Ted Shaw Interview (Pt 1) Transcript

    Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project  

 

Theodore (Ted) Shaw, Pt. 1 

Interviewed by Seth Kotch 

April 14, 2023 

Chapel Hill, NC 

Length: 02:35:10 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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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[START OF INTERVIEW] 

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

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is April 14th, 2023, and I'm here in Chapel 

Hill, North Carolina, with Mr. Theodore Shaw in Mr. Shaw’s home office to conduct an 

interview for the LDF Oral History Project. Thank you very much for being here.  

Theodore (Ted) Shaw: Thank you very much. And, of course, I'm Theodore M. 

Shaw, the Julius L. Chambers distinguished professor of law at UNC School of Law and the 

Director of the Center for Civil Rights. Glad to be with you, Seth.  

SK: Glad that we are both here. I want to start at the very beginning. Before we get 

to your work at LDF. You were born a few months after the Brown decision. Grew up in 

New York. Can you talk a little bit about your childhood?  

TS: Sure. With the proviso that once I start talking, you have to rein me in. So, yes, I 

was born in November of 1954 and, in New York, in fact, on Governors Island. And my 

father was in the Air Force at the time, which is why I was born on Governors Island. And 

my mother. Well, I didn't come to know her very well. She passed away when I was just shy 

of three. I only have one clear memory of her. But I remember her from that memory. We 

had moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, because when my father got out of the Air Force, 

he was a jet mechanic. He tried to get a job with the airlines. They wouldn't hire African 

Americans and he got a, the best he could do was get a job with an air freight company and, 

what’s now Bradley Field or Bradley Airport Hartford. [00:02:05] But we lived in 

Springfield. And one night, he made the beds all the time, military style, so taut that, you 

know, you can bounce a coin on them. And one night I got caught under the covers and 



   
 

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couldn’t get out and I was crying for help. My mother came and rescued me and when she 

got me out, she took me over her shoulder and was trying to calm me down. And I 

remember she was kind of laughing [laughter] and I was looking out over her shoulder and 

it was a full moon. And so I remember the full moon and my mother chuckling over having 

to rescue me. It’s my only memory of her. She died of tuberculosis and pneumonia. She had 

lost a lung when she was 15 and then married at 18. Had three children. No, she married at 

20, had three children in a row. Boom, boom, boom. [snaps fingers] Pregnant with a fourth 

when she died. No business having three children like that with one lung. But that's my 

memory of my mother.  

SK: Did the description of your mother that you just shared about her marriage and 

her pregnancy and who she was, did that come later from learning about her from your 

father? 

TS: Well, not so much from my father [laughter], but my two grandmothers played a 

huge role in my life and my maternal grandmother, and Seth you’ve got to keep me in check 

on this. My maternal grandmother was a [pauses], she belonged to Abyssinian Baptist 

Church in Harlem, you know, Adam Clayton Powell’s church. [00:04:09] Adam Clayton 

Powell Senior’s church. And she and my grandfather, my grandfather was a deacon. They 

were actually the first couple to be married in the church when they moved up to Harlem 

after that. In 1924, they got married. Church moved in [19]23. So my grandmother was, and 

my grandfather, they were Harlem middle class, Harlem bourgeoisie. My grandmother kept 

my mother alive in our memories, talked about her all the time. My grandfather died a little 

more than a year after my mother. So I didn’t have him for long either. My other 

grandmother was not bourgeois or bougie, as we used to say. She was a single mother at a 



   
 

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time when that was the Scarlet Letter, in the 1930s. She was a domestic worker. She was a 

very short woman in physical stature. She was four-foot nine, bow legged, and a very 

humble woman. They were both very dear to me. My paternal grandmother, she was my 

heart. And I have here in the house a framed handbill from the March on Washington in 

1963. [00:06:00] You know, my grandmother may have cleaned houses, did clean houses, as 

many single Black women or married Black women did during those days. That’s what she 

did, you know, cleaned their houses, scrubbed their floors, helped raise their children. But 

that morning, she got up and went down to 34th Street and got on a bus and went to 

Washington. And she was there for the March on Washington. She wanted to take me, but 

by that time my father had been married, for a while anyway, and she wanted to take me. 

But my mother, my stepmother, feared violence because there was a lot of talk about 

violence. And so I didn’t go. But I've always been proud of the fact that my grandmother 

went. You know, I have right over here a pin from the march, and I’d probably have to get 

up and show it to you. But I have pins from the march and other, not only the handbill but 

the programs from that day. She gave it, gave them to me many years later. And I’ve come 

to talk about her a little bit more in recent years, because I often point out that for years, 

whenever I see photographs of the March on Washington or when I see film footage, I’m 

always looking for my grandma Hattie. And there were 250,000 people there that day, and 

she was four feet nine. Of course, I’m not going to find her. I’m not going to see her, but I 

can’t help it. I'm always looking for her. And I’ve always been so proud of the fact that she 

was there. I have another early memory that’s related to civil rights. My other grandmother, 

you know, she and my grandfather had a brownstone in Harlem. [00:08:04] For years I had 

this imagery in my mind. At the east end of 125th Street in Harlem, the main thoroughfare, 



   
 

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of course, is the entrance ramp to the Triborough Bridge, now the Robert F. Kennedy 

Bridge. And I had this image of being there with my grandmother. I was very, very young. 

And there were all these people who were laying down in the streets and they were blocking 

traffic. Cars and busses and trucks had pulled right up to them. In my mind, these people 

were covered with newspapers. I couldn’t make sense out of that. I didn’t know whether it 

was a dream or what. Years later, when I was working on a college thesis on the Civil 

Rights Movement, I came across a story in the Boston Public Library on microfiche. I wish I 

could find it again. And it was about a demonstration at the foot of the Triborough Bridge to 

protest the failure or the refusal of white store owners on 125th Street to hire Black 

employees, even though the patrons of these stores were almost exclusively Black. And 

apparently, I had witnessed that demonstration with my grandmother. The only thing I got 

wrong was that they didn’t have newspapers on top of them. They had them under them to 

keep their clothes from being soiled. [00:10:06] I must’ve, must have seen that. But that 

always stayed in my mind. And so, the Civil Rights Movement was kind of the backdrop of 

even my early life. You know, I remember hearing a radio blaring about the Little Rock 

school crisis. I was only a few years old, but I remember that. And when I was a little older, 

I remember going across 125th Street with my maternal grandmother and seeing, on a bus, 

and seeing a big crowd of people listening to a speaker and the speaker was yelling and I 

said, “Grandma, who’s that?” She said, “Oh, some Black fool.” It was Malcolm. You know, 

my grandmother wasn’t a Malcolm X admirer. She was a Martin Luther King admirer. And 

then, of course, it was Abyssinian Baptist Church with Adam Clayton Powell. And I heard 

him speak many times. I remember crying. My sister and I, we cried because we thought his 

sermon was so fiery, but we thought he was yelling at us personally. But I remember Adam 



   
 

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Powell. So, the Civil Rights Movement was very much a part of the, you know, the 

background of my life from the very beginning.  

SK: It strikes me that, the story of your grandmother or grandmothers being the 

people who led you in a way towards the movement strikes me as a little bit unusual because 

one of the tropes, true or not, of the movement is of parents and grandparents being worried 

for their children who want to participate. 

TS: Yeah. 

SK: Do you feel that your experience in this way was different?  

TS: [00:11:59] Well, you know, I was blessed in my later years to come to know 

John Lewis. And late in his life, he would tell the story about when he was a child and his 

parents told him, you’ve heard it, “Stay out of trouble.” They were concerned, as many 

Black parents were for their children, particularly in the South. I wasn’t in the South. I was, 

except as I often say now, the South Bronx was the extent of it. But I know there were a lot 

of concerned parents who wanted their children to stay out of trouble. And I loved John 

Lewis’s way he came to talk about it, he said he got in trouble. It was good trouble and 

necessary trouble. I loved hearing him tell that no matter how many times he told it. But, 

you know, my mother, my second mother, my stepmother, the one who raised me, I would 

have been at the March on Washington, but she was concerned about trouble. So that’s true. 

I mean, there were many parents who were. At the same time, my paternal grandmother, she 

was there. And I knew other parents, particularly mothers, grandparents, who were part of 

the Civil Rights Movement, North and South, but particularly in the South that was true. But 

even in the North. I had dear friends, I became part of their family, and their mother was at 



   
 

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every demonstration I could possibly think of. As I grew older, I would see her there, 

sometimes we even went together, you know. [00:14:09] So it depended on, as with most 

things, who you are, who you were. So, I’ve always been proud of my paternal 

grandmother. You know, she had a fire in her belly, even though she was a very humble 

woman.  

SK: Can you talk a little bit about how growing up in New York, growing up in 

what I think you called a housing project or public housing, how that, the role that may have 

played in sort of developing who you were? 

TS: Yeah. I chuckle because whenever I run into people who grew up in New York 

City in public housing, I sometimes have an exchange with them because we had a way and 

an intonation when we talked about the houses where people lived near the projects, but 

they weren't the projects. And we used to call them or we referred to them as the private 

houses. And that was the intonation, the private houses, you know. Not that the private 

houses near the projects were as high-toned as I thought they were when I was a kid. But 

anybody who lived in the projects thought if you lived in the private houses, you were 

wealthy. Of course, that wasn't true. We were raised by my maternal grandmother for a few 

years with the help of my paternal grandmother. But my father remarried, and when he did, 

we moved to the Bronx, in an area that when we moved there was never referred to as the 

South Bronx because it really was more east than south. But as time passed and the 

demographics of that housing project and the neighborhood changed, people started calling 

it the Southeast Bronx, and then they called it the South Bronx because the demographics 

changed. [00:16:27] Then the geographics moved with that. When we first moved there, it 

was a racially integrated public housing project, and they screened carefully who was there, 



   
 

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who got in. That did not last for very long because of two things. One is that Co-Op City 

was built in the Bronx and huge numbers of people moved out of the projects into Co-Op 

City, but particularly the white people were there. And a lot of white folks also moved out to 

Long Island, some to Westchester. But, you know. So the projects got blacker and browner. 

It was Castle Hill projects in the Bronx. I don’t want to be immodest because it’s not 

anything I can claim any credit for, but it just so happens that in high school, Sonia 

Sotomayor was my classmate. And so, Sonia grew up in the projects not far from me. There 

were a number of projects in the area, the Bronx, in which I grew up. Hers was Bronxdale 

projects, the Bronxdale houses. And I started telling this story in recent years sometimes 

when I spoke about how Sonia lived in the Bronxdale houses, which are now the Justice 

Sonia Sotomayor houses. And I say, I grew up in the Castle Hill houses, which are now the 

Castle Hill houses.  

SK: [laughter] 

TS: So Castle Hill changed. And as it changed, many of the people I grew up with 

got lost to either using drugs or selling drugs or both. [00:18:29] Some of them lost to drugs, 

as you know, victims of overdoses, some of them killed in drug related violence, some of 

them killed others. I don’t want to overstate it because there were some folks who made it 

through all that intact, but a lot of them didn’t. You know, so, I don't want to be overly 

dramatic because there are many people who can tell this story all around the country, Black 

and Brown people in particular. But, you know, by the time I was in law school, certainly, 

and even before then, many people I grew up with were gone already, one way or another. 

And yet growing up in the projects, I have some, I had some wonderful experiences. 

Wonderful stories. I know wonderful people. Some of them are lifelong friends, even now, 



   
 

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but many of them are gone. At that time, heroin was the most, I don’t know how to call it 

anything but wicked drug that people were using. And so, I remember that very well. I 

remember seeing it around me and having opportunity to do it, of course, I didn’t do it. I 

mean, I couldn’t do it. So, one of the big differences was for me going to Catholic school 

and it was outside of my neighborhood. [00:20:30] It was, before we got there, an all-white 

school. Wasn’t that far outside of my neighborhood. It was in another part of the Bronx. But 

I got a better education than I otherwise would have gotten, even though a lot of the kids 

there were, in many ways, racist. Some of the nuns were. I remember one particular nun 

who ironically pushed my sister, a year older than me, hard to be the student editor of the 

newspaper. But she — she was from Missouri, or Missour-uh, as she always called it. And 

she referred to Black people as “darkies.” Now, you can look at me. I’m light skinned 

anyway, as was my sister. But it didn’t matter if you were light skinned, you still caught 

some hell for it. So anyway, we had the benefit of going to a school that gave us a good 

grounding educationally, even if there were other issues we had to deal with. And from 

there, my sister, who’s a year older than me, she went to Cardinal Spellman High School, 

and I followed her a year later. And at the time, Spellman was one of the best high schools 

in New York, certainly one of the best parochial high schools in New York, but best high 

schools, period. But growing up in New York was, for me, a wonderful experience. And by 

the time I was a teenager, I was all over the city. And also, the Black Consciousness 

Movement had flowered and grown. [00:22:34] And I was all over New York at that 

moment, with all of the cultural blossoming that was going on. And I could talk about that at 

great length. And it was a wonderful experience growing up in New York at that time.  



   
 

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SK: I do want to hear about that blossoming and how you experienced it as a young 

person. But you said something I want to ask for a little bit more on. You just said of your 

experience in elementary school, it was before we got there, an all-white school. 

TS: Yeah. 

SK: Is there a story there to share?  

TS: Well, it was a, when I say all white, I think we were the first ones. Sadly, I just 

heard, my brother just told me that the school, Holy Family, is about to close, as many 

parochial schools are. You know, they’re, they, the Archdiocese of New York can’t sustain 

them. And apropos of totally nothing, the most famous person to graduate from Holy Family 

High School is J. Lo. Well, after me. But in any event, there were no Puerto Rican students 

there at the time. There were no Black students at the time. And we were, my family, we 

were the first ones to go there. When I mentioned that experience, there were some students 

who were very friendly and some who weren’t. Some who, for whom, you know, they call 

you out of your name. And there was some who I had physical alterations with. And it was a 

mixed experience. [00:24:35] But when I talk about the quality of the education that I got, it 

was pretty good. But I remember some of the nuns in music class, for example, we used to, I 

could sing the song, but I won’t. They’d have us sing. And that song was in the book, you 

know, talk about what finds its way into textbooks. And this was a music book. The song 

was “jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton, jump down, turn around, pick a bale a 

day.” Did you ever hear that song? Yeah, we used to sing that when I was in grade school, 

or we were made to sing it. And one nun had me sing a particular part of it. You know, it 

was a little humiliating. So, there was some of that, but that was part of the, what some 

people call the Up-South experience. And that reminds me about an experience that was a 



   
 

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Down-South experience I want to share. Not long after my grandfather died, my maternal 

grandmother took me with her, just the two of us. She used to call me her “little man”, and 

she took me with her on a trip to her, to where her people came from. She was born in New 

York, in Harlem in 1899, November 16th, 1899. I love both my grandmothers, as I said, but 

my maternal grandmother was an inveterate liar about some things, and she always told the 

story and she changed documents. [00:26:34] She told the census workers things that 

weren’t true, that she was born in 1900. She did not want to be a child of the 19th century 

[laughter], that antiqued her. But born in Harlem. But her people were from Charles City, 

Virginia. And she took me with her to Charles City. I was probably shy of five years old. 

We took a Greyhound bus. It was a double decker bus and we took it from West 40th Street, 

Port Authority, for those who know New York. And I remember when we got to 

Washington, D.C., we had, even though we were going further south and it was a stop, I 

think we got off the bus for a moment. But when we got back on, we had to sit in a different 

place. Now, I didn't mind it because we sat upstairs in this double decker Greyhound bus, 

and not only did we sit upstairs, but we sat in the first seats. We were lucky enough to do 

that so you could look out over the front and the rest of the bus. But there was nothing but 

Black folks, colored people back then, up there. And I didn’t get at the time that it was 

because of segregation, which was still in place. We’re talking about 1959, 1960. And so, 

the busses were segregated. That was Down-South. But the thing about Up-South, thing 

about living in Castle Hill projects, is just a few blocks from the far end of the projects, and 

I lived in a 20-story building at the end, at one corner of the projects. [00:28:31] There was a 

swimming pool. The swimming pool, none of the people in the projects went there. In fact, 

there was a sign, I remember, and I asked my, some of my contemporaries about this 



   
 

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because I don’t want my imagination taking over and making things up. But I’ve checked it 

with them and they had the same memory. We share the memory. There was a sign, 

“coloreds,” “no coloreds.” In fact, we resented that so much because some of the kids I went 

to school with would come down and go to that pool. I’d hear them talk about that. Some of 

us who lived in the projects, we would go down to the pool and we’d throw rocks over the 

fence. In later years, I just thought about how I hoped I never hurt anyone, you know. But at 

the time it was resentment and anger. And I hope to God I never hurt anyone. But it was, it’s 

in the Bronx, in the [19]60s, a segregated swimming pool. Many of the people who came to 

that swimming pool came from a huge housing development that was not public housing. It 

was owned by the Metropolitan Life Insurance company Parkchester. And at that time, 

Parkchester didn’t allow any Black people or colored people to live in Parkchester. My 

Grandma Hattie worked for a number of families in Parkchester. I would meet her sometime 

and she would take me to buy shoes at Florsheim’s or Buster Brown and some of these other 

places. [00:30:31] But if I went to meet her in Parkchester, the Parkchester police would ask 

what I was doing there, and I had to have a good reason for being there, meeting my 

grandmother to go shopping for shoes or something. So anyway, I had forgotten about that. 

By the way, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company owned Parkchester, as they did 

Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan. Very desirable. They had one Black development in Harlem 

that they owned, the Riverton houses, which was also very desirable. But that was all Black. 

Parkchester and Stuyvesant Town were all white at that time. And even now, Parkchester’s 

turned over, but Stuyvesant Town has relatively fewer Black and Brown people in it than is 

representative of New York.  



   
 

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SK: It makes me think how much I and many others have to learn about, certainly 

segregation in the North, but the ways in which racial segregation often seemed to function 

as a way of denying Black people simple comforts. A pool in the summertime, access to a 

beach, access to a home that has air conditioning.  

TS: Yes. Yes.  

SK: And then turning those things into luxuries for the poor whites who can go there 

just because of their whiteness.  

TS: Yeah, well, I have behind me Robert Caro's The Power Broker. There’s a lot of 

that in that book about how Robert [Moses] had such an influence on New York City. But a 

lot of it wasn’t good for at least for Black folk in terms of segregation and discrimination. 

So, point well taken. Some of these things I don’t think about often, you kind grow up, you 

forget about it, particularly in New York City. But New York had a lot of segregation. 

SK: Absolutely, and I think part of being a bustling city like New York is it gets to 

remake its landscape every generation or so and wipe away memories of things that might 

be unpleasant or pleasant for different people. You mentioned that by the time you were a 

teenager, I guess what, by the mid to late 1960s, we have the, a rising enthusiasm among 

Black people for African traditions. For discovery of Black art, Black owned businesses, 

economic independence. It sounds like this was something that rubbed off on you.  

TS: [33:21] Oh, absolutely. The one passion I had as a child was reading. My father, 

as I said, remarried. He worked for the post office and he worked nights. And so he would 

sleep during the day. We couldn't make any noise. We could never have company. Our 

parents would send us downstairs to play. And one of the places that they would send us, 



   
 

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and we never had babysitters. Our babysitter was the public library branch, and we were 

fortunate enough to have one. And it was a section of stores in the projects. And we had a 

public library there. So, we spent a lot of time there, and I read everything I could get my 

hands on. You know, some of the books I read I have here now, I years later would buy my 

copies of some of those books. I never got on an airplane until I was 20 years old. But I felt 

like I had traveled all over the world through reading. I loved to read with a passion. And I 

read. I read a lot. I read about World War II, which had such an influence on the generation 

I was part of, the baby boomer generation. I read those books. I read mysteries, the Hardy 

Boys. But I also read Robert Louis Stevenson and I read Sherlock Holmes, and I loved, I 

remember reading A Tale of Two Cities and all of those books. [35:36] But I also began to 

read, when I could find the books, about Black folks. I remember getting into trouble in 

school one day. We used to use paper bags to make book covers, fold them over, you know, 

cut them and fold them over the books. And so, I was in religion class and we were 

supposed to be reading the Bible. Our nuns, many of them, they didn’t take any prisoners. 

And I had a book. I have a copy of it here. I had a book that was very popular at the time. 

It’s called Manchild in the Promised Land. Claude Brown. You ever hear of it? It’s about 

Claude Brown growing up in Harlem in the 1940s and his experience, and he was sent to a 

reform school, a Wiltwyck school. You know, drugs and violence and everything else. It 

became a classic. There’s a Puerto Rican version called Down These Mean Streets that I 

read. But on this particular day, I had a paperback copy of Manchild in the Promised Land, 

and I was so engrossed with it. And the book had a lot of words that were in French, if you 

catch my drift. And I didn’t realize that a nun had come up behind me and was peering over 

my shoulders and was looking at what I was reading. She realized it wasn’t a Bible and she 



   
 

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did what some of those nuns would do back in those days, and they got away with it. It was, 

I mean, it was a violent interaction, I’ll put it that way. [37:34] But I was reading that stuff 

in third, fourth grade, you know, Malcolm X’s autobiography, when it came out, right 

around the time he was killed, [19]65. I read that immediately. Somewhere along the line, I 

was reading the poetry of Langston Hughes already. I talked to you about the, this book that 

I came to possess then. All of this was going on back at that time, and it had an influence on 

me. And let me try to articulate something that, as I keep saying, the danger is once I start 

talking, I don’t stop. I am so conscious, I have been, Black folk in general have been 

conscious of skin color all of our life. We have internalized racism. My grandmother, my 

maternal grandmother, who was brown skinned, darker than me, was very color conscious 

in ways that I think probably, not probably, had to do harm within the family. My uncle, 

who is pretty dark skinned. My mother was light skinned. Many Black families are like this. 

If you looked at them side by side, you'd say, now show me the milkman. But that’s how 

Black families are. And I’m saying all this to say that I was conscious of the movement for 

Black pride, even at the time that, in which Black folks had internalized racism within our 

communities, within our families in so many ways. It’s a painful story. [39:50] And so, 

when Malcolm talked about pride in Blackness, he was doing something that Marcus 

Garvey had done. You know, Marcus Garvey, all those volumes of Marcus Garvey papers. 

Marcus Garvey did that in the 1920s. Malcolm was doing that in the 1960s. The Black 

Panthers did it. The Nation of Islam did it. And we can have a conversation about the Nation 

of Islam. We can have a conversation about Farrakhan, because Farrakhan became an 

anathema because of the allegations of anti-Semitism. In the meantime, within Black 

communities, though, he was spreading Black pride. Well, you’ve got to be careful about 



   
 

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how you reconcile those things if they’re reconcilable, because you’ve got to speak out 

against anti-Semitism. But I remember going to hear Farrakhan speak on multiple occasions. 

I remember Black theater, the National Black Theater Company in Harlem. I remember a 

Black drumming company, Olatunji, and I would go see them and hear them regularly and 

see dances and Black theater. [41:28] You know, the Black theater companies. Denzel 

Washington, whom I came to know, but he came out of that. That’s where he started. Those 

are — many of the Black actors. There was so much that was flourishing in that time, so 

much pride. And we were turning away from some of the things that manifest in internalized 

racism. The old stories of the bag tests at Howard University. You know about the bag tests? 

Most white Americans don’t. With all due respect. So, the internalized racism, which is 

alive today, by the way, internalized racism manifested where Black people would go to 

Howard University, but there would be a paper bag test that they would hold up at parties. 

And if you were darker than a paper bag, you couldn’t get in. If you were lighter than a 

paper bag or the same color, you could get in. I mean, awful stuff. That is the internalization 

of racism. But it shouldn't be surprising. Black folks had to, had been taught racism, had 

been taught racism against their own people, against their own selves. Well, in the 1960s, a 

lot of that began to change. And it was a wonderful thing to grow up in that era. You know, 

Nina Simone was singing “to be young, gifted, and Black is where it’s at.” You know, 

teaching that being Black was not what we had been taught it was. It was a thing of beauty. 

[43:25] I loved growing up in that Harlem and in that Bed-Stuy, where I would go and visit 

relatives. And there was Black pride and Black nationalism in that moment. I remember I 

was at my grandmother’s house in Harlem, her brownstone, on April 4th of 1968. I often 

went to my grandmother’s even though we lived in the Bronx. And I would, we would take 



   
 

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the bus to the subway and a subway to Harlem and then walk from the subway at 125th and 

Lexington to my grandmother’s house. And so, I was there. And I visited with my 

grandmother and I left and I was going back up to the Bronx. It was a Friday, as I 

remember. I think it was Good Friday. And you know where I'm going. I remember walking 

on 125th Street toward the subway and something was wrong. And I couldn’t make it out 

because people were yelling and cursing and moaning and crying. And I stopped somebody 

and I said, “What? What’s going on? Why, what’s happening?” And somebody told me 

Martin Luther King had been shot. And I remember the thought was, “Why Martin Luther 

King?” [45:08] You know, Martin Luther King was about nonviolence, I thought. By the 

time I got back up to the Bronx, Harlem was on fire. Washington, D.C. was on fire. Newark 

was on fire. Cities across the country on fire. That was a profound moment. And I tell that 

story because that moment had a profound effect on my life. You know, there I was. I was in 

my, I think my last year of high school then, I mean, I'm sorry, in grade school. I was only 

13, going to be 14 or something like that or maybe I was 12 to be 13. But in any event, I 

remember in the days after that, watching the television and the manhunt for King’s killer. I 

remember watching the funeral when it happened and seeing the King family. I remember 

seeing his oldest child, Yolanda King, who was about my age, and it had a profound effect. 

But the profound effect, the most profound effect for me was delayed a year or two, because 

at that time, the archbishop of New York, Cardinal Cooke, wanted to do something, as many 

people in many institutions wanted to do about racial inequality and discrimination. [47:01] 

In his Catholic way, what he could think about was trying to create a program that would 

produce more Black priests. That's what he was focused on. And so he did that. The project 

was called the Archbishop’s Leadership Project, but its first intention was to create more 



   
 

18 
 

Black priests. The first group of young Black men from Harlem and the Bronx that he, and 

the Project, that he took in, they weren’t interested in the priesthood. They were interested in 

the Black Consciousness Movement. They were interested in girls also. You couldn't 

reconcile those things with the priesthood. They couldn't even find a Black priest to run the 

project because they only had one or two Black priests in Harlem. I knew them also, but 

they found an Irish-American priest to run the project. His name was John Meehan. And, to 

his credit, Father Meehan knew who he was and what he wasn't. And so he didn’t try to be 

something he wasn’t. And he petitioned the archbishop, Cardinal Cooke, to let the group 

continue as a leadership project that would train young Black men to become leaders in their 

community. It’s called the Archbishop’s Leadership Project. ALP. [49:01] I was in the 

second group that was chosen for the ALP and it changed my life. We had a curriculum. We 

would read books. The first book we read, I remember, was Lerone Bennett’s Before the 

Mayflower: A History of Black America. You know, I have a copy of it right here. We read 

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. We read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. We read 

Black Power by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton. We read Facing Mount 

Kenya by Jomo Kenyatta. I could go on and on. It was on top of our schoolwork, we read 

these books. We had to read these books, and we had meetings every Sunday in the evening. 

We learned to get up and give speeches and debate with one another. We had people come 

in and teach history classes. Father Meehan knew who he was and what he wasn’t. And so, 

he didn’t try to do these things. He designed the program. I asked him just the other day, 

“How did you do that?” You know, but the people he brought in, most white Americans 

don’t know who they are or who they were. Some Black Americans know. The great John 

Henrik Clarke, a Pan-Africanist and a professor, a historian. You know, we had a professor 



   
 

19 
 

by the name of Lenny Gunther who would come in and teach Black history. Brilliant. We 

had people like Sonia Sanchez, the great poet, African American poet, come in and speak to 

us. [51:12] It was a tremendous program. It changed my life. Talk about consciousness. 

Brought it to another level. We would go down and hear the Black Panther Party members 

meeting and talking, all of that. In my high school, Cardinal Spellman Catholic High 

School. We brought Louis Farrakhan to campus, to the high school to speak. That wouldn't 

happen today. And I can’t believe we got away with it then. And we brought the Black 

Panthers to our school. We bought the Young Lords to our school. It was an exciting time. 

And that was the, that’s where I came from and what I came through that awakened me in so 

many ways. I’m not even recalling everything that that program did and was, but it made all 

the difference in me. My father and mother had divorced. My stepmother did the best she 

could, but, there was a lot she couldn’t do. That program made the difference in my life. No 

ALP, no Father Meehan. No Wesleyan University, no Columbia Law School. No Justice 

Department, no NAACP Legal Defense Fund. My life would have been so different. So, 

that’s my story. [53:10] 

SK: So, you just sketched out your path through Wesleyan, Columbia, the 

Department of Justice, LDF. I can’t help but wonder what brought you from this ferment of 

Black, radical, intellectual thought and culture to Wesleyan.  

TS: I did not know anything about colleges in spite of everything I said. I remember 

somewhere along the line I decided I wanted to be part of this whole movement for civil 

rights for Black folks. And I thought the best way to do it was to be a lawyer. I had learned 

about Thurgood Marshall by that time. You know, I knew who he was. I thought that was 

the best way to do it. I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. Besides the fact that I grew up on 



   
 

20 
 

Perry Mason and I loved watching those Perry Mason TV shows and all of that. But when it 

came time to go to college, I remember my mother telling me that I should go in the Air 

Force. [00:54:33] We didn’t have the money to go to college. And I remember I was so 

disappointed. Now I want to say this and be clear that I say it with some understanding and 

say it in love. One of the things about the leadership project, we would have parents’ 

meetings every month. My father wasn't in my life in any significant way by that time. My 

stepmother never came to any of those meetings. My stepmother struggled with the whole 

idea of identity in so many ways, talk about internalized racism. My stepmother was very 

light skinned. Again, we got a long strain of light skindedness, as many Black folks would 

say, in my family. She wouldn't come to the parents’ meetings. I was there, often the only 

one there without a parent. But I had other parents who looked out for me. But I’m saying 

that to say my mother did not have an understanding of the consciousness movement that 

was going on and that the ALP was part of and what my possibilities were. So, when she 

told me to go in the Air Force, she was doing the best that she could. My father had been in 

the Air Force. By that time, the Vietnam War was raging. I was not interested in going into 

the military and I sure enough wasn’t interested in and fighting against other people of color 

in another part of the world. I had that much consciousness already. But I didn’t know how 

to find my way to the path that I thought I wanted to be on. [00:56:35] There was an 

institution, a college. I thought, “If you want to be a lawyer, maybe you should go to John 

Jay College of Criminal Justice.” It kind of made sense to me, not knowing that John Jay is 

mostly a place where people who were in law enforcement got some training and education. 

Good school. But that wasn’t the one that would lead to the path, that was unlikely to lead to 

the path that I thought I wanted to be on. And I didn’t have any resources to speak of. Father 



   
 

21 
 

Meehan by that time, still early on in the leadership project, had started to take some of the 

fellows up to see colleges. And I remember he and I were standing on a street corner in 

Harlem one day my senior year in high school. I had applied to a number of different 

schools because they came to my high school and they were recruiting. Wesleyan was one 

of them. And so, I did apply to Wesleyan, but I applied late. I applied in January. You know, 

you’re supposed to apply way before then. And they had waitlisted me. I was watching with 

Father Meehan this tenement building that was burning down, big fire. And we were 

standing there and we were talking and he said, turned to me and said, “So, where are you 

going to go to college next year?” And I said, “I don’t know.” I said, “I’m thinking about 

John Jay, but I’ve applied to a few other schools.” And he said, “Well, what’s going on with 

these places?” And I told him that I didn’t know. [00:59:12] And he said, “What? What's 

this place in Connecticut, Wesleyan?” He couldn't even pronounce the name right because 

he wasn’t familiar with it. And so, I [inaudible] and I said, “Well, I'm waitlisted.” He said, 

“Well, have you gone up there?” I said, “No.” “Why not?” I said, “How would I get up 

there? I don’t have any money,” or whatever. And he said, “Well, I’ll take you.” And so fast 

forward a few, a week or so. And he was taking one of the fellows who had been admitted to 

Yale, up to Yale, to New Haven, and he took me along to go to Wesleyan. We got up there 

and it was a picture-perfect day. It was a beautiful day. And if you knew Wesleyan’s 

campus, you ever been there by any chance? You’ve been there. So, it’s a beautiful campus. 

It’s a big hill in the middle of campus. And all the students were sitting out there, and I 

won’t tell you all the activities they were engaged in. But he took me to the admissions 

office and I met a Black admissions officer, and then he told me to go for a walk. And so I 

did. And I walked around the campus and I said, “Wow, if I could get into this place.” A 



   
 

22 
 

week later, I had a letter saying I had been admitted. I still didn't know if I’d be able to go 

because I didn't have any money. And a week after that I got a full scholarship. And so 

that’s how I found my way to Wesleyan, which was one of the formative experiences of my 

life. Fast forward, you know, Wesleyan has been such a part of my life well after 

graduation, I was, I would come to be a board member for 15 years on, you know, for 

Wesleyan and have been engaged in so many ways with the institution. And that wouldn’t 

have happened if it wasn’t for the ALP and if it wasn’t for Father Meehan. That’s how I 

found my way there.  

SK: [01:00:53] You write your thesis there on some aspect of the Civil Rights 

Movement. Is that right?  

TS: I did.  

SK: Well it seems like an obvious question because it feels like you spent most of 

your adolescence engaged with the movement in some way, learning about it and learning 

about its values, but can you talk about what led you to that topic, what you did as an 

undergraduate that helped prepare you? 

TS: It was my passion. It was my, that's what I was interested in, and I can't help but 

mention. I mentioned the assassination of Dr. King and seeing the funeral and Dr. King’s 

children. My first semester in at Wesleyan I went up to a party at Smith College, and I met 

Yolanda King. She was a first-year student there. We became dear friends. Yoki died about 

a dozen years ago now. It’s hard for me to talk about it even now, died too young. But we 

became dear friends. I don’t want to sound immodest. I never talked to her about her father 

unless she raised him. Never. But I did come to know her and her family. I have a 



   
 

23 
 

beautifully inscribed book over here from her mother to me. And it was, it fit in to the path 

that I was on and in many ways. But she became a dear, dear friend. So yeah, that, I can’t 

imagine for me, my life, not being engaged in the struggle for civil rights. [01:03:01] 

Somewhere along the way I had decided there were two jobs that I dreamed about someday. 

I’ve had both of those jobs. I'm not talking about being Director-Counsel of the Legal 

Defense Fund, but I’m talking about working at the Legal Defense Fund, because the best 

part of working at the Legal Defense Fund for me was being one of its lawyers and doing 

the trial work and the cases and the appellate work, et cetera. Not the administration. Some 

people love that. I didn’t. And working at the Justice Department right out of law school. It 

was a wonderful place to work, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. If you know 

the story of the Civil Rights Movement, you know the story, the role, the Civil Rights 

Division played, you know, John Doar, Derrick Bell, was at the Civil Rights Division at one 

time, and I could talk about others. And so those were the two jobs that I wanted, I dreamed 

of. And I was blessed to get there. When I was in law school, when I was at Columbia. And 

I'll come back to that in a moment, if I may. Jack Greenberg was teaching a seminar, so I 

took it. I don’t think I was particularly brilliant, but that’s when I first met Jack Greenberg, 

who was head of the Legal Defense Fund at the time. It was Jack Greenberg who would 

come to hire me a few years later. [01:04:48] What I wanted to come back to was say, when 

I was in law school, I applied to a number of different, when I was in college, I applied to a 

number of different law schools, including Columbia. Columbia was my moon-shot 

application. You know, I wished that I could get into Columbia, but, my Lord, it was hard to 

get into Columbia then. It’s even harder now, I think. But I was waitlisted again and I 

remember the summer after I graduated, I had been admitted to Georgetown, which is a 



   
 

24 
 

great law school. I thought I was going to Georgetown, but I would come by Columbia 

because I wanted them to know who I was. I was working two jobs and all of that, but I 

would come by Columbia Law School and make sure they didn’t forget about me. There 

was this wonderful woman, I think she was from Hungary, her name was Anna Bearer. You 

know, we forget about these people. They get lost in many, in time, over time. She was 

wonderful. She kept encouraging me and she worked there and she was in admissions. She 

kept encouraging me, “Stay in touch. Keep doing what you’re doing.” She couldn’t 

guarantee me anything, but she wanted to make sure I stayed in touch. And I was packing to 

go to Georgetown late in the summer. And I got a letter saying I had been admitted to 

Columbia Law School. [01:06:54] I couldn’t believe that it had happened, but I was on my 

way. I’ve come to tell this story to many students, and I tell the story about how I got into 

Wesleyan off the wait list. I graduated with honors from Wesleyan, and did so many other 

things connected to Wesleyan, including Board of Trustees and various honors over the 

years. And I got into Columbia off the wait list. Doesn’t matter how you get in. What 

matters is getting in. And I’ve come to know and believe and I say it, tell the story that if 

there’s a heaven, I know I haven’t been good enough to get in, straight out, but if I’m lucky, 

I just might get in off the waitlist. [laughter] So that’s my story.  

SK: It’s interesting that you saw becoming an attorney as the thing that the Civil 

Rights Movement inspired you to do, because just, I suppose it would be easy for me to 

think, well, you saw Dr. King, you want to become a preacher or you saw, heard Malcolm, 

and you want to become an activist or you want to become a community organizer or 

otherwise. Was the work of attorneys during that period of time visible to you in a way that 

inspired your passion? 



   
 

25 
 

TS: You know, other than Perry Mason. Maybe, no. But I did know or come to 

know about Thurgood Marshall. Maybe that’s the way. I don't think I saw any attorneys in 

action, and I would be embarrassed at one time to acknowledge this, but I will acknowledge 

it. [01:08:57] When I started law school, I didn’t even know the distinction between 

criminal and civil law. I couldn’t have told you that civil rights law, for the most part, was 

civil law. And the difference between criminal defense lawyers or prosecutors and lawyers 

who worked in civil law, including civil rights. So, I did not know that distinction. I didn’t 

know what I didn’t know. And I would learn that in time. I will say that Columbia was, as 

you know, there’s a Southern saying that you’re familiar with, that you know. It was high 

cotton. And many of the students there, and there were faculty who encouraged this 

thinking, believed that if you were going to be a first-class lawyer, you were going to work 

at a white shoe law firm. If you didn’t do that, you were second-class. You know, if you 

worked in public interest law, if you were working as a prosecutor or defense lawyer, that 

was second-class work, maybe third-class work. I’ve come to tell students, I realize I think 

about, for example, the Justice Department and yeah, it has a civil division, a tax division, 

an anti-trust division, an environmental division, it has all these divisions. It has a Civil 

Rights Division. Many people thought the Civil Rights Division was kind of second-class 

part of the Justice Department. [01:10:59] The Justice Department was created in 1870 

under the Grant Administration, and it was created in large part to do the kind of work that 

the Civil Rights Division, although it wouldn’t be created for another hundred years or 

more, but the kind of work that Civil Rights Division did and does. Merrick Garland, the 

current attorney general, talks about that often. I’m glad he does. This is not second-class 



   
 

26 
 

work. This is first-class work. But I always wanted to do it regardless of what class people 

thought it was. [laughter] 

SK: While you were at Wesleyan or at Columbia did you have Black faculty or 

others who you worked closely with or even peers who were, felt like you were on their 

track? 

TS: While I was at Wesleyan, there were some Black faculty. Few, but some. I think 

about Jerry Long, who was in the religion department. There was another Black faculty 

member by the name of Clarence Walker. I didn’t have him, but I knew who he was, and 

there were a few other Black faculty. There was an African American institute, not a 

department, but it was an institute that was created. And there were faculty there whom I 

admired and looked up to. There was a faculty member from East Africa, Ahmed Farrar, 

who had an influence on me. I went to Tanzania and Kenya after my third year. It was the 

first time I ever got on a plane. [01:13:03] And there were others in the African American 

Institute, whom I admired quite a bit. When I got to Columbia Law School, there was only 

one Black faculty member. He was from North Carolina. And I liked him a great deal. His 

name was Parker. Professor Parker. And you’ve heard of his brother, though you don’t 

know that. Maceo Parker. You know, James Brown, Maceo. And Kellis Parker was the only 

Black faculty member there. And, you know, to be the only Black faculty member at a place 

like Columbia, it takes its toll. It’s not easy. But Kellis was an inspiration for so many of us. 

And I loved Kellis. He died prematurely. And now, of course, there are a number of Black 

faculty members at Columbia Law School. And I have had the opportunity to teach there 

also full time, something I never dreamed I’d do. And so Kellis was, as they say, the onliest 

one at the time. And I loved Kellis.  



   
 

27 
 

SK: Do you have memories of Jack Greenberg while you were there?  

TS: [01:14:46] Oh, yeah. Yeah. I took Jack’s seminar. You know, in my office here 

at UNC Law School I have a casebook that Jack wrote. One of his students at the time was 

an assistant to him in preparing that casebook, who was one of my colleagues at the Legal 

Defense Fund. And Kellis, you know, had an influence on me, but so did Jack. Now, I will 

tell you, Jack wasn’t someone who had a lot of personal charisma. Jack had a flatness about 

him. And years later, some years later, when I came to work at the Legal Defense Fund, I 

said at one point I came to understand that one of the most awkward moments you can have 

is if you got caught in the elevator alone with Jack Greenberg. Jack wasn’t much for small 

talk, and, you know, he had his own way. But Jack hired me, and I have always been 

grateful for that. He and I had what I think was a pretty good relationship. But Jack never 

had the kind of charisma and warmth that allowed one to be sure about that. I remember 

when I was interviewed at the Legal Defense Fund, Jack had called me. He rescued me from 

the Justice Department, because there had been a change in administrations and I was 

unhappy at Justice and knew I was going to have to leave that place. [01:16:53] And Jack 

called me out of the blue and said that “I hear that you’re doing school desegregation cases 

and that you’re doing pretty well.” I said, “Well, I’m flattered.” I said, “Well I do them, you 

know?” And he said, “Would you like to come up and talk about working at the Legal 

Defense Fund?” And my heart jumped. I thought, would I, you know? I found myself on a 

plane up to the Legal Defense Fund, met with the lawyers. I didn’t know at the time that a 

couple of the lawyers were very upset about the way Jack was doing this. They wanted to 

have a say in who got hired. They didn’t like the fact that he brought me or others up like 

that and made the decisions himself. That's how Jack did things. You know, there was a 



   
 

28 
 

point at which I remember I heard Jack say in response to some of the lawyers that they 

wanted a more democratic process, that he believed that democracy was great for countries 

and that was that. But, Jack hired me. And of course, that was one of the most profoundly 

important moments of my life. And I came to do work, even at the end of my time at LDF, 

with Jack after he had left and he was up at Columbia. Jack pulled me into working on 

Roma Rights issues in Eastern Europe. And Jack and I co-taught a class on Roma Rights at 

Columbia Law School. Jack had a huge impact on my life. [01:18:58] I’ve talked about the 

fact that I'm conscious that there were, there was a lot of controversy about Jack succeeding 

Thurgood. I get it. You know, if you look at Constance Baker Motley’s autobiography, she 

writes about that controversy and what it meant to choose a white lawyer. You know, Robert 

Carter, who was, he and Jack were colleagues, but they were oil and water. And Jack, of 

course, got the position of Director-Counsel, not Bob Carter, but Bob Carter could have 

easily been the one who got it, except Thurgood made the decision and he took that decision 

and his reasons to his grave. I’ve acknowledged over the years that Jack, head of the Legal 

Defense Fund in halcyon days of the Civil Rights Movement, you’d never see an African 

American chosen as head of B’nai B’rith, for example, or any other numbers of 

organizations that represent ethnic groups. And so, one could speculate, argue, debate, the 

merits of all of that. But when people said, as some Black folks said, that Jack didn’t 

represent the interests of Black folks in his role as Director Counsel in the most aggressive 

way that he could have, I think they were just wrong about that. Didn’t mean that you’d 

agree with all of his decisions. [01:20:57] He, in a very controversial way, decided not to 

represent Angela Davis. But I don’t think Thurgood, I’m pretty sure Thurgood would have 

made the same decision. Thurgood had some small C conservative ways about him also. But 



   
 

29 
 

I think Jack served the interest of the work of the Legal Defense Fund in a way that was 

done well, although I get that there’s importance and significance in having an African 

American in that position. No question about it. Not what you were asking about. But yes, I 

knew Jack. [laughter] 

SK: And we’ve gotten to a good place because I want to take half a step back and 

ask about working with Drew Days at the Department of Justice. 

TS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, I remember I wanted to work at the Justice Department 

the summer after my second year in law school. I wanted to work at Justice. One of my 

buddies and colleagues in law school, good buddy, he was much more upfront and 

aggressive than I was in getting to meet people. And we were at some kind of conference in 

our, the spring of our second year. And he went up and met Drew, introduced himself. I 

didn’t. I kind of was conscious of not putting myself in front of people’s faces. [01:23:00] 

Bottom line is, I didn’t work at the Justice Department that summer in the Civil Rights 

Division, but my buddy did. But I did get an offer from what was then the Lands and 

Natural Resources Division doing environmental work that summer. And it was a great 

experience. And the Lands and Natural Resources Division gave me an offer during my last 

year of law school to come and work with them in the honors program, a permanent 

position. And I remember one of the lawyers there said, “If you really want to work for 

Black folks, doing important work for them, do environmental work.” I didn’t quite fully 

understand how prescient that was at the time, because there’s a lot of truth in that 

statement, although I wanted to work in the Civil Rights Division. And I got an offer from 

the Civil Rights Division. Of course, having been around the department that summer, I got 

to know a lot of people, including in the Civil Rights Division. So I got an offer and that's 



   
 

30 
 

where I went. And Drew Days, former Legal Defense Fund lawyer, of course, was Assistant 

Attorney General for civil rights. I was a trial attorney, a line attorney, a trial attorney. And I 

didn’t see Drew regularly, but I did see him. I came to know him. He, yes, he hired me, 

made the decision. [01:24:59] There were cases that I worked on which required his 

attention and I interacted with him. I remembered well the times that I was in the office of 

the Assistant Attorney General as a trial attorney. I didn’t take that for granted. By the way, 

the office of the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Department of Justice 

Building, main Justice Building, used to be occupied by, you know this? That was, that was 

J. Edgar Hoover’s office, ironically. So, in any event, Drew was very thoughtful. He was 

brilliant. I remember one case that some of us brought to him where we wanted to sue a 

suburb of Chicago, and we wanted to sue them for maintaining a minimum lot size 

ordinance municipality, a minimum lot size ordinance. And we thought that that in effect 

was racially discriminatory because Black folks didn’t have the same wealth and resources 

to afford these larger lot size ordinances for these houses. And Drew decided not to do it. 

And his thinking about not to do it, even though some of us were critical about it, had to do 

with how he thought the courts were likely to apply and interpret the law and what was, on 

its face, a racially neutral requirement, even though he understood what the impact was. 

[01:27:14] Looking back, I can see that, you know, Drew was as Assistant Attorney 

General, he was not only making decisions that were about the merits of the legality of 

certain actions, but he also was, in many respects, a kind of a caretaker for the Civil Rights 

Division. And he was careful about how we put the Division out there in a way that would 

put the Division’s head on the chopping block. I’m talking about Congress and oversight, 

congressional oversight, et cetera. And so, I remember that about Drew. He was careful. 



   
 

31 
 

And yet he approved a case that I worked on that was controversial. I was one of the lawyers 

who worked up the Yonkers case, which was the first joint school and housing 

desegregation case. The Civil Rights Division had made a decision to take the education 

section, which did school desegregation cases and the old housing section and merge the 

two in recognition of the connection between schools and housing. You know, you 

segregate schools, you segregate housing, you segregate housing, you segregate schools. 

That was visionary. And the first time there was a case and it ended up being the last time 

because another administration came in that embodied that envisioning of the connection 

between schools and housing and what was then called the general litigation section. 

[01:29:16] Drew approved that case. So, careful, but at the same time, visionary. And I 

always admired Drew for the way he carried himself. There was a special kind of dignity 

and professionalism about him that I saw. I was proud to work in the Civil Rights Division 

under Drew’s leadership. And it was during that time that Drew had, as one of the people 

working most closely with him, well, he had Lani Guinier. That’s when I first met Lani. We 

were at the department together. You know, he had Lynn Walker, later Lynn Walker 

Huntley, who actually headed up one of the sections, but also became his Deputy Assistant 

Attorney General. Former Legal Defense Fund lawyer and close and dear hanging buddy of 

Elaine Jones. One of my law school buddies had preceded me to the Justice Department, 

Ricky Roberts, who later became a federal judge. Working at the Civil Rights Division I 

made so many good friends. My office mate, Brian Heffernan, I remember when I walked 

into his office on my first day on the job, and he had this big office all by himself, all to 

himself. [01:31:18] And I thought, “Well, he can’t be happy to see me.” [laughter] You 

know, I got a — well, we became close friends, one of my dearest friends. And we did work 



   
 

32 
 

on a landmark housing discrimination case together, U.S. v. City of Palmer. My first case 

that I ever worked on. And the lawyers who worked on it, including a lawyer who became 

the Section Chief, Bob Reinstein, a lifelong friend. You know, Justice was a wonderful 

place to work. One of the things that I’m conscious of that I always remember. You work at 

the Justice Department. You are a young lawyer. I was, what, 25, maybe 24 when I started 

working there. And you get up in court, the first time you do that, and you say, “My name 

is,” “Your Honor, my name is,” fill in the blank, “And I represent the United States of 

America.” That's heady stuff. At least it was heady for me. But that's what you're doing. 

You represent, you’re representing, as corny as some people think it might sound, the 

United States of America and the people of the United States of America. And you’re 

representing them in civil rights cases. What a wonderful opportunity that was for me. And I 

had a rocket start there. I was blessed in so many ways to be there. Of course, that all came 

to a screeching halt [laughter] a few years later.  

SK: You’re anticipating my question about what changed.  

TS: [laughter] 

SK: [01:33:11] But I want to first briefly just note or ask. I think that, thinking back 

to the [19]70s, a lot of people might think that this was a time of backlash, mainly against 

the Civil Rights Movement. You know, 1968 is this big pivot point. Then we move into a 

kind of retrenchment. That said, we had Jimmy Carter in the White House. And it sounds 

like you were surrounded by talented Black attorneys who had a lifelong effect on you, who 

were in many ways daring and creative in seeking out solutions to some structural problems.  



   
 

33 
 

TS: Black and white attorneys. But yes, there were a number of Black attorneys 

there, you know, Drew, and Lani, and Lynn and Franz Marshall, and people you would not 

know. In fact, I was, just in the last week, reading a book that I just picked up about higher 

education and race. And there was a reference in the book to a lawyer who was an older man 

by the time I got to Justice. And I would see him in the hallways and I don't think he was 

working in a section of the Civil Rights Division. I think he had a special title, a special 

appointment. And out of respect, we younger attorneys would always say hello to him. But, 

years later, I’d realize I really didn’t understand who he was and what he had done. 

[01:35:12] This is the lawyer who first coined the term and gave meaning to the term 

“affirmative action,” and here we are in 2023, with affirmative action being up for grabs on 

the chopping block for the Supreme Court of the United States. This man played a historic 

role in in the creation of affirmative action in the early 1960s. Those are the kind of people 

who were around the Justice Department and in the Civil Rights Division at that time. And 

yes, Drew was Assistant Attorney General for civil rights, but we also had an African 

American who was the Solicitor General of the United States. He was the second solicitor, 

Black solicitor general of the United States, the first, of course, being Thurgood. But you’d 

see these people and you got to know them. You might run into them in the hallways and on 

the elevator and something like that. And Wade McCree was the Solicitor General, but it 

was a tremendous time. And you call Jimmy Carter’s name. I came across an invitation. I 

have it somewhere in this room. And it’s a, these things don't exist anymore. It's a telegram. 

And it's an invitation to go to the White House for an announcement that Jimmy Carter was 

making, the president was making. [01:37:17] First time I ever went to the White House was 

in that moment. The reason I got the invitation, I found out, was because my friend Yoki 



   
 

34 
 

King had gotten my name added to the list. First time I ever went to the White House. And I 

remember seeing Jimmy Carter, and I remember when Jimmy Carter was, lost the election 

to Ronald Reagan and the way he was treated and the way the media talked about him as a 

failed presidency. We now know that Reagan’s people and the Republicans engineered the 

delay in the release of the hostages in Iran until the election was over, which is, which had 

an outcome likely on the election. And we also know what Jimmy Carter did after his 

presidency and the kind of man he is and has always been. I am proud of the fact that I 

served in the Carter administration in the Department of Justice, have always been. And at 

the end of, near the end of his life, he's in hospice now. I'm proud of the fact that I worked 

for his administration.  

SK: I think for those of us who have only watched it from a distance, the way you 

framed it is helpful for me because I think I've been guilty of thinking of his post, thinking 

of Jimmy Carter as being among the best post-presidents that we have.  

TS: Oh, he has been that.  

SK: Yes, that part’s true. But I think know the unspoken part there is that the 

presidency itself wasn’t successful.  

TS: Yeah. [01:39:15] 

SK: Whereas if we think into the [19]80s, Reagan’s presidency was remarkably 

successful from the perspective of tightening that circle of citizenship that had been pushed 

open in the 1960s.  

TS: Well, I remember. I remember how I felt after Election Day in 1980, and you 

could see it coming, but I remember Ronald Reagan being a supporter of the apartheid 



   
 

35 
 

government in South Africa. And I remember Ronald Reagan saying that when he was 

growing up, there was no race problem in this country that he could remember. And I 

remember thinking to myself, “Well, where did he grow up? Where did he live? And was he 

brain dead at the time?” And Ronald Reagan had opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He 

would start his second campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, without saying a mumbling 

word about what had happened there, in part because that’s exactly why he was there, to 

play on racial resentment, et cetera. I couldn't find my way to admire Ronald Reagan in a 

way that so many Americans did. And I could say a lot more about him. But before I left the 

Justice Department, I saw his appointees to head up the Civil Rights Division and to staff 

the leadership positions there and the ways in which they were abandoning enforcement of 

civil rights laws. And I found myself bumping up against them in ways that I look back 

now, and I was thinking, “Boy, you had some chutzpah.” [01:41:23] But I remember when 

they changed the position of the Justice Department in the Bob Jones case, Bob Jones v. IRS, 

which raised the question of whether or not the IRS could deny tax exemptions to 

institutions like Bob Jones University that practiced racial discrimination. And I remember 

their position there and the rebellion that we had within the Civil Rights Division against the 

administration. I remember all that and more. And they prepared to get the Yonkers case 

that I mentioned before that I was working on dismissed. You know, these folks and many 

of the younger lawyers in that administration who came in, were brought in, were people 

who went on to be leaders of the Conservative Movement and people who were opposed to 

voting rights, including John Roberts and others. So, Jimmy Carter. Yeah, he was one of my 

presidents. Ronald Reagan, not so much.  

SK: So, on the timeline that I have in front of me. You joined LDF in 1982? 



   
 

36 
 

TS: I did. I did.  

SK: Were you at Justice for that sort of two-year period trying to find your way 

forward under the Reagan administration?  

TS: Yeah, well, the election, of course, was in [19]80. Brad Reynolds was not 

appointed to head up the Civil Rights Division until, I think, the summer. So, the summer of 

[19]81. [01:43:23] And in the meantime, it was a leaderless division, although I remember 

the first time Brad Reynolds came to the division and he went around to the sections. And, 

you know, when he came to our section in general, the litigation section, I remember asking 

him, you know, I said I had heard that he took the position as Assistant Attorney General 

because he had had a lifelong commitment to civil rights. And so I said, “If you’ve had that 

commitment, it’s not evident. Can you talk about and give us examples of how that 

commitment was manifested? Because I don’t see it.” And, you know, he had argued, I 

think, maybe one civil rights case when he was in the SG’s office some years before that. 

But he had no commitment and no experience in civil rights. And it became pretty apparent 

that he was turning around civil rights enforcement. Now, I have to say in candor, I ended 

up having quite a few one-on-one discussions and debates with Brad Reynolds. We actually 

ended up having a cordial relationship, even though we disagreed strongly with one another. 

He was one of these blueblood Americans descended from William Bradford of the 

Mayflower, upper class bourgeoisie, but no civil rights experience and no real commitment. 

But it became apparent that one of us was going to go and it wasn’t going to be him. 

[01:45:22] I was just a trial attorney and he was the Assistant Attorney General for civil 

rights. So, yeah, the election is in November of [19]80. Brad Reynolds comes in somewhere 

around [19]81 and I’m out of there in March of [19]82. I have to say, I came across 



   
 

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something not long ago. I didn't realize it, but Brad Reynolds died a few years ago. I felt a 

moment of sadness because I didn’t have any personal dislike for him. I just disagreed with 

him, you know? But he’s gone on. But my memory of the Civil Rights Division under the 

Reagan administration and what Brad Reynolds and others did doesn’t get any better in 

time.  

SK: And so you arrive at LDF in 1982, hired by Jack Greenberg. 

TS: Yeah, I started at LDF on March 2nd of 1982. 

SK: Tell me about those, I suppose they’re hardly first impressions because you 

were, at that point, sounds anyway like you were fairly well connected to their work. But 

can you talk about those early days?  

TS: Oh, well, you know. I’m glad that I had the experience of working at LDF at 

that time. We were still located at a place that doesn’t exist anymore. We were at 10 

Columbus Circle, and I don’t know if you remember the old coliseum in New York that was 

the predecessor to the Convention Center at Columbus Circle, 10 Columbus Circle. And at 

that time, LDF, if you looked at the briefs that we filed, we never put the name of the 

organization on the briefs. [01:47:22] You never saw NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It was 

Jack Greenberg, Director-Counsel, Jim Nabrit — James M. Nabrit, you know, Associate 

Director-Counsel and then the lawyers who were working on that particular matter. And 

then the address, 10 Columbus Circle. Judges and everyone else in the legal system who 

came across us knew when you saw 10 Columbus Circle that it was the NAACP Legal 

Defense Fund. But the reason that we didn’t put the name of the organization on was 

because at the time, I think the thinking was we didn't want to in any way give anybody any 



   
 

38 
 

reason to say that Thurgood Marshall should have been recused or should recuse himself 

from particular cases. That was the thinking. There are a lot of ways in which the Legal 

Defense Fund was a small C conservative organization. Not ideologically conservative, not 

certainly in a partisan way, but careful. You know, that was a way in which we operated. 

And I learned some things from that. And I learned from Jack. I learned from Jim Nabrit. 

Jim Nabrit, when I first met him, I was so intimidated by James Nabrit. I was intimidated by 

his career, by his intellect, by who and everything he was and what a great lawyer he was. 

Same thing for Jack. [01:49:21] I came to know Jim Nabrit very well, and there was no 

reason to be intimidated by him, but it was an honor to work with him and under him, to 

learn from him. To work at the Legal Defense Fund in those days, it was a joy, you know, 

when you can get up from your desk and go down the hall and ask one of the lawyers there 

who have been around a long time about an issue, about a strategy, about cases or whatever. 

And all these folks were available to a young lawyer like me. I mean, it was just a great 

place to work. It was a 24-hour place at that time, literally. I don’t think there was a time 

where you would come in the office, even if it was four or five a.m., where no one would be 

there. I don't mean to say that everybody was there 24 hours a day. Obviously, that wasn’t 

true. But somebody was there. It was in part because of the capital punishment work we did, 

but also the other cases, the other areas. We were constantly working on getting briefs out 

and done and filed on time. And we didn’t have all the technology that we came to have. So, 

you know, we used to have to put people on planes. And I’m not talking about the lawyers, 

I’m talking about staff members, maybe the people who worked in the, and God bless them, 

but I’m talking about people who worked in the copy room, for example. They were part of 

the backbone of the Legal Defense Fund. [01:51:25] Earl and Oscar, Oscar and Earl. But we 



   
 

39 
 

used to have to put them on planes and take briefs down to the Fifth Circuit, for example, to 

New Orleans, and get them filed in a timely way. There was no fax at that time, there were 

no computers. You couldn’t email anything in or whatever. I mean, that was the way we, 

that was the way we worked. It was a 24-hour operation. The secretaries, if they needed to, 

would stay overnight. By that time, at that time, there were very few lawyers who typed 

their own briefs. Norman Chachkin was one of them because he had been a secretary before 

he went to law school. What an amazing skill he had, we thought at that time, he was typing 

his own briefs. But most of the lawyers relied on their secretaries and as secretaries, if they 

had to stay overnight, they would do it. And then we put them in a car, a car service, and 

sent them home because they had worked all night. You know, it was, the Legal Defense 

Fund was the best job I ever had. You know, at that time, the term LDF wasn’t in use when I 

first joined LDF. And you know what I'm talking about. I mean, you know, the LDF was 

known as the Inc. Fund, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., Incorporated. 

So, the Inc. Fund. I’ve always been very fond of that appellation for what is now known as 

LDF. And the people who knew it, they knew it as the Inc. Fund. They knew it in the old 

days. You know, it was the cooperating attorneys we worked with. [01:53:22] These are 

tremendous and courageous lawyers, people who were the only civil rights lawyers in their 

communities, sometimes one of the only civil rights lawyers in the whole state. Some of 

them had gone through, as Julius [Chambers] did, but also as our lawyers in Albany, 

Georgia, and in Nashville, Tennessee, had gone through homes bombed, offices bombed, 

cars blown up. All, these are courageous lawyers. It’s one thing to fly into a jurisdiction 

from New York and go to court and then go home. That’s one thing. It’s another thing when 

you live there and people are threatening you and your family and all of that. Knowing all 



   
 

40 
 

these folks, tremendous lawyers. You know, one of the lawyers, C.B. King in Georgia. I 

know. I remember I first heard Norman Chachkin talk about this, but then learned it myself. 

On a regular basis, you’d call C.B. King, and he was an anathema in and to the white 

community and the judges down where he was in Georgia. But you’d call C.B. King and 

he’d answer the phone this way. You’d say, “C.B., how you doing?” And he’d say, “Well, 

white folks still on top.” [laughter] You know, the humor that these mostly men had, and I 

want to come back and say something about that, the cooperating attorneys, they were 

mostly men, not all, but mostly. [01:55:22] But the humor they had, the courage they had. 

The faithfulness to the cause they served. I mean, working at the Legal Defense Fund was 

the best job any lawyer, certainly anybody who believed what I believe, could have. 

Turnover was very low. The staff at the Legal Defense Fund rarely turned over. That’s why 

when I say it was my dream job, you know, the thing was, you didn't call LDF. You didn’t 

tell them that you were applying for a job. They called you. That’s what happened with me 

and Jack. It was a tremendous place to work. When I found out and got to know the lawyers 

who work there, in addition, I mentioned Jim Nabrit. But Charles Ralston, Napoleon 

Williams, Peter Sherwood. I get in trouble if I start calling the names because I won’t call 

them all. But I worked with and knew them all. And they were mentors. They came to be 

friends. They were great lawyers. Bill Lann Lee, who is one of my dear friends and 

colleagues. Patrick O. Patterson, Gail Wright. I can’t stop calling their names without doing 

an injustice to some of them, but these were tremendous lawyers to work with. Their names, 

you know, spell civil rights. I’m not being, I’m not exaggerating when I say all that. 

[01:57:20] I loved working at the Inc. Fund. And I’ve often thought to myself, at the end of 

my life, whatever I do, the thing I will be most proud of besides my children and my family 



   
 

41 
 

is that I was an Inc. Fund lawyer, and I was blessed to work there. The cases I worked on, 

the people I met, I loved the time I spent doing cases in, you know, Louisiana and Alabama, 

Deep South. It was an honor to do that kind of work and meet the people, the clients, you 

know, the clients. You got me going on this, but going to the Legal Defense Fund was the 

first, well, the second job I had as a civil rights lawyer, but it’s the best thing I ever did.  

SK: I’d like to hear more about the clients. But first, you said that you wanted to 

come back to the idea of these cooperating attorneys. You said that most of them were men. 

Were there others you wanted to mention? 

TS: Well, you know, here in North Carolina right now, in Julius’s old firm, 

Geraldine Sumter, one of the women who, a long-time civil rights lawyer, most of the — but 

I wanted to come back and I mentioned women. Not a cooperating attorney, but I had the 

opportunity to come to know, even though she was long gone and was on the federal bench, 

but Connie Motley. I mentioned that Bob Carter and Jack were oil and water. They were. 

[01:59:23] You know, there came a point when Elaine was Director-Counsel. I was the 

Associate Director-Counsel. She had pulled me back to the Legal Defense Fund. But one 

thing we did was we went back and kind of reclaimed our relationship with Bob Carter. Bob 

Carter was one of the great civil rights lawyers. He was as responsible, I used to say, as 

anybody, by the time I came to know him, dead or alive, for Brown v. Board of Education. 

And that means as responsible for Thurgood. I'm not saying he was more responsible, but he 

was as responsible. If you go and learn about what Bob Carter did in Brown and the role he 

played, it was Bob Carter who came up with the doll test, among other things. So, coming to 

know those people, Bob Carter and Connie Motley, for example, just as examples. What an 

honor. Almost all of these people except Thurgood, you know, I came to know fairly well. I 



   
 

42 
 

didn’t come to know Thurgood pretty well. And there’s a reason for that. Because by the 

time I came to the Legal Defense Fund, Thurgood Marshall was on the Supreme Court. He 

talked to Jack once in a while. Maybe he talked to Nabrit, but he wasn’t talking to the 

lawyers at the Legal Defense Fund and shouldn’t have been, and vice versa. I would see him 

on the bench and admire him from afar. [02:01:22] I have a photograph on the wall 

downstairs in the hallway with Thurgood and another former Legal Defense Fund lawyer, 

Conrad Harper, who became the first African American to head the New York City Bar 

Association. So, we have a photograph with Thurgood. I’m happy to have that photograph, 

but I can’t claim to have known him well. I did come to know Cissy Marshall very well and 

loved her. His widow. And I know his sons and all of that. But the people you met through 

LDF were some of the best people. You know, these are the people who, Oliver Hill, lived 

to 100 years old. He died while I was Director-Counsel. But Thurgood’s law school 

classmate, litigated the Virginia case that was part of Brown v. Board of Education, one of 

the great lawyers. Sam Tucker, his partner. Henry Marsh, also of that firm. All these people 

I came to know. John Walker, who died last year. Maybe it’s a couple of years, a couple of 

years now. My family and I saw him in Little Rock on our way back from a cross-country 

trip. I did a lot of work with John Walker. What a force. What a great lawyer. Wiley 

Branton. You know, one of the great lawyers, Little Rock school case and a dean of Howard 

Law School, but litigated many of the important cases and headed up the Voting Rights 

Project. And one of the great lawyers. And some people weren’t lawyers. Butler Henderson. 

[02:03:27] Do you know about Butler Henderson? Butler Henderson, when I started to work 

at the Legal Defense Fund, headed up the Earl Warren Legal Training and Scholarship 

Program. Butler Henderson, when he was a college student, worked with and for W.E.B. Du 



   
 

43 
 

Bois. From Pine Bluff, Arkansas. What, I mean, one of the old school gentlemen. Every day 

when I was at the Legal Defense Fund and his office was next to mine, every day when I 

came in when I wasn’t traveling, I’d see Butler and I’d say, “Butler, how’re you doing, 

Butler?” And then, “Mr. Henderson?” And he’d say, “Yeah, Mr. Henderson.” And he’d say, 

“Oh, okay, for my condition.” I really didn’t understand that very well. I've come to 

understand it better now. But his role at the Legal Defense Fund, and he worked with this 

other gentleman who was not a lawyer but an educator and headed up an HBCU. His name 

was Davis, who worked at the Legal Defense Fund. I just missed him. But knew who he 

was. These are tremendous people. And I mentioned the secretaries and I could call some of 

their names and remember them well. They were as important, even if our lawyer snobbery 

didn’t recognize it sometimes, to the work of the Legal Defense Fund as the lawyers. 

Without them, things would have ground to a halt. I loved LDF as an institution, and I loved 

LDF as people, but let me go back and say one other thing I came to understand. I 

mentioned several times now. [02:05:29] You know, Bob Carter and Jack, Derrick Bell 

didn’t have a great relationship with Jack, but what I came to understand was that 

sometimes the tremendous accomplishments of the Legal Defense Fund, Brown v. Board of 

Education most prominently among them, they were accomplished in spite of the 

relationship of some of its people with each other, not because of it. Sometimes people 

didn’t get along. Institutions and individuals have egos. People have ambitions. I learned 

that over time, sometimes the hard way at LDF. I think it’s naive to think otherwise. You 

know, so not everything was roses. On the other hand, in spite of all that, LDF was a great 

place to work. And it changed this country.  



   
 

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SK: Do want to talk a little bit about your clients, although first, I want to ask you, 

what did Butler Henderson mean when he said he was doing fine for his condition?  

TS: Oh, I think he was just talking about, you know, being at the age I am now. 

[laughter] You get older, you understand that pretty well. But he used to tell these stories, 

wonderful stories about people who were not around anymore. He talked about somebody 

he knew from Pine Bluff. And this old fellow said when it was pouring rain and flooding 

and muddy. And he said it’s getting a little pessimistic underfoot. [laughter] [02:07:35] You 

know, I remember those stories and those expressions that Butler used. I didn’t mention 

Jean Fairfax. Not a lawyer. I have a photograph of her, with her, downstairs I could show 

you. Jean Fairfax was, this is a woman who came from a tremendous family. Well, from 

Cleveland when she grew up, her parents both professional educators. She goes to the 

University of Michigan in 1940s. No Black folk there to speak of during that time. She’s a 

pacifist, very much shaped by Quakerism. After the war, she finds herself in Germany, 

Austria, rather, and helped with the rebuilding effort. She speaks some German. She told me 

this story. I never forgot it. She’s got to know this, this Austrian man who kind of took her 

under his wing. He would invite her to dinner, you know, he and his wife, the family. And 

they would play classical music, the piano. They would sing together. Jean’s on a trolley 

one day, might have been the late [19]40s, and somebody says to her, “How can you be 

friends with that man?” And she says, “What do you mean?” He says, “He’s a terrible man. 

He’s evil.” And she says, “He’s never been anything but kind and thoughtful and generous 

with me.” And he said, the man said to her, “During the war, he was a leading Nazi and he 

was responsible for the deportation of many Jews to the death camp.” [02:09:40] And Jean 

told me about sitting there and being devastated after she heard that, she didn’t know what 



   
 

45 
 

to do with it. How could she reconcile this relationship, this friendship she had with this 

man, what she just had been told? Of course, the answer is she couldn’t reconcile it, you 

know, but I never forgot her telling me that story and what that meant to her and what it, 

how devastating that was and what it told her about human nature and not the best of it. Fast 

forward a little bit more after she’s in Europe, and the rebuilding effort. She’s traveling 

alone as an African American woman, which wasn’t an easy thing to do, throughout Africa. 

She’s meeting people who are going to become some of the leaders of the emerging 

independent post-colonial Africa. What a set of experiences she used to talk about. I’m 

trying to remember the name of this guy, the famous white guy who had a kind of a 

missionary thing. You know his name. If I think about it, but I can’t think about it right now. 

And she went and met him. He’s famous and honored all the world over. She couldn’t stand 

him. She said he was terrible, you know. [laughter] But fast forward a few more years. In 

the early [19]60s, she’s in Mississippi doing civil rights work for the American Friends 

Service Society at a time when being in Mississippi doing civil rights work, well, you know 

what it was. [02:11:33] And she comes to the Legal Defense Fund and she does work 

desegregating schools, not as a lawyer, but as an activist and an organizer, organizing some 

of the families and the clients and the school cases. She ends up also working in higher 

education. By the time I come to the Legal Defense Fund with her, I do some work with her 

on higher education desegregation work as Drew had done when he had been on the staff. 

Working with Jean, she is one of the most extraordinary women I ever met. It was an honor 

to work with her. And I came to love Jean dearly and vice versa. She passed a few years 

ago. But I can’t go on and not mention her, just like June Shagaloff. You know who she 

was, right? June Shagaloff was at the Legal Defense Fund before I ever got there, and it was 



   
 

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a while before I came to know her. June was one of the last survivors of the staff who 

worked closely directly with Thurgood. She worked on the Brown case. Not a lawyer, but 

she, you know, Thurgood sent her to do research the summer between the two arguments in 

Brown, before Brown was decided. And she was at the public library. Here’s this white 

Jewish woman from Long Island whose whole life ends up being dedicated to doing civil 

rights work on behalf of African Americans. Worked on the staff not only of the NAACP 

Legal Defense Fund and closely with Thurgood Marshall, but also worked on the staff of the 

NAACP. [02:13:35] And by the time I came to know her, I grew closer and closer to her. At 

the end of her life a couple of years ago, she had to move to Israel because that’s where her 

son was. And that was her only surviving family. Oh, you know June. I don't need to tell 

you about June, right?  

SK: Well, you're telling me, but you’re also telling everyone.  

TS: Ok, yeah. 

SK: So, you referred earlier to growing up in the Bronx as being Up-South. Then 

you actually go Down-South as part of this work. Talk a little bit about the effect of that. 

TS: [02:14:13] Well, you know, I, there’s something about the South that I’ve 

always found attractive and endearing to me. It’s a way that people talk, the way they 

interact with one another, the kind of easiness that people have, notwithstanding the racism 

in the South. Because God knows we have racism up North, too, you know, and elsewhere 

and out West. But I always enjoyed the experience of interacting with people. Their ways. 

And so, when I started doing cases in the South, I liked those experiences and interactions. 

You know, I have, as do most African Americans, deep personal roots in the South. I 



   
 

47 
 

mentioned my maternal grandmother and Charles City, but my father’s side of the family is, 

the roots are here in North Carolina. So, I’ve always thought that I felt a certain level of 

comfort. And yet I say all that, and I go back to what I said before. It’s one thing to 

experience working in the South on school desegregation cases, as I did, we’re flying in and 

out. [02:16:27] It’s another thing to live in those communities. I spent a lot of time in the 

South doing LDF work, but even with all of that, it’s one thing to do that. It’s another thing 

to live in the South as I do now. And I live in Chapel Hill, which is, yeah it’s the South, but 

it’s not the Deep South experience of living in Mississippi, Alabama, or even in rural North 

Carolina. Yet I still have seen a kind of racism since I've lived here in North Carolina that’s 

different from what I saw before, and that’s just the way it is. Some people used to say that 

at least in the South, you know where you stand, people are out front about it, and in the 

North, they hide it. They are hypocritical about it. Liberals are stabbing you in the back. 

They’re racist. Okay. So, I've heard that. I get that. There’s some truth to it. But yet I’ve, 

there's still a lot about the South that I like. And I started those experiences with LDF. So. 

SK: I mean, one of the things that's interesting about Southern history, including the 

history of the [19]60s and [19]70s and onwards is that lots of people outside the South 

criticize, quote, the South or one state or another for being discriminatory, racist, whatever it 

is. And I think they tend to overlook the many, many thousands and millions of southerners, 

white and Black, who are trying to band together to change that. [02:18:31] 

TS: Yes. Yes. There’s such a deep and long tradition. Yeah, there’s a lot of racism in 

the South, a lot of racists. But there are also people, I’m talking about white people, who are 

anti-racist and who have worked against racism. They worked against segregation. The 

Durrs in Montgomery come to mind. But there’s so many others and people who are civil 



   
 

48 
 

rights lawyers, white civil rights lawyers whom I’ve worked with. And it's been an honor to 

work with them, you know. So, yeah, there are a lot of good folks all over the South.  

SK: So, I think you were working on the education docket in your early years at 

LDF? 

TS: I was.  

SK: Can you tell me a little bit about that?  

TS: Well, I had done education cases, school desegregation at Justice. I remember I 

worked on a case in Dothan, Alabama, and there was a lawyer who worked with the 

NAACP in Dothan who, at the time we were working together, he was just a few years older 

than me. I was, what, 24, 25, when I started. He was like 31 or 32, 33, and he became the 

last federal district court judge appointed by Jimmy Carter. [02:20:24] He was appointed to 

a seat Jimmy Carter wanted to appoint Fred Gray to. And for one reason or another, Fred 

Gray couldn’t get appointed. And so, he appointed Myron Thompson, who would go on to 

become one of the great district court judges in the South and become the Chief Judge of the 

court that he sat on in the middle district of Alabama. And I had done school desegregation 

cases at Justice in Louisiana and in Alabama, and a couple of other places. But when I came 

to LDF, I continued that work. Ironically, in some jurisdictions where, because I couldn’t 

work on cases that I had worked for at the Justice Department, but I worked on the 

Charleston school desegregation case with the local attorney, Arthur McFarlane, whom I 

still stay in touch with and see from time to time. You know, if I start to try to think, I mean 

— Phyllis McClure was another organizer for LDF. I don’t know if you know her name, a 

white woman who was in the D.C. office. Phyllis and I worked on some cases in in South 



   
 

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Carolina, not Charleston, but — I’m losing the name of the case, but right across the border. 

It’ll come back to me in a minute, from North Carolina. And one of the big, huge cases that 

I worked on with LDF lawyer and my friend Jim Lehman. Lehman is now, has long been on 

the faculty of Columbia Law School. [02:22:25] But was the Kansas City School case, a 

huge case, and if I start talking about that case, there’s no stopping. A huge inter-district 

case. I worked on school desegregation cases with John Walker in Arkansas, the Little Rock 

school case in its third or fourth generation. A case in the inter-district Little Rock case, the 

North Little Rock school desegregation case. I worked on the Oklahoma City case again 

with John Walker of Little Rock, but he worked on that case. That was an important school 

desegregation case. I can’t remember without looking it up all the cases I worked on. You 

know, I worked on a matter in which we tried to get — the Prairie View University in Texas 

cut in to some of the state funding they had been denied that they should have gotten, 

although we had the, kind of the rug pulled out from underneath us. And I worked on that 

with, I mentioned Jean Fairfax, but we had the rug pulled out from underneath us and there 

was a settlement that we thought they shouldn’t have entered into, but they did. So that was 

that. [pauses for a drink of water] I worked on a higher education case in Nashville, 

Tennessee, with a cooperating attorney by the name of Avon Williams. Avon Williams 

became the first African American member of the [Tennessee] Senate. [02:24:18] I’ve been 

thinking about him a lot in the last couple of weeks with what’s been going on in Nashville. 

He started off his career as the junior attorney for a cooperating attorney for the Legal 

Defense Fund, Z. Alexander Looby, a courageous lawyer. That’s another one of those 

lawyers whose homes were bombed and offices bombed. But Avon was somebody I was 

proud to say that I had an opportunity to work with. He was a cousin, if I remember 



   
 

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correctly, of Thurgood Marshall, but I had an opportunity to work with Avon on the 

Nashville school case in its closing era, but also the higher education case involving 

Tennessee State University and a case that before me, you asked about Drew Days again, 

Drew used to work on in earlier, earlier times. I had an opportunity to do, well, I started to 

say the Kansas City, Kansas case, but I worked on that for Justice and I worked on Kansas 

City, Missouri for the Legal Defense Fund. I’d forgotten about that. So, I just had a great 

experience working in places that, some of them I don’t remember without going back and 

looking up the, if I pull up my laptop here, I have a collection of many cases, but it’s not all 

of them, all of the places where I worked. [02:26:21] But most of the school desegregation 

cases I’ve worked on have been — I mean some were at Justice. Pointe Coupee Parish, 

Baton Rouge, East Baton Rouge, Lincoln Parish, Louisiana. But even more cases were 

Legal Defense Fund cases because LDF was litigating most of the school desegregation 

cases after Brown. I remember I tried to revitalize a case where people in the Black 

community in Macon, Georgia, I think, you know, Jim Nabrit kind of passed this on to me. 

They had agreed to a settlement that left schools segregated in exchange for a commitment 

that Black schools would not be closed from the school board and they would continue to 

fund them equally. LDF got out of it, said “That’s against our principles.” And, you know, 

“We don’t believe in separate but equal. And you can’t trust these school districts to do what 

they say.” By the time I got there, the Macon school board had said for financial reasons 

they had to close some schools. And so guess whose schools got closed? Meanwhile, the old 

case had been terminated and closed by the district court judge and the Black community, I 

went and met with them. Many of the Black community leadership wanted to reopen the old 

school case [redacted due to attorney-client privilege]. And I remember working on that 



   
 

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case, filing a brief and ending up going to the district court, which denied us a reopening. 

[02:28:20] And we appealed that to the Eleventh Circuit and lost. And that was that. And 

there’s a lesson in there, I thought. When I worked with John Walker in Little Rock, I 

remember a case, it wasn’t a school case, but I like to remember it because it was a colorful 

case. I had, John asked me to do an appeal on his part that he, on his behalf, that he couldn’t 

do because he was so jammed. And the facts were briefly these. There was a Black activist 

in Little Rock who owned a barbecue truck. Stop me if you realize what this story is. He 

owned this barbecue truck. He was an activist and his name was Robert McIntosh. His 

nickname was Say, Robert “Say” McIntosh. And in the 1980s, when I think, yeah, Reagan 

was President, Bush was Reagan’s vice president, is that right? Bush was coming to speak in 

Little Rock at the Little Rock Convention Center, a public space. And he was coming to an 

event that was an Arkansas Republican Party event. So, it’s held at this public place, 

Arkansas Republican Party, and Say bought a ticket to this luncheon. The luncheon didn’t 

cost much, but he got a RSVP card and he wrote on it. [02:30:16] You know, he paid, he 

joined the Republican Party. He wrote on the card and he paid, sent in his $10, I think, or 

something like that for the luncheon. And he wrote on the card, “Tell me, I’m sending in 

this card, I joined the party. Tell me when I get to speak, because I plan to speak at the 

luncheon and I know that if I’ve paid $10 for this luncheon, I have a chance to speak 

because you haven’t given me $10 worth of government.” And so, the Arkansas Republican 

Party had the state troopers on the lookout for him. He shows up dressed in rags to 

symbolize poverty in protest of the Arkansas Republican Party policies. And they arrest 

him. He doesn’t even get in the hall. He gets dragged down across the river to north Little 

Rock and jailed for something like five hours until the event was over. They let him go. 



   
 

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They don’t take him back across the river. He has to walk all the way back. And John 

Walker files this lawsuit, First Amendment and Section 1983 and race discrimination, et 

cetera. And the district court judge rules against him on all counts, and he wants to take it up 

on appeal. So, he asked me to do it. So, I do it. And I get partial reversal, which was enough 

of a victory. But anyway, Say McIntosh was my client. Now, the reason that I'm telling you 

all of this is that, do you remember the book or the movie Primary Colors? 

SK: Yeah. 

TS: [02:32:12] Yeah, so there’s a character in the book whose daughter gets 

impregnated by the governor. Black girl gets impregnated, or Black woman, pardon me, gets 

impregnated by the governor. I say girl because she was pretty young and the father goes 

nuts and is picketing outside of the gubernatorial. That was based on Say McIntosh, who 

had picketed outside Clinton’s gubernatorial mansion. I probably shouldn’t be telling this 

story on air [laughter] but has these pictures, photographs of little brown babies that look 

like Bill Clinton in the face, and then whatever. But that was Say McIntosh. And I mention 

all that to say how colorful the experience, no pun intended, of working in the South was. I 

remember that, working on that case and representing Say. I, as I said, I can’t think of all the 

cases that I’ve worked on when I start to think of them. It’s, it was a rich career. I’m glad I 

did what I did.  

SK: So, there’s lots more to ask. I just want to acknowledge that it’s after four.  

TS: Yes. So, tell me what you want to do, and we’ll work together.  

SK: Yeah, I mean, it’s really, it’s sort of up to you. It’s up to us. If you’ve had your 

fill for a Friday afternoon, we can stop now and schedule another session. 



   
 

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TS: Yeah, I can pick up another one for you. I have more to tell you.  

SK: [02:34:14] Well, we haven’t even gotten to, I mean, we’re still in 1985. 

[laughter] Because I want to go to Los Angeles. I want to go to Michigan Law. You know, 

we’ve got to come back as Associate Director-Counsel. So, I mean, I think this works really 

well as, this is background. You got your foot in the door. And if we were to come back, I 

would ask you to start by talking about a sort of, you know the thing I'm curious about what 

you’ve just been mentioning is the strategy. Is there an overarching strategy or is this a case 

by case thing? And I don’t know how this stuff works. I'm learning, right? 

TS: Yeah, we can talk about some of that. 

SK: But yeah, and then, we want to pull, you know, Gratz and Grutter and Missouri 

v. Jenkins, and there’s a lot more to unpack, obviously, so, I think if we were to try to do it 

all, we’d be here until midnight. [laughter] 

TS: Let’s do it. Yeah, let’s figure it out. 

[02:35:10] 

[END OF INTERVIEW]