here, a lot of it. That 

was amazing. That was fantastic. Thank you. Oh, you know, the one thing and you can just. 

Maybe we’ll just get a little bit of it while Kayla is taking some photographs. Susie wrote here 

that after you left LDF, you were involved in helping the New York City Bar improve diversity 

in New York City law firms. You have to be proud of that. And so how, if at all, do you think the 



53 
 

LDF labor docket prepared you for efforts you made to help make the NYC Bar more inclusive? 

[01:58:03] 

CH: Well, I was very clear, have long been clear that there were many, many people, 

years, decades earlier than I who could have had, should have had the kind of opportunities and 

breaks I had and who probably would have been even more remarkable than anything I can think 

would have happened. But they didn’t have it because of a system of racial exclusion and 

discrimination that was extraordinarily successful. I’m convinced, and was convinced when I 

was at the City Bar, that the only way you get real progress is continually to push for it. And the 

only way you do that is to insist in this world, continually publicize it. The reason I became bar 

president maybe is worth saying a word about. When I became a partner at Simpson Thacher, 

there was only one other Black person who had ever become a partner in a major New York City 

law firm, and that was Amalya Kearse, who in 1979 became a member of the Second Circuit 

Court. But Amalya became a partner of Hughes Hubbard & Reid in 1969. I became a partner 

here in 1974. I think Vaughan Williams became a partner of Skadden Arps in 1977. Gordon 

Davis became a partner in what was then Lord Day & Lord about the same time in 1978. By the 

late 1980s, there were only about five or six Blacks who were partners in major firms in New 

York City. [02:00:02] That was absolutely indefensible. These were firms at that point [of] 200 

or 300 lawyers in size, and of that number, maybe 60, 70, 80 were partners. So, to have such 

minuscule numbers was indefensible. Periodically, the then [Black] partners in such firms would 

get together for lunch. And one of the things that we talked about was we ought to be able to do 

something about this. And so, we met with the then president of the City Bar, Jim Oliensis by 

name. And Jim actually took the matter very seriously and he decided that what he needed to do 

to set up a committee, but a committee very unusual for the Bar Association. The Bar 



54 
 

Association dates back to 1870. It had never had a committee of the type that he formed, namely 

one that would be composed of the leaders of the leading firms as members of that committee, 

designed to do something about this subject. I came to learn – you heard me say something about 

how important Cy Vance was to me. I came to learn this only later. At the time Oliensis was 

deciding he would try to put this committee together, anticipating who his successor would be, 

he approached Vance and said, “What about Conrad Harper as the president? And I’d like you, 

[Cy], to be head of this committee.” And Vance said to him, “I will do that only if Conrad 

Harper is the president.” Okay. So, in the fullness of time, I became the president and Cy became 

the chair. And the first year was very difficult. We talked about this issue a lot around the table, 

the 35 or so lawyers, trying to hammer out what could be done. And we were not making great 

progress. [02:02:03] Cy Vance, the summer of 1991, said, “I’m going to be at Martha’s Vineyard 

and I’ll probably see” – I won’t remember his name this second [Arthur Liman], but a key 

partner at Paul, Weiss – “and I’ll have a talk with him and see whether we might be able to do 

something.” And Ira Millstein of the Weil Gotshal firm was very important as well, and the then 

head of Davis Polk [Henry King]. But it was Vance who was able to talk to his peers in a way I 

could not. And things were going pretty well. But then there was a major holdout. I won’t say 

which firm it was, but Cy said, “We have to go see X, the head of the firm, and I want you to go 

with me.” So, we went to see this guy and he was accompanied by one of his hotshot corporate 

law partners. And here’s how the meeting went. Cy said, you know, “I’m here to see you about 

this, and we really need to talk about it as much as we can.” And this fellow turned to his hotshot 

younger partner, who again, gave a terrific speech, basically why things were just fine the way 

they were. Okay. He finished talking. So, Cy said to the partner in charge of the firm, “I need 

your vote on this.” [The partner] said, “You have it.” We walked out. 



55 
 

MHP: That was that. 

 [02:03:50] 

 

[END OF INTERVIEW]