Paul and Iris Brest Interview Transcript

This item is featured in:

Paul Brest and Iris Brest Oral History

    Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project  

 

Paul Brest and Iris Brest 

Interviewed by Gabriel Solís 

October 13, 2023 

Palo Alto, California 

Length: 01:42:44 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

Conducted in collaboration with the Southern Oral History Program at University of North Carolina 

at Chapel Hill 

LDF Archives, Thurgood Marshall Institute, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc. 

 



 
 

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This transcript has been reviewed by Paul Brest and Iris Brest, the Southern Oral History Program, 

and LDF. It has been lightly edited, in consultation with Paul Brest and Iris Brest, for readability and 

clarity. Additions and corrections appear in both brackets and footnotes. If viewing corresponding 

video footage, please refer to this transcript for corrected information.    

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

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[START OF INTERVIEW] 

 Gabriel Solís: Okay, we’ll start. So, this is, my name is Gabriel Solís. I’m working with the 

Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Today is Friday, 

October 13th, 2023, and I’m here in Palo Alto, California, with Paul and Iris Brest in their lovely 

home to conduct an interview for the Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project. Thank you very 

much for participating in this project and inviting us into your home.  

 Paul Brest: It’s our pleasure. 

 GS: So, as you know, as I said before, I want to start with some background, and I’ll start 

with you, Iris. You’re a native New Yorker. Can you talk a little bit about growing up in New York 

and a little bit about your childhood?  

 Iris Brest: I grew up in Brooklyn, in fact, in a neighborhood that at that time was about half 

and half Jewish and Italian, which means that until I left the neighborhood to go to college, I didn’t 

ever realize that there were any religions other than Jewish and Catholic. So, college was a real eye 

opener. A different world. What can I tell you? I had one brother, a cousin who lived with us from 

time to time. These were the years when one bathroom was considered enough for one apartment, no 

matter how many people lived in it. And we had a dog and five of us.  

 GS: And how did your family get to Brooklyn, how did they arrive to Brooklyn? 

 IB: [00:01:48] My mother was born in a place that was either Poland or Russia, depending on 

the time, and was brought to the States when she was about two by her aunt because her mother had 

died and her father was already in the States trying to make enough money to bring the rest of them 

over. She and her quite a lot of siblings were brought by her father’s sister, who stayed behind to take 

care of them and had herself lost a child. My father was first generation. His parents came from 

about the same place. And they met during prohibition when both of them were working at slightly 

illegal enterprises. 

GS: In Brooklyn? 



 
 

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IB: Manhattan. It was very cosmopolitan. 

GS: Yeah. Wow. Thank you for that.  

 PB: You might want to add who your brother was.  

 IB: My brother Michael was one of the, I think, the primary entrepreneur for the Woodstock 

Festival. 

GS: Really? 

IB: Yes.  

 GS: Did you attend?  

 IB: We didn’t. We were there a week before and got taken around backstage. In fact, I still 

have a very valuable artifact, which is a backstage pass. But Michael Lang was very [pauses] — I 

don’t know how he came by it, but he was very, very much cared about music and very 

entrepreneurial, which I think was already in my father’s family. 

 GS: [00:03:54] Thank you. Paul, you were born in Florida? 

 PB: I was born in Jacksonville, but spent most of my young life in New York.  

 GS: Oh, is that right? So, when did you go to New York?  

 PB: So, my mother was able to leave Vienna, Austria, in 1938, and she got out because she 

was the nursemaid or au pair for the British consul who had been reassigned from Vienna to 

Jacksonville. He must have done something very bad to be reassigned to Jacksonville. My father, 

who had been in World War I, re-enlisted in World War II. He had already started a civil engineering 

firm with a colleague of his, also in the Army Corps of Engineers in Jacksonville. He was 

considerably older and he was doing Jewish relief work at the time. So, my mother ended up in 

Jacksonville and they ended up getting married and I ended up being born in Jacksonville.  

 GS: And how old were you when you went over to New York?  

 PB: It’s a little bit complicated because my father was stationed in different places, including 

in Washington. But I ended up being permanently in New York by the time I was eight or so. My 



 
 

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mother, if you imagine moving from cosmopolitan Vienna to Jacksonville, a real segregationist 

outpost, even among segregationist outposts. She just couldn’t take it and moved with me to New 

York, where she had some relatives.  

 GS: Okay. And you mentioned segregation. So, when both of you were growing up, what 

were you noticing around you, around segregation? And even if there were desegregation efforts, I 

guess at this point, both of you were in New York.  

 IB: [00:06:03] I don’t think I’d ever met a Black person until I went to college. It was really a 

very contained enclave. And I also was not very good about following news or anything. So, I knew 

nothing.  

 PB: And I went to a school in which, to the extent that there were any people of color, they 

were from other countries.  

 GS: And how about in New York, were you seeing people working on desegregation, on 

racial justice, civil rights issues? Or was that something you were only seeing later when you got to 

college?  

 IB: For me, yes.  

 PB: And for me, it became much more in my consciousness after I went to college.  

 GS: Okay. Well, let’s talk about college, because that’s where you all met. So, Swarthmore. 

So, that would have been, would that be the late [19]50s when you arrived to Swarthmore?  

 PB: Yes.  

 GS: Okay. So, can you talk to me a little bit about that time period and what it was like to be 

studying there at that time period? And then I would love to know how you all met.  

 PB: Why don’t you go first?  

 IB: [laughter] It was the first politically active place, group that I’d ever encountered. There 

was, well, Paul, how do you describe it? It was, you know, it was and still is, I suppose, a highly 

academic school, but —  



 
 

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 PB: A very liberal student body. 

 IB: [00:07:49] Yes. Athletics was not a big deal, but politics definitely was. We met in 

introductory Greek class, which I cannot remember at all why either of us was taking it. I mean, it’s 

liberal arts. [crosstalk] Yeah. It just seemed exotic. And there we were. At that time the, how many, 

the total college enrollment was about 900. I had gone to a high school where the enrollment in any 

class was bigger than that, any grade. So you knew everybody. And I don’t know, it’s easy to make 

connections. Paul was actually in the class behind me. So, I was a sophomore by the time he was a 

freshman. 

 GS: Do you remember the moment you met?  

 PB: We actually had met in class, but had not singled each other out. And then a mutual 

friend basically put us on a blind date. And typical of Swarthmore, the date was a Saturday evening 

in the library.  

 GS: And you just talked in the library that evening? 

PB: Yeah.  

 IB: Then we did other Swarthmore things like going to old movies.  

 GS: I’ve been to this one on campus, the campus is beautiful.  

 IB: Isn’t it.  

 GS: It’s beautiful, yes.  

 IB: Yeah.  

 PB: And my first involvement in anything involving civil rights was Chester, Pennsylvania, 

is a town not very far from Swarthmore, and it had a Woolworth’s department store. And at that time 

there were protests against Woolworth’s in the South because of their having segregated lunch 

counters. And I remember several weekends picketing the Woolworth in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 

sympathy for what was going on in the South.  

 GS: [00:10:18] You were doing that? 



 
 

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PB: I was doing that. 

GS: What motivated you to join those actions?  

 PB: I was a typical liberal Swarthmore student and the Civil Rights Movement, or I would 

say kind of the white liberal involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum. 

And somehow I was pulled into it.  

 GS: Were there any writers or thinkers, philosophers at this time in your life, you’re a young 

person in college, for both of you, that you were reading or even public intellectuals that were sort of 

giving you that political context that that eventually led you to your career, but focusing now on you 

participating in these actions?  

 PB: I don’t think so, later on, but not at that time.  

 IB: At that time, it’s mostly just the shock of learning about what was happening.  

 GS: Right. Because as you said, you hadn’t known when you were growing up, because you 

lived in, right. So, Iris, were you involved with any actions at that point?  

