Michael Meltsner: A Fighter for Justice

Before Michael Meltsner left Northeastern University School of Law as its dean and a professor, he kept one of his favorite quotes from baseball legend Satchel Paige on his office door for years: “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

Paige, a Negro League player who was 42 when he made his Major League Baseball debut and 59 when he played his last professional game, was likely speaking of uncertainty or fear—particularly as a Black athlete forced to play under frequently hostile situations and whose big break came later in life.

For Meltsner, Paige’s quote provided a daily reminder of how far he had come in his own life, especially in a demanding legal and academic career marked by high-profile, high-stakes court cases pursued in the name of equality and justice.

“You’ve got to be lucky,” Meltsner said during a 2023 interview for the Legal Defense Fund Oral History Project. “There’s just so much luck in the world, and I’ve been able to have more than my share. Not sure whether that’s true of all my colleagues, but it’s true of me.”

But Meltsner’s professional successes involved more than mere luck: Talent, hard work, and a skillful navigation of the law to combat societal injustices also played major roles in his evolution as an advocate for the poor and a champion for civil rights. 

Meltsner was born an only child in New York City in 1937, during the Great Depression. He and his family lived near Rockaway Beach in Queens until he was 12, when they moved to Manhattan. His father, Ira, and mother, Alice, were liberals who opposed any form of discrimination.

“In part, that certainly emerged from the fact that they were Jewish and had felt—as many American Jews did at that time—the restrictions” imposed on them, he explained.  

His mother worked part-time at Macy’s. His father was a sales manager who understood the power of targeted marketing, product branding, and endorsements. The company where he worked sold novelty promotional items like calendars that advertised companies, and he had the idea to make an endorsement deal in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers’ first baseman Jackie Robinson, the first Black player to integrate Major League Baseball. Ira Meltsner acquired the right to place Robinson’s image on calendars that advertised Black businesses, and young Michael Meltsner even got the chance to shake his baseball idol’s hand.

“It was one of the greatest days of my life,” he recalled.

As his family worked hard to make a living, Meltsner encountered youth gangs in their neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan, which was then considered a rough area. He described it as a “tumultuous time” in which rival ethnic gangs fought over turf in the crowded city. Meltsner’s safety depended on his ability to steer clear of the violence that seemed to lurk around every corner.

“Part of your growing up was to learn how to avoid those rumbles, and sometimes, you couldn’t do it,” he explained.

After he was attacked by a group of junior gang members, he formed a gang with his Jewish friends to avoid being a repeat victim. The new group wore matching satin jackets with the name “Sharks” printed on the back, and the mere fact of the jackets offered some protection.  

“The other groups with their satin jackets didn’t know who you were, and they might think that you were stronger than you [actually] were,” he said.  

He reflected, “My Manhattan childhood prepared me for conflict because that was all around me in the city.” He said he learned how to “make my own way in a tough city” and “learn its folkways.”

He also took sanctuary in the public library, where he began an ambitious plan to read every book from A to Z.  

When he was not at the library, he kept busy with work: A cousin hired him as an office messenger when he was 14, and he delivered packages to places beyond his neighborhood. The job put him face to face with the office “gatekeepers”—the receptionists who controlled the access of visitors and messengers—and helped turn his veneer of toughness into a more mature self-assurance.

“[The job] made me a confident, urban person long before I had any right to be,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union led to heightened tensions. In the 1950s, U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin began a ruthless, multiyear crusade to root out communists in government agencies and the military. He chaired a series of subcommittee hearings that were broadcast on black-and-white television sets to a captive American audience.

After arriving home from Stuyvesant High School in the spring of 1954, Meltsner would watch the dramatic series of standoffs between McCarthy and Joseph Welch, the U.S. Army’s unflappable Chief Counsel. Welch’s deft ability to expose McCarthy’s zealotry and demagoguery on national television helped turn public opinion against the senator. Watching such hearings also sparked Meltsner’s interest in studying law and “certainly made me understand that maybe I wanted to be a lawyer.”

Later that year, he enrolled in Oberlin College in Ohio. He graduated in three years and then went to Yale Law School on a full tuition scholarship. At Yale, Meltsner knew early on that practicing corporate law at a Wall Street firm—the route chosen by many of his Yale peers—was not for him. Although he did well academically, he began to question whether being any type of lawyer was how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

“I was a reluctant law student in the sense that I thought so much of this stuff—largely commercial, probably my bias—it bored me,” he said.

After graduating in 1960, he took the bar exam and went to travel abroad. He followed the weather: When it became too cold in Greece, he moved to Israel, working on a kibbutz and then spending some time as a journalist with The Jerusalem Post. He also assisted on an archeological dig near the Dead Sea, where he met his wife. 