 IB: No. No.  

 GS: You were studying math. 

 IB: Right.  

 GS: You were deep in the numbers. 

IB: Yeah. 

GS: And you studied English?  

 PB: I studied English and philosophy and music.  

 GS: And so you graduate, Iris, you graduate in [19]61. Paul, you graduate in [19]62. This is 

obviously the beginning of the [19]60s. I mean, what, can you talk about the culturally, both in your 

own world and Swarthmore, but more broadly in the country, sort of the cultural shifts at that time?  

 PB: [00:12:14] So we, my class was the last somewhat passive generation of students. The 

students in the class below me, and therefore two years below Iris, were founders of Students for a 



 
 

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Democratic Society, SDS. But we kind of, those of us who were still there kind of rode on their 

coattails a bit. But we weren’t the activists. They were.  

 IB: I don’t know how we even — well, you must, you were much more aware of things, but I 

don’t know when we first realized that there was stuff going on in the South that one could 

participate in. But at some point, Paul told me that his plan was to go to law school in order to go 

down South and do civil rights work.  

 GS: So you knew that’s what you wanted to do before you went to law, that was your 

motivation for going to law school? 

 PB: For going to law school. Yes.  

 GS: And how about you, Iris? Because you were just one year behind, right, so.  

 IB: One year ahead, actually, but.  

 GS: For law school?  

 IB: Oh, in law school, yes. The reason I went to — so, we’re old. At the time, and the way I 

was brought up, the idea was that if a woman had a career other than as a schoolteacher, it was 

something to support her husband. So I figured if Paul was going to be a lawyer, I’d be a legal 

secretary. But as it turned out, I couldn’t type. [laughter] So I went to law school.  

 GS: [00:14:17] What was that process like for you to apply to law school? I mean, because I 

can’t imagine, I imagine people were, were people discouraging you from doing that? I would love to 

know more about what that was like for you to, at Harvard, nonetheless, you know. What was that 

process like?  

 IB: I think, there was a dean or something who’d suggested to you [Paul] that I should not be 

doing that.  

 PB: I don’t recall.  

 IB: There was no active discouragement. It’s just that there was no encouragement. At the 

time, there were a couple of years of women at the law school and the numbers were about five 



 
 

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percent. [laughter] Okay. So at that time, the dean, who was Erwin Griswold, had the practice of 

inviting the first year women law students to his home for dinner. Because there were only kind of 

20 of us or something, 30. And he would also invite some faculty to kind of leaven the lump and 

have dinner in his lovely house. And then they cleared out the furniture of his living room, put chairs 

all around and we all sat in. It’s like, I don’t know if they still do this at children’s birthday parties, 

but you had to go around the room and say your name and kind of sing a song or something. Say 

why you wanted to go to law school. It was awful. And then they said, he said, “I know many of you 

have a lot of questions and that’s why we’re here. We just want to answer any questions you have.” 

So, after a long time during which we tried to think of a suitable question, somebody said, “Is there a 

limit to the number of women admitted?” And Dean Griswold said, “That’s a wonderful question. 

I’m so glad you asked. No, there’s not a limit, but what we do is we admit without regard to sex, the 

number that we know will result in the take that we need, the number. And then, as it is these days, 

almost virtually all of the male students are graduated on time. And of the women, about half drop 

out. Not that they fail or anything, but they get married. So what we then do is we go to the waiting 

list and we invite half that number of women admitted to come so that the class is a little bit too big 

to start with, but it will be the right number and we won’t have discriminated against any men.” So, 

we’re kind of stunned about this. And the thing that happened next was just totally unforgettable. 

One of the faculty members said, “Erwin, that’s a great system, but, you know, I’ve been head of the 

admissions committee for the last five years. I never heard of it before.”   

 GS: [00:18:00] Wow. Was there support for you and other women? One of my daughter’s 

favorite books that we read about Ruth Bader Ginsburg going to law school and how hard it was for 

her and how she persevered. And, you know, that’s sort of the message of the book. And my 

daughter’s five. She loves that book. And, you know, I’m trying [laughter], I mean so what was, was 

there support for you to get through and graduate?  



 
 

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 IB: Nothing special. There was, for the most part, was nondiscrimination. And that was 

enough. Some of the, one of the older teachers had Ladies Day because he didn’t want to call on the 

women students just randomly as he did with the men, because he didn’t want to embarrass anybody. 

So, he would give us a set of questions that he would ask us in a week or something, then he made us 

sit up front and ask us [laughter] softball questions. But apart from that, it was nothing much.  

 GS: So at that time, so I know you said, Paul, that that was your motivation for going to law 

school, was because you wanted to get involved in doing some work in the South. Was that your 

motivation as well, or at what point did you become interested in —   

 IB: Well, I knew that was what we were going to do.  

 GS: Okay. You knew that was the plan and you were — 

 IB: That sounded like a good plan to me. We had, our daughter was born between, well, 

between my second and third years. And our parents were very anxious about taking the baby to 

Mississippi and wanted, “Leave her with us, do something, do something else, do something long 

distance.” But that was the only kind of, I mean, it wasn’t, so far as we were concerned, the answer 

was, “No, she’s coming with us.”  

 GS: [00:20:32] I can’t imagine being away from my child like that. [laughter] So, I want to 

talk about Mississippi here in a second. But first, before we move away from Harvard, were there 

any professors or even fellow students that stand out in your memory that sort of were meaningful to 

you in some way in your own sort of intellectual growth or just sort of how you saw the world 

around you?  

 PB: So Albert Sacks was teaching a seminar on some civil rights related issues, and I worked 

for his research, as his research assistant one summer, reading lots of books in the area and reporting 

to him about kind of what, what I had read and what he might use in the seminar. I think he’s, I 

mean, there were a number of faculty who were extremely good teachers and good scholars, but he’s 

the only one I recall who was particularly interested in civil rights issues.  



 
 

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 GS: Do you remember any of the books that you were reading for him? 

PB: No. 

GS: So you’re reading the books and sort of summarize them?  

PB: Yeah.  

GS: How about you, Iris, were there any professors or fellow students that stand out in your 

memory from that time?  

 IB: Well, one of the other woman students, who was older, she had a couple of children and 

they were school age children by then, impressed me a lot by saying, “You know, I could be a very 

good mother or I could be a very good wife or I could be a very good lawyer. I think I’d rather be an 

okay all of them.”  

 GS: [00:22:26] And how was that for you to have a newborn while you were going through 

your third year?  

 IB: Well, Paul’s father had supported us quite lavishly, which allowed us to have somebody 

living in —  

 GS: So, you had help in the house? And would your families come down to Cambridge to 

visit?  

 IB: Yeah. I mean. 

GS: To come see the baby? 

IB: Yes, babies are a big attraction. [laughter]  

 GS: [laughter] I guess they are. So, you graduated in [19]65.  

 PB: Yeah. Let me just say a word. So I was, as you can tell from my subsequent career, I was 

interested in civil rights, but I was always academically motivated too. So, I was on law review. And 

at that time there was a new journal just starting called the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law 

Review, a specialized journal. I don’t remember who edited it, but the first article I ever wrote, and it 



 
 

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was in their first two editions because the, two issues, because the article was too long, involved a 

civil rights issue. And I suppose at that time I could have predicted that I would end up in academia.  

 GS: [00:23:53] And so, you know, mid-[19]60s, there’s a lot happening in the country, 

obviously, around this time. What events stand out, again, as you’re transitioning, you’re in law 

school, you have a plan to go down South to do work. What events are, particularly for you all, stand 

out as something that you know further entrenched your beliefs, your politics, or maybe complicated 

your worldview in some way? 

 IB: The murder of the three civil rights workers. 

 PB: That’s in, what year is that? That’s 1964. But we were what, we were in law school at the 

time. And I mean, I think the Civil Rights Movement and the violence that accompanied it in the 

Deep South. So, we decided, I can’t remember how we decided on the Legal Defense Fund, but we, 

Iris will tell you the story when we called Jack Greenberg’s office and asked to see him. You want to 

tell the story?  

 IB: So, we went there and he actually came out of his office. His secretary said, “There are 

people to see you.” 

GS: And where was this, Iris? 

IB: At the Legal Defense Fund office in New York.  

 GS: Okay. So, you all went to New York City to see Jack Greenberg?  

 IB: Yes. Actually, we probably were in — so Paul told him that we were there because we 

were interested in doing civil rights work as soon as I was finished with law school. And he said, 

“Where would you want to be?” And Paul said, “Anywhere.” And he said, “Including Mississippi?” 

And Paul said, “Sure.” And he said, “Miss Jones, hold my calls. I’m in conference.” Took us into his 

office. We’d never been in conference before [laughter], so. 

 GS: Because he’d found someone who would be willing to go to Mississippi? 

 PB: Right.  



 
 

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 IB: Yeah. [00:26:17] And at that time, Marian Wright and Henry Aronson were the —  

 PB: They were the office. 

IB: They were the office. And Barbara Greene was probably already there as the person who 

did — 

 PB: Administrator. 

 IB: Administrator, secretary, everything. Supporter.  

 GS: How did y’all know about the Legal Defense Fund? And I mean, what drew you to go 

and have that meeting?  

 PB: I can’t remember how we knew about LDF as distinguished from other organizations. Do 

you? 

IB: No. 

 GS: So what happened after that? You had the conference with Greenberg? [laughter]  

 IB: Yeah. And we arranged — oh, he told us that we should be admitted to a federal bar. So, 

that summer, we — that was the only summer that we really lived in New York. The only time we 

really lived in New York.  

 PB: Well, we took the New York bar exam first. 

 IB: And then we needed to get admitted to federal, I think, how did it work? The Southern 

district wouldn’t let us in.  

 PB: Right. So, it had to do with — the Southern District of New York, you had to have been 

a lawyer for a couple of years maybe before admitted. But the Northern District of New York, which 

was in Syracuse, didn’t have any time requirement. 

IB: Or residency. 

PB: [00:28:02] So the thought was if you got admitted to that court, then you could get 

admitted to other federal courts, including ones in Mississippi, which turned out not to be quite so 



 
 

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easy. We can come to that later. So we, a cooperating lawyer with LDF who lived in Syracuse got us 

admitted to the Northern District of New York. 

 GS: Before we move on, Iris, when I asked about events happening at that time period that 

were meaningful, you sort of quietly said the murder of the three civil rights activists. Can you talk a 

little bit about that and the impact that had on you?  

 IB: Well, as I said, I was quite naive about anything political. It was just so shocking. The 

whole situation seemed, in the South, seemed so uncivilized, so horrific that it just didn’t seem as if 

there was any question but what the right thing to do was to go and see if you could help.  

 GS: So that happened and that further sort of motivated you to do your work?  

 IB: Yeah. It was an amazingly horrible time. You forget, I mean, current times are pretty 

horrible, but it was really startling, it was very shocking.  

 GS: How about you, Paul? Do you have any memories about that event and how it impacted 

you and your plan that you already had, to go to Mississippi? 

 PB: So, I think the summer of [19]64 happened before we showed up in Jack’s office. And 

no, I mean, I think we were heading in that direction anyway.  

 GS: So, in [19]66, you both started working for LDF. And was that the year you moved to 

Mississippi?  

 PB: [00:30:25] Yes.  

 GS: Can you talk to me about the move to Mississippi? I know you mentioned your families.  

IB: Not thrilled. 

GS: Not too excited about it. Can you talk to me a little about that?  

 IB: Paul’s father, as I said, was extremely generous to us. And one of the things that he did 

was he bought us a car. We got whatever car we wanted. So, in light of what was happening in 

Mississippi, we got a Chevy with a, what —  

 PB: A big engine. 



 
 

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 IB: A big engine. So that we could quickly escape. Right. And we were still in law school at 

the time. And we didn’t realize it but there’s a little symbol on the car that shows what the capacity of 

the engine is or something. But everybody else knew, at least other drivers knew. And when we 

stopped at a traffic light in Boston, they’d roll down the window, and say, “You want to drag?” 

[laughter] 

GS: I thought that might be where that was going. 

 IB: Yeah. But it turned out that that was, in fact a good thing because Paul used it  

when in Mississippi to escape, basically. 

 PB: One time. 

 IB: One time. One time was enough to justify it.  

 GS: Can you tell me about that? 

 PB: This was probably in 1967 or so. And we were doing — much of our work was in the 

Delta. And I can’t remember what was going on in Greenwood, but we were in Greenwood and some 

hostile people in a pickup started tailgating me as if, and they meant no good. And I put on the gas 

and ended up in Greenville, which was a much more civilized place, and kind of left them in the 

dust. It’s the one time having that souped up car actually turned out to be a valuable decision.  

 GS: [00:32:50] How did they know what you were up to?  

 PB: So, Mississippi, people know, people take counties seriously in Mississippi, the way 

people take states seriously in the rest of the U.S.. So if you were in any Delta county with Hinds 

County, which was Jackson, license plates, they immediately knew you were there. And they knew 

who was doing civil rights work. So, again, I can’t remember the particular issue we were dealing 

with in Greenwood, but they knew we were there. So, nothing — I ended up in a motel in Greenville. 

But that’s the only actual seemingly dangerous situation I was in in those two years.  



 
 

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 IB: Yeah, there was a lot of stuff that, it had been much more violent before we got there. 

You know, from the murders. But when we got there, we were told, for example, you always started 

your car with the door open. So, in case there was a bomb, you’d be blown out instead of. 

GS: [00:34:09] Who was telling you this? Who was giving you that advice? 

 IB: People who’d been there for a while, people in the other civil rights [organizations in 

Jackson]—  

 PB: And that was a habit that lasted even after we moved North. There were no seatbelts in 

those days, hardly, so you didn’t —   

 IB: You didn’t worry about that. Well, a friend of ours who had, it really was getting a lot 

less violent. A friend of ours came to visit us and he had been in the South before we were, doing 

civil rights work. And when we went to the airport to pick him up, we had, we were waiting in the 

car in a no parking zone. And he was totally shocked because when he had been there a couple of 

years before, that would have been incredibly dangerous. And I mean, and Henry had, Henry 

Aronson had gotten beaten up by sheriffs.  

 GS: Did y’all have any interaction with law enforcement or sheriffs that were hostile?  

 IB: We didn’t, I didn’t. 

 PB: No. 

 GS: How old was your daughter at this point?  

 IB: She was —  

 PB: One when we moved down. 

 IB: One, yeah. And a bit. 

 GS: And did you still have the support, someone to help with your daughter at that time? 

IB: Yes, we had somebody who lived — we lived in a house that was kind of passed around 

in the civil rights community. And there was a woman who would take care of the children of the 

house that also was passed around the community. She was wonderful. 



 
 

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GS: Do you remember her name? 

IB: Was Delilah her daughter, or she was Delilah? 

PB: No, she was Delilah. 

IB: She had a daughter whose name also started with D, who would also help out. They kind 

of reared our daughter.  

 GS: So what was your social life like there at this point, I mean?  

 IB: Well, there were three civil rights offices in Jackson, and there was.  

 PB: [00:36:38] Three civil rights lawyers offices.  

 IB: Yes, sorry. And there was the liberal Jewish community, which was very supportive. And 

that’s kind of it. In fact, the day before we left Mississippi, I had gone over to the home of a court 

reporter to get a transcript that she had finished for us. And she had been hostile to begin with, but 

had gotten quite to like us, be friendly with us. And she said to me on that occasion, you know, you 

haven’t had really a very good experience here in Mississippi. We’re really very, very friendly 

people. If you’d been in any other line of work, you would have had lots of friends. [laughter]  

 GS: She said that to you? 

 PB: But our main our main social community was the other lawyers.  

 GS: Were these LDF employees or? 

 PB: No. Well, there were very few, there were very few of us in that office. So, there was the 

Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, one side of us on Farish Street, and LCDC [Lawyer’s 

Constitutional Defense Committee], another legal civil rights office on the other end. And I think we 

hung out with them for the most part.  

 GS: [00:38:04] Do you remember what the office, the LDF office, was like?  

 PB: Oh, yeah.  

 GS: On Farish street. Can you describe it?  



 
 

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 PB: It was 538 and a half. And I think the half meant that we were upstairs. We were upstairs 

from the, if not the only, the preeminent Black restaurant in Jackson, Steven’s Kitchen. And it was a 

— it was a small but perfectly adequate office. And there were [just a few: Henry, Barbara, and us], 

so Marian ran it. Although Marian had gotten deeply involved in trying to protect the Head Start 

program, the child development group in Mississippi. So when we came down, essentially fresh out 

of law school, she spent most of her, she turned over much of the litigation to us and spent much of 

her time dealing with Senator Eastland and CDGM [Child Development Group of Mississippi]. But 

she had, she was in that office. And then, as Iris mentioned, a few others. And then you can always 

go downstairs and get breakfast or lunch at Steven’s kitchen.  

 IB: When did Mel Leventhal come? I can’t remember.  

 PB: I can’t remember either.  

 IB: And Reuben Anderson, but that was a bit, he was later.  

 PB: Reuben Anderson, who then got on the Supreme Court of Mississippi, was the first 

Black lawyer who worked for LDF [in Jackson]. There were cooperating attorneys before we came 

down and continued working with us.  

 GS: Iris, what do you remember about going to the office and working there? Was it the 

smells coming up from Steven’s kitchen? [laughter] 

 IB: No, actually, the thing — there was, at that time in law school, no course in practice. So 

we didn’t know anything when we got there. When Marian asked us to do a complaint against some 

school district and we had no idea how to do complaint, she said, “Here’s one for a different school 

district, you do it like that. You know, copy it.” And also, she gave me something to send to 

somebody. And I said, “What do I tell them?” And she said — this has been a real help for me in my 

legal career — “The enclosed is self-explanatory.” So we were learning law practice from the 

bottom, and the office was a plain office. It was, I think, probably fairly shabby. But it worked, it 

was perfectly okay.  



 
 

19 

 GS: [00:41:03] You mentioned Reuben Anderson and Marian Edelman, but were there others 

there in the LDF community that you remember working with, interacting with at that time in 

Mississippi? 

 PB: So, we had Tony Amsterdam, who at that time was teaching at Penn. Was a mainstay 

legal resource for LDF. And when we ran into a problem that we just couldn’t solve, typically, not 

how to file a complaint, but some complex legal problem, we would call him up. He would pause for 

30 seconds and then give us paragraph after paragraph of clear, concise analysis of the problem. We 

waited until we couldn’t deal with the problem ourselves, but he was always there when we needed 

that kind of expertise.  

 IB: [00:42:07] And so too were the other lawyers in the LDF New York office were always 

available. It was nice. 

 GS: So you were in contact with the New York office pretty regularly? 

IB: Yeah.  

PB: Yeah. 

GS: What about some of the judges in Mississippi?  

 PB: Well, there was the Northern District and the Southern District. I’ll begin with the 

Northern District and you can talk about the Southern District. So there was one judge in the 

Northern District, [Claude] Clayton, who was a segregationist, but also had some sense of what it 

meant to be a judge and didn’t like being overruled by the Fifth Circuit. So, what you got was not 

hostility. What you got was a biased, but not totally — biased, but given that, reasonably fair 

treatment. And you were certainly treated respectfully in the courtroom. You just, if there was a 

close question of fact or law, you didn’t win on it.  

 GS: And tell me about being in the courtroom at that time. What was the environment like? 

You know, what was it like going against the other side? Do you remember, what stands out in your 

memory about that? 



 
 

20 

 PB: [00:43:46] Sure. And then we’ll come back to the Southern District, which is a very 

different experience. The courtroom was run very professionally. There were two groups of lawyers 

we worked with. One were the Justice Department, which was, you know, came in in school 

desegregation cases, particularly, on our side. And we can tell you some stories about their lawyers 

later. And then there were opposing counsel. The advantage we had with opposing counsel was they 

were used to being in state courts and not federal courts, whereas in law schools at that time, 

Northern law schools, at least like Harvard, you learned the federal rules of civil procedure. So you, 

in effect, came ready to deal with federal courts. And as Iris mentioned, we got a fair amount of 

instruction along the way. The lawyers were mixed competence. One lawyer who was on the other 

side of us, Nay Gore, was competent and also had a professional, a sense of professional courtesy for 

other lawyers. That wasn’t true of all of them. The state had lawyers in what, with no irony, was 

called the Mississippi Department of Justice. And they were incompetent and mean and stupid, 

which was to our benefit, all things considered.  

 IB: I think Will Wells was, was he the head of their Civil Rights Division? [laughter] They 

did have something called the Civil Rights Division.  

 GB: Interesting. 

 IB: It was. 

 PB: Do you want to talk about the Southern District? 

 IB: The Southern District had two judges, Harold Cox, who was mean and smart, and 

somebody Russell, who was mean and stupid. And we used to have debates about which was better. 

Judge Cox was the one, I believe, who instituted the various rules, like you had to be a member of 

the Mississippi Bar to do anything like deliver the mail. I mean, it was —  

 PB: Backing up. Typically, if you belong to one federal district court, if you’re a member of 

one, as a matter of courtesy, you can work in another. He devised rules to make that very difficult.  



 
 

21 

 IB: Right. For example, you could only do it once a year as a pro hac admission. But so, 

Judge Cox was — so one case we had, which was an employment discrimination case. And for some 

reason, it was in Biloxi.  

 PB: It was, because that’s where the International Paper Company was. 

 IB: Right. And the attorneys for International Paper noticed depositions for the five named 

plaintiffs. It was a class action, but there were five people and they were union members, which was 

another major red flag for the local bar. [00:48:03] And the depositions were taking place in Biloxi. 

They noticed them, as is usual, you know, from starting something and from day to day until 

concluded. So they had gone on for, I think, five days. And the next day was going to be Saturday. 

And I said, “So, we reconvene on Monday?” And they said, “No, no, we’re going straight on 

through.” Which led to a really idiotic dialogue, in which I said things like, “Let the record show that 

we’ve been here for five days. We aren’t finished with the direct examination of the first plaintiff and 

it’s the weekend.” And they said, “Let the record show that [the notice of deposition] said from day 

to day until concluded, and it’s not concluded.” And we all going on like this as if the record could 

do anything but show, what with the lady doing the transcript. And finally, I just said, “Well, I won’t 

be here.” And they said, “Well, we’ll be here and we will notice you as in contempt.” So, this 

contempt issue was before Judge Cox, because it was Southern District. And Judge Cox fined us and 

also said that he would actually disbar me if it were not for the fact that I was so young and stupid. 

GS: He said that to you? 

IB: Yes. And that case was part of the case that went to the Fifth Circuit on the issue of the 

Southern District’s treatment of members of the federal district court bar and was reversed all 

around.  

 GS: [00:50:07] Can you talk a bit more about that? So, I want to make sure I’m 

understanding that. So what was the Fifth Circuit looking into specifically?  



 
 

22 

 IB: They were looking into the rule that out-of-state attorneys could only appear pro hac one 

time, even though they were associated, affiliated with local counsel. And the, I don’t remember why 

this got tossed in, but it did, as the reasonableness of his interactions with the out-of-state attorneys. 

And the importance of the appeal was that it made clear that members of, that people admitted to 

federal bar elsewhere could practice in federal district court in Mississippi.  

 GS: Okay. What was the outcome of the International Paper Company case? 

 IB: I don’t actually know. It was on appeal when we left.  

 PB: So, this was the Civil Rights Act. This was under Title VII, the Employment 

Discrimination Provision of the Civil Rights Act, which was passed in 1964. This is 1966 or [19]67, 

and the district court, Judge Cox, held that you couldn’t bring class actions under the Civil [Rights 

Act], under Title VII. And we went on appeal on that issue. And, of course, you know, ever since 

then, class actions have been kind of a mainstay of Title VII. So, that was the substantive issue. But I 

don’t think that went up to the court until later on. I think. 

 IB: [00:52:03] Right. But whatever happened in the actual case, do you know?  

 PB: No. They permitted a class action.  

 IB: Yes. But.  

 PB: Oh, you mean who won?  

 IB: I expect we did, but I don’t remember.  

 PB: Tell you a story about Judge Cox.  

 GS: Yes. I was just about to ask more about Judge Cox. 

 PB: So, Johnson Publishing Company, which publishes Ebony magazine, came to Marian 

and asked whether we would handle, whether Marian would handle a non-civil rights case. And we 

got permission from the LDF office in New York to handle this case. So, the story, here’s the story. 

Ebony published an article titled “Ole Miss 10 Years Later,” and it showed a picture of a dorm room 



 
 

23 

with Black and white men and women, students, and also a can, which from the picture could have 

been a can of coke or a can of beer. What county is Oxford in?  

 IB: It’s Oxford county, I think. 

 PB: It was a dry county. Mississippi had lots of counties where it was illegal to have or drink 

alcohol. The caption of the picture listed the plaintiff in this defamation action against Ebony, against 

Johnson Publishing Company. It listed him as being Bill Boyd. Is that right?  

 IB: No, he was Boyd — 

 PB: Boyd Gatlin.  

 IB: [Listed as] Boyd Gatlin. It was Bill Boyd [in the picture]. 

 PB: [00:54:02] The person actually in the picture was somebody named Boyd, but a different 

person. So, the plaintiff argued that by having a caption of a picture showing him at what the 

complaint described as “a racially and sexually mixed party at which alcohol was served” was 

defamatory. He was an on-the-air newscaster for a Hattiesburg TV station, and he argued that he’d 

been taken off the air. So, it’s defamation by being mischaracterized as being at this party. The case 

was brought in state court. We removed it to federal court, but it had to, unfortunately, it was in 

Judge Cox’s court. Judge Cox called, Iris and I and Marian were all involved in the case. He called 

us into his chambers before the jury selection and said, “I know you all don’t like me. I know you all 

think that I do everything against you. But let me tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to give 

you a Black jury on this case.” And he did. So, the case goes to trial, and it’s totally, I mean it’s as 

inappropriate to do that as it is to give us an all-white jury. The case comes to trial and Judge Cox is 

a teetotaler. And of course, in a defamation case, it doesn’t matter what was in the can. It matters 

whether the can shows alcohol being served. But he took a particular interest in what was actually in 

the can and asked the photographer to be deposed, to be put on the witness stand and grilled. He 

then, you couldn’t tell from the can whether it was Coke or a Dr. Pepper, a famous favorite Southern 

drink, or beer. So he told the reporter to come back the next day with blown up images of the can. 



 
 

24 

 GS: Wow, okay. There’s a real investigation going on here. 

 PB: [00:56:14] Right. But then the culmination of the case is, the plaintiff is on the stand, 

Boyd Gatlin, and says, Judge Cox asked him, “Do you know who was actually in the picture?” And 

Boyd Gatlin says, “Yeah, that’s Bill Boyd.” And Judge Cox says, “Billy Boyd, he’s the son of John 

Boyd. I used to go hunting with him. He’s a great guy. You ought to be, you ought to be honored to 

be confused with him.” And he dismissed the case. He didn’t let it go to the jury. He dismissed the 

case. And here’s the situation where the fact that we knew federal procedure and the other side didn’t. 

They let the time for appeal lapse, and that was the end of the case. But that kind of high handedness 

and totally extralegal behavior was typical of Judge Cox. It was kind of fun to be on the good side 

for a change.  

 GS: Anything else about Judge Clayton or Judge Cox or Judge Russell? Something new that 

stands out in your memory around this time and being in the courts? 

 PB: So unlike Judge Cox, who was a teetotaler, Judge Clayton would start drinking the 

minute court was over. So we met in Oxford and there was a Downtowner Motor Inn. It was a chain 

of motels. And after court, Judge Clayton would have a booth and anybody who came could join 

him. If it was lawyers from one side, if it was lawyers on both sides. And he was a good drinker. So, 

one of our very favorite, there were two lawyers from the Justice Department who were down there, 

Bob Moore and J. Harold Flannery, Nick Flannery. Nick was a pretty good drinker, too. And so we, 

and usually, there usually weren’t lawyers from the other side, but sometimes there were. He didn’t 

care. So we were sitting in the booth with Judge Clayton and Nick Flannery, and they were matching 

drinks with each other. And we left at some point, not being as good drinkers as they were. The next 

morning at 10 o’clock, Judge Clayton is on the bench and says, “Where’s counsel for the 

government, for the U.S.?” And an assistant of Nick Flannery said, you know, “He hasn’t quite made 

it up this morning.” So, Clayton orders his bailiff to get Flannery out of bed and appear in the 



 
 

25 

courtroom. He fines Flannery $100 for being late, and the next afternoon they’re back drinking 

together.  

 GS: And Judge Clayton was such a good drinker that he could show up and be ready to go 

for court the next morning? 

 PB: Yeah. 

 IB: Could then. Nick Flannery, tell them Nick Flannery’s story.  

 PB: Oh, his oral civil rights complaint? You tell the story.  

 IB: I can’t remember what case, but we were on some school desegregation case in Oxford 

and we went out to lunch together, where “we” was Marian Wright and Paul and me and Nick and 

maybe some others. And we went to kind of, you know, this luncheonette, drugstore kind of thing. 

[01:00:18] And we were served, but we were given paper plates. Everybody else had china plates. 

So, Nick went up to the cashier and asked for the manager. He came. And he said, showing his 

credentials, “J. Harold Flannery representing the United States of America.” And there was the 

United States of America in there, you know, filing an oral civil rights complaint for discrimination 

on the basis of race in violation of Title IV. I don’t remember what happened, that we were just 

thunderstruck.  

 PB: He then went back after lunch, went into the courtroom and essentially dragged the 

manager of the lunch counter in with him and stood up in front of Judge Clayton and said, “I’d like to 

find an oral civil rights complaint.” After that, they served us china, which was no improvement, 

hygienically, I have to say. 

 IB: Yes. In fact, we might have been better off with the paper plates. 

 GS: We, we’ve kind of been talking about cases around employment discrimination, 

desegregation. I’m curious about how you prepared for your cases. Anything, both in terms of 

strategy, or were you working together? Were you bouncing ideas off each other? Were you, you 



 
 

26 

mentioned how you were in contact with Tony Amsterdam at the New York office. Anything about 

just sort of your prep for these important cases around this time.  

 IB: [01:02:15] You know, the basic complaints against the school districts were very much 

the same because the school districts were pretty much the same. The things that were, so the law at 

that time was freedom of choice. The law wasn’t interesting, but we needed to establish facts. So, 

preparation consisted in interviewing, well, deposing the school district officials and looking through 

their documents on the one hand and interviewing the students, the plaintiffs, or at least the plaintiffs, 

mostly, and their families, about the conditions in the school. And one thing about the deposition of 

school district officials was one other advantage I had at least of being a white woman, because they 

weren’t used to, they didn’t like to contradict white women. So, if you ask the question often enough, 

eventually you get the answer you want. But the chief thing was the children who could tell you 

everything that was going on in the school and every horrible thing that happened. It was just —  

 PB: [01:03:47] So let me back up and say we came, the large majority of our work was 

school desegregation. And we came to Mississippi at a time when the governing rule was so-called 

free choice, or freedom of choice. And what that meant is that at the beginning of every school year, 

every child in the school district had to choose what school to go to. And the white kids all chose the 

white schools. And kids from Black families would choose the white schools only if they were very 

courageous. Typically, what would happen would be there was some civil rights organization in 

town, a local organization that would mobilize families to choose to go to the white schools.  

 IB: Usually with the help of the local pastor.  

 PB: Okay. Right. So a lot of a lot of our work took place when we were, when we were in in 

the Delta, a lot of the work took place in churches. So what would happen is, in a community, maybe 

20 Black kids would go to the white schools where they were either, they were treated badly by 

teachers, by principals, or by local people who would harass them. And much of our litigation 

involved simply trying to get them to be, to actually have a normal day in the schools. And that 



 
 

27 

involved interviewing lots of kids to see what was, how they were being harassed. And then on the 

witness stand, putting them on the witness stand to describe this. And again, this is where Judge 

Clayton was reasonably fair. When he saw a pattern, when he put on several kids and he saw the 

pattern that they were being harassed by teachers or the school principal, he once in a while would 

issue an order saying they had to stop doing that. But it was a losing game because it required a great 

deal of courage to decide to go to the, and I don’t say formerly white. They were just white schools. 

And, you know, it was just, you couldn’t win. So, I mean, at the same time as we were trying to do 

the best for the kids under freedom of choice, we used every case as an opportunity to try to overturn 

freedom of choice. And it wasn’t until a year after we left that LDF finally got the Fifth Circuit and 

then the Supreme Court to say, “Freedom of choice is not working and you actually have to 

desegregate.” 

 IB: [01:06:50] So, part of the background was, I mean, there’s still separate but equal. And 

so, it was still important to suggest that it was not equal. So we also had testimony from kids who 

were in the all Black schools about not having books, not having gym, not having, I mean, the 

schools were a disgrace.  

 GS: Can you talk to me about working with the plaintiffs and their families, especially 

working with children and interviewing them about their treatment? I can’t imagine how difficult that 

must have been emotionally, having a child of your own and then seeing how these children are 

being treated. Can you talk to me a little bit more about working with these families?  

 PB: So, we were treated too well in the community. I mean, Lawyer Iris, Lawyer Paul, 

everybody called us. And we were welcomed warmly. And the kids, the nice thing about these are, 

you know, 10 or 12, 14 year old kids. They didn’t hold back for us. And actually, when we got them 

in the courtroom, they didn’t hold back. So we ended up becoming, if we developed any practical 

expertise, it was interviewing, interviewing lots of Black school children.  



 
 

28 

 GS: [01:08:36] And where did the interviews take place? Were they at the office? Were they 

at home?  

 PB: In their home or in the church. 

GS: Oh, okay. The church. Where they were comfortable.  

 IB: Yeah.  

 PB: And we were up there in the Delta. Our office was in Jackson and we were a couple of 

hundred miles away.  

 IB: And the kids were, I mean, they were great. They were very, very observant. And they 

could tell you things. And in one of the cases, we had a, I don’t know, maybe a 10-year old testifying 

about the number of books in her school. And the reason she knew was that her job had been to 

count them. I mean, they just, they were, they were all very good kids. You couldn’t imagine how 

anybody could mistreat them.  

 PB: In one case, a child testified, this was in Grenada. We spent a lot of time in Grenada, 

which, in which not only the school district would harass the kids, but there were, there were fairly 

violent threats by people in town.  

 IB: Didn’t they beat up some kids?  

 PB: I can’t remember.  

 IB: I think there was the chain episode, Paul, this was in Grenada.  

 PB: [01:10:05] They were threatened anyway, with chains. Anyway, a student testified that 

the school principal had hit her with an umbrella, and the lawyer for the district on cross-examination 

said, in fact, “Do you mean to say that Mr. Jones, who is one of the most respected members of the 

community, used an umbrella?” And she said, “It’s just because he was so respected that I was so 

surprised that he hit me with the umbrella.” We actually, that’s the case where Judge Clayton issued 

an injunction saying, “You have to treat the kids fairly.” 



 
 

29 

 GS: So, even as children, they, do you think they understood the sense of importance of what 

these cases were trying to achieve?  

 PB: Yeah. In part because this wasn’t, these weren’t done individually. This was always done 

as part of a local movement that made a decision. And I think the kids were very aware of the role 

that they were playing.  

 IB: Yeah. And the movement, it was, I think there was virtually always, always a strong 

religious element.  

 GS: Yes. I was going to ask about the role of sort of faith communities in the Delta, in 

Mississippi, the role that they played. You mentioned a couple of times already the role that the 

churches played. 

 PB: The movement centered around church. I spent a lot of time living in a motel in Grenada, 

and the daytimes were spent in the Bellflower Baptist Church.  

 GS: You were working out of the church?  

 PB: Working out of the church. And that was the center of the movement in almost every 

community.  

 IB: [01:11:54] So it would be very good to know what these experiences did to the children 

and what became of them, how their lives were affected. So, I do hope that you will get around to 

interviewing them. They’re not going to be children anymore.  

 GS: Did you ever stay in touch with any of those children, as the cases?  

 IB: No, for a little bit there was one child that we wrote to, but it fell apart.  

 GS: You mentioned living in motels in Grenada. Iris, were you there too in these motels in 

Grenada or were you back in Jackson?  

 IB: I was almost always home by nightfall with our daughter. I mean, Delilah would stay if 

she needed to, but it usually didn’t require that.  



 
 

30 

 GS: Is there anything else you want to talk about? There’s obviously a lot to talk about, but is 

there anything more you want to say about your time in Mississippi working on, as you mentioned, 

mostly school desegregation. There were also equal municipal services cases. Is there anything that 

stands out in your memory around some of that litigation and advocacy?  

 PB: Municipal services cases. What’s most memorable is, I mean, the basic issue is that if 

you go into any town in Mississippi or any city for that matter, it’ll take you five minutes to know 

which are the Black neighborhoods and which are the white neighborhoods. The streets are paved in 

the white neighborhoods. The culverts or sewers are covered. And very, very distinctive. So, we 

knew we wanted to. And that’s clearly, even under the most, after Brown v. Board of Education, that 

was clearly illegal. So we were looking for the optimal place to bring the case, the town with the 

clearest distinction between the white and Black neighborhoods. And LDF had an urban planner, I 

think from Penn, who came down. And we basically drove around from town to town looking for the 

most egregious cases where there was just no doubt about the difference. And then because we were 

very close to the communities, we would then discuss with the community whether they wanted to 

bring the case. [01:14:55] And in a couple of the cases, the district court would say, “This is simply a 

matter of limited budgets. You can’t do everything.” They didn’t see any segregation. And then the 

case that finally made it to the Fifth Circuit, Hawkins v. Town of Shaw, the district court once again 

said, “There’s no problem.” And the Fifth Circuit reversed and said, “You just can’t have these 

unequal municipal services." But what was most memorable was not the litigation, which wasn’t 

very complicated, even though we lost, but rather looking with this urban planner, looking for good 

places to bring them litigation.  

 GS: So you were driving around with the urban planner.  

 PB: Yeah. 

 GB: So, I think you mentioned that, you know, I mean, a lot of the work you were doing was 

setting the foundation for further litigation at different, at the federal level, or the Fifth Circuit. And 



 
 

31 

so what did success look like for you all, even if that was beyond winning this specific case, I think 

you had a sense of the larger context of what you all were doing and why it was important. So, I’m 

just curious, even if a case was lost or you didn’t get the outcome you wanted, what did success feel 

like or look like for you all at that time, working on these cases?  

 PB: [01:16:30] Success, which didn’t come until after we left, was getting freedom of choice 

replaced by an actual requirement of desegregation. And so, I think the hope is that we laid the 

foundation for that. But then there was success on the very local level, that is, getting Judge Clayton 

to tell the Grenada School District that they actually couldn’t harass Black kids. That was successful.  

 GS: So, Paul, you mentioned a couple of other stories that you wanted to share with us. Can 

you tell me about the flying one first?  

 PB: So, our office was in Jackson and the majority of our litigation and cases were in the 

Delta area. And it’s not a bad drive, but it’s a long drive. So, I decided to take flying lessons and we 

would then have, once I got a pilot’s license, we would rent a plane and fly up, fly up to Oxford or 

wherever else we were. And Marian Wright, she later became Marian Wright Edelman. But at that 

time, she and Peter were starting to date, but she was still Marian Wright. Marian thought that was a 

good idea for her, too. And she took a couple of lessons. And I think after the third lesson or so, the 

flight instructor said, “I’m not going to teach you anymore.” And she said, “Why?” “Because you 

keep on falling asleep in the plane.” And it’s true, I mean she worked, she worked just incredible 

hours. And the drone of the plane was enough to put anybody to sleep.   

 GS: [01:18:29] So, you were, how would that work? So, you got your pilot’s license and you 

would?  

 PB: You would rent a plane. I mean, every airport has a fixed based operator. In fact, Jackson 

had two airports. It had the main airport, which was actually in Meridian. And then the small airport 

for private planes. And you go rent a plane by the hour or the flight time, I think. 

 GS: Oh, wow. What was the cost of that?  



 
 

32 

 PB: Gosh. 

 IB: That’s a long time ago.  

 PB: I just don’t remember the cost. But it was reasonable. I mean, it was reasonable enough 

that LDF would pay for it because it was, it was, all things considered, it was pretty competitive with 

—  

 IB: Driving.  

 PB: Driving your car. And you’d get there much faster.  

 GS: And Iris, would you fly in the plane with Paul?  

 IB: No. They, flight instructors like to get you, get spouses, they tell you, “What if you’re in a 

plane and your spouse has a heart attack? Don’t you want to be able to take over?” No, I didn’t want 

to take over. But Paul harassed me into doing it. So I took some lessons and then he looked at my 

logbook one day and said, “Oh, you probably, solo next time.” So I never went back.  

 GS: [01:19:52] You didn’t want to fly solo. 

 IB: I had never been scared in planes before, but when I realized that they let people like me 

up there controlling them, never been really comfortable since.  

 GS: And Paul, did you continue flying?  

 PB: I did. In fact, I got a commercial license and a twin engine license and the FBO in 

Jackson, actually a couple of times hired me to ferry somebody. And then we came out here and we 

actually bought a plane out here. Had no reason. I mean, in Jackson there was a very good reason to 

have a plane, but we just kind of got hooked on it. And we co-owned the plane for about fifteen or so 

years and then other things got in the way.  

 GS: And where would you fly to?  

 PB: We’d fly, we’d take friends up to Nut Tree, which is a little restaurant with an airstrip in, 

not more than 100 miles from here. We’d go down to Monterrey. And then with the kids. By this 



 
 

33 

time our daughter, Hilary, was a teenager and we had a son also. We sometimes, we’d go up to 

Washington. Once we went up to Banff in Canada.  

 GS: Wow. That’s great.  

 PB: But in Mississippi, it was actually useful.  

 GS: You mentioned Marian Wright working grueling hours. I’m sure all the LDF lawyers 

were working long hours. I’m curious if you could sort of talk about whether the long work hours or 

just sort of the emotional intensity of it, did that have any kind of, I hope I’m not, you know, probing 

too much here, but did that have any impact on your relationship or did it strengthen your 

relationship? Or both.  

 PB: I don’t think it had any negative impact. And I mean, working together on common 

causes, I think always strengthens things.  

 GS: [01:22:16] So, you all found a way to make it work with long hours and with children.  

 PB: Right. I should say, by the way, we kept on referring to our daughter anonymously. 

Hilary, perhaps there’s some genetic defect in our family. She ended up going to law school and she’s 

head of the environmental law division for the New York City Law Department. So, she stayed in 

the public sector.  

 IB: Our son also went to law school, but he did a JD MBA and has pursued the business part.  

 GS: Iris, did you have anything to, any thoughts about the sort of personal impacts of the 

hours and the emotional?  

 IB: Well, we left after two years. I mean, it is, it was very draining. And I mean, we didn’t 

leave because it was all fixed, but we were burnt out.  

 GS: Well, can you talk to me a little bit about that? I mean, what were you all’s conversations 

like at that point when you were realizing you’re burnt out and what did burnout look like for you? 

Because it looks different, as someone who’s experienced it in my type of work, it looks different for 

everybody. What did that look like for you all and what were those conversations like? 



 
 

34 

 IB: I think we were pretty much agreed, was that, as you recall? I mean, it just —  

 PB: There were two things that happened and we were getting a little bit tired, but one was 

we wanted to have another child and Iris didn’t want the child to be born in Mississippi. And the 

other was I got a call from a former professor of mine at Harvard Law School asking whether I 

would like to clerk for a justice on the Supreme Court. And I probably could have deferred it for a 

year. But I think those two things coming together were enough to have us decide we’d been there 

long enough.  

 IB: [01:24:23] Yes, that’s true.  

 GS: Before we start talking about leaving LDF, there’s a quote here, that you wrote Paul, 

about strategy at LDF. I’m going to read the quote and get your reaction to it. “The motivation was 

the quest for social justice, but the strategy was ruthlessly instrumental and required passing of cries 

from the heart for immediate action in favor of long term gains. The foundations that invested in 

LDF knew that they were working in partnership with an organization whose leadership not only had 

its eyes on the prize, but had well-thought out strategies for gaining it.” That’s from “In Defense of 

Strategic Plans.” Any thoughts about that?  

 PB: I mean, I think that something that has characterized LDF throughout its history and, to 

the extent we followed subsequent history, continues, is taking the long view. I mean, I think you see 

that beginning with Thurgood Marshall and continuing. And saying, what law is there in service of 

changing, changing society in some ways? And we intervene in ways that are going to have a 

reasonable probability of changing the world to make it more equitable. And that’s kind of an LDF 

mainstay.  

 IB: Which explains why some cases came first and why some were long deferred while they 

built the undergirding structure.  



 
 

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 PB: I mean, the great example of this, well before our time, is not going directly into school 

desegregation for elementary and secondary schools, but LDF’s decision to begin with graduate and 

professional schools, where Southern sensibilities would be less offended.  

 GS: [01:26:43] So you’re sitting in the homes or at the churches of these Black families that 

are being treated badly, harassed, beaten, don’t have access to municipal services. You’re with them, 

face to face. And then there’s this larger strategy, the long-term views we just talked about. Was that 

ever a frustration or something that was hard to sort of reconcile for you, of the immediate needs of 

the people that you’re working with in these communities and then this longer-term strategy? Or 

were you able to reconcile those two things, those two feelings?  

 PB: I mean, one immediate need we didn’t talk about is these are also families living in real 

poverty, quite apart from racial disparities. Quitman County, which is where Nay Gore, our 

respected opposing counsel was, was just a dirt poor place. I mean, whites were pretty dirt poor, too. 

And I think what was sometimes was uncomfortable was the fact that we would go back to a 

comfortable house or even a comfortable motel room, and they were living in shacks. [01:28:10]  

But our job was civil rights, not poverty as such. But I mean, the rapport. I mean, none of this, none 

of our work would have made sense if it weren’t coming up from the communities themselves. And I 

think what made it, what made our relationships rewarding as well as productive was the sense that 

we were working with community leaders and then the members of the communities themselves.  

 IB: One case that I remember where there was kind of conflict of interest. One of the things 

we always asked for was desegregation of not only of the schools, but of the school district 

administration. And when we were suing Bolivar County, we neglected to notice for a while that 

Bolivar County, was it school district six, was all Black. They had Black administrators and they 

totally let us know that they did not want desegregation because they were the only school 

administrators in the state of Mississippi who were Black and they didn’t want to lose those few. 

They were our clients. Of course their needs came first.  



 
 

36 

 GS: [01:30:06] Before we move on from Mississippi, Paul, you mentioned two stories that 

you wanted to share. One about Nay Gore and one about a restaurant. Tell me about this.  

 PB: So we, our office was a racially mixed office. And we would eat in Jackson. There was a 

motel, if you moved from Farish Street a few streets down, right opposite the capital there’s a motel 

that after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, had to serve us. And they did. And you actually didn’t have 

much of a problem. There were a few restaurants in Jackson where we knew wasn’t safe to go into, 

even though they were covered by the Civil Rights Act. And then there was the Old Town Deli, the 

only place that had decent cheesecake and bread.  

 IB: Yeah.  

 PB: I mean, other than Wonder Bread.  

 IB: Yeah. And in Jackson, at the time, we didn’t know any other place to get bread that didn’t 

come in a plastic package.  

 GS: You wanted some good homemade bread.  

 IB: Rye bread. 

 PB: And we would occasionally go there with members of our office. And then they asked, 

would it be okay to serve us outside? And then they said, could we bring a civil rights suit against 

them so that they would have to serve us so that they could explain why they were serving us? I 

mean, they were friendly in that sense, but they were afraid they were going to lose all their business.  

 IB: Which they perfectly would have.  

 GS: And did you bring the suit?  

 IB: I think so. I mean, it was, there was a consent decree.  

 GS: [01:32:00] I see.  

 PB: And then the story I was going to tell about Nay Gore. So, Nay Gore. Mississippi was a 

frontier. I mean, just had a frontier mentality. And Nay Gore represented Quitman County. And I 

can’t remember what cases we had there. But he was the county attorney at one time.  



 
 

37 

 IB: And also, he was representative to the Mississippi House.  

 PB: That’s right. He was the state representative. There was a time, there had been a civil 

rights demonstration and a half dozen demonstrators were arrested and jailed. And some members of 

our office, again, Black and white, went up pretty much in the middle of the night to bail them out. 

And Nay Gore is in the courthouse with the sheriff and some other officials and with the lawyers 

who have done their job. And Nay says, in front of everybody, he says, “You have a long drive back 

to Jackson. Why don’t you all come over to my house and have some food before you drive back?” 

This is the first time, so far as we know in the history of Quitman County, that Black people are 

allowed in, not only allowed, but invited in the front door of a resident’s house. And here he is. I 

mean he’s a white resident and a segregationist. But the idea of professional courtesy kind of 

trumped everything else. And he was just, he was a frontier guy.  

 IB: [01:33:58] So, he, I mean, he knew Reuben because they, we’d had them both to dinner at 

our house. And southern courtesy, as exercised by him, didn’t admit of not returning courtesy for 

courtesy. It was funny, he took us on a tour of the state house one time just showing, and there was a 

colleague of his sitting in the hallway. He was wearing a Stetson. And the guy said, “Hey, Nay, I like 

your hat.” And Nay without breaking stride, said, “Glad you do Jim, but if you didn’t, I’d wear it just 

the same.” I mean, it’s more like a story that the South likes to tell about itself, but sometimes it’s 

true.  

 GS: And so did you go to dinner at Nay Gore’s house that night?  

 PB: Yeah. 

 GS: How was it? 

 PB: It was just a snack. But I mean, the real point is that he had people in the front door. 

 GS: Right. So, where do you go — talk to me about leaving Jackson and that chapter of your 

family’s life. Where do you go? And what were the conversations with your LDF colleagues about 

you all transitioning out?  



 
 

38 

 IB: It was kind of expected. I mean, LDF was used to people not staying forever. And 

besides, they had now Mel Leventhal and Reuben Anderson and maybe somebody else. So, they 

certainly, the Jackson office didn’t need us. So, I don’t think anybody was either surprised or 

heartbroken.  

 PB: [01:36:09] And we went on to Washington, where I spent a year clerking for Justice 

Harlan on the Supreme Court. And Iris worked for a civil rights organization.  

 IB: Yes. Whose name I didn’t —  

 PB: Was it the Native American Legal Defense Fund? 

 IB: I don’t think that’s what it was called. It was a Native American civil rights kind of 

organization.  

 GS: How did your time with LDF in Mississippi shape the rest of both of your careers? I 

know that’s a big question, but it’s an important one.  

 PB: I’ll go first. When I came to teach at Stanford, my areas of teaching were constitutional 

law with a particular interest in civil rights. And the experience with LDF, I think, who knows 

whether I would have moved in this direction anyway, but it certainly began and maintained an 

interest in civil rights that’s been with me my whole professional life.  

 IB: I’m not sure how this is directly causal effect, but I’ve basically only worked for 

nonprofits, and I think that that was just because the Legal Defense Fund kind of set for me the way 

it’s supposed to be. Eventually did work for a couple of biotechs, but they were definitely nonprofit.  

 PB: I mean, they, it set an expectation of quality that I think is, you know, we judged other 

organizations we worked for or contributed to or were involved in one way or another, that was the 

standard by which we judged them. And the point, which the quote of mine I had forgotten about, is 

essentially about the strategy and integrity of an organization and that has been a mainstay of LDF. 

 GS: [01:38:53] What relationships with LDF colleagues did you all maintain over the years, 

if any?  



 
 

39 

 PB: We stayed in touch with Henry Aronson, who we see from time to time. We stayed in 

touch with Marian until we sort of got out of touch in the last five or 10 years. But we were in pretty 

good touch with Marian and her kids.  

 IB: And with some lawyers from the Lawyers Committee. Judy Lichtman, particularly.  

 PB: Yeah. So, this is the, one of our down the street organizations.  

 GS: I’m going to wrap up with some big questions, big picture questions here. Talk to me 

about how you all see LDF’s legacy today.  

 IB: [01:40:03] Well, it’s still building. I mean, it’s not dead. So, I don’t like thinking about its 

legacy, but I think that it’s, I hope it remains as important as it was, has been for the, for everything 

that it was doing while we were there. And it’s branched out in ways that I don’t really know about, 

but I think that it’s still doing good work, doing what’s needed.  

 PB: I mean, the problems, a lot of the problems that it dealt with before we were there and 

while we were there, remain. There’s a lot of school segregation happening in different ways, but not 

less. There are certainly huge inequalities in justice. And, I think, as Iris says, it’s an ongoing 

organization. And I think from everything I can tell, it continues to meet those challenges with very 

high-quality legal work.  

 GS: Is there anything else that you all would like to share for this oral history project, 

anything that I failed to ask about before we have any final thoughts or anything like that? 

 PB: I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. Any?  

 IB: Nope. I could just repeat that I do hope that they will do their best to find out what 

difference they have made.  

 PB: To the plaintiffs.  

 IB: The plaintiffs.  

 GS: Paul, any final thoughts or? 



 
 

40 

 PB: No, this is very, grateful for the opportunity to kind of think back to what’s now fifty 

plus years.  

 GS: Well, thank you all so much for having us in your home. Thank you for participating in 

this important project. I really do appreciate your time and willing to go back to your memories from 

that time in your life. Thank you so much.  

 PB: Thank you.  

 IB: Our pleasure. Thank you. [01:42:44] 

[END OF INTERVIEW]