After a year seeking personal and professional direction abroad, he returned to the United States, where he planned to marry and hoped to work as a civil rights lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). But his mother-in-law, who was well connected in social and political circles in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had loftier ideas. She put him in touch with a few of her friends, who mostly advised him to instead take a lucrative job at a private law firm. However, one referred him to a colleague in New York, who gave Meltsner a tip that would change his life: He suggested Meltsner call Thurgood Marshall, the Director-Counsel of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), whom he had heard was looking to hire an attorney.  

“I was a reluctant law student in the sense that I thought so much of this stuff—largely commercial, probably my bias—it bored me,” Meltsner Said. 

Marshall was a few months away from being President John F. Kennedy’s judicial nominee to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit when Meltsner arrived at LDF during the summer of 1961. Jack Greenberg, Marshall’s second-in-command and imminent successor, hired Meltsner at a salary of $6,000 a year. 

“When [Greenberg] said $6,000, I couldn’t believe it. It was so much money in my head. So, I said—the foolishness that he immediately demolished—I said, ‘I could take less if you don’t have [it].’ That was my start at the Legal Defense Fund.”

Although Meltsner’s time working with Marshall was brief, he was around him long enough to admire his leadership and mentoring style, and how he used his storytelling skills to enhance his legal arguments and center the experiences of his clients.

“When most people tell stories or anecdotes, they’re telling you a story or an anecdote about that [subject],” Meltsner said. “Thurgood was really also telling you something about what he wanted to convey about your job.” For example, “He might tell a story about his life in Harlem, but he’s really telling you to rewrite that paragraph in a brief.” 

LDF had six attorneys at the time. Meltsner, then 24, was the second white lawyer at LDF after Greenberg. Meltsner shared a cramped office with Derrick Bell, who litigated scores of school desegregation cases. Bell would later become a renowned Harvard law professor and one of the founders of critical race theory. Meltsner appreciated the collaborative work environment.

“It was a time at LDF where you would stand in the hall and say something,” Meltsner said. “You didn’t have to send memos, and everybody would know what you were [communicating], what you were doing. And it was a time when it was very close knit. ... It was a very small operation with enormous responsibilities.”  

Meltsner said he also “thrived” working with a predominantly Black administrative staff, who “were an essential part of the work." 

"They were both hard-boiled realists and mother figures. ... They educated me about the ways of the African American world and about things that I was not fully aware of."

Greenberg’s management style and dedication to LDF’s mission also impressed Meltsner. When Greenberg succeeded Marshall as Director-Counsel in 1961, many Black leaders—including some LDF staff and board members—questioned the decision to give the job to a white man. Meltsner, who opined in his memoir The Making of a Civil Rights Lawyer that in his early days at LDF he saw himself “as a civil rights lawyer, not as a white civil rights lawyer,” believed Greenberg was, like him, committed to civil liberties, regardless of his race.

“Jack Greenberg, while a very different personality than Thurgood Marshall, was an excellent boss on many levels,” he said. “And he was a great litigator. But aside from that, the thing that sticks out most for me, because it impacted me so much, is that he cared in his unemotional way about the development of his staff. And when you’re a new lawyer doing hard work, tense-making work, but you have a boss who really cares about your development, about where you’re going to go in life as a lawyer, [it is] tremendously important.”

Meltsner’s mentor at LDF was James Nabrit III, whom he called “the most famous lawyer people have never heard of.” Over the course of his career, Nabrit won nine of the 12 cases he argued before the Supreme Court, including the important 1971 school desegregation case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. Meltsner fondly dubbed Nabrit a “civil rights diaper baby” given his pedigree: Nabrit’s father was a civil rights giant who argued the 1954 school desegregation case Bolling v. Sharpe and later served as the head of Howard University.

At LDF, Nabrit “was the person you went to when you had a technical issue,” Meltsner said. “He was the guy who would know what to do.”

One of Meltsner’s first big cases involved health care: Simkins v. Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital. Dr. George Simkins Jr., a prominent Black dentist in Greensboro, North Carolina, had a Black patient with a tooth abscess so severe that he needed emergency treatment in a well-equipped hospital instead of in his dentist’s office. However, the Black hospital in Greensboro could not provide the treatment. Simkins sought treatment for his patient at the state-of-the-art Moses H. Cone Memorial Hospital. The hospital accepted Black patients under strict conditions, but there was no room. Another nearby all-white hospital, Wesley Long Community Hospital, did not accept Black patients under any conditions.

In 1962, with LDF’s help, Simkins and other local medical professionals whose Black patients had been denied care sued Moses H. Cone and Wesley Long hospitals. Both hospitals had received federal funds under the 1946 Hill-Burton Act. The Hill-Burton Act helped finance new construction and upgrades at hospitals and other health facilities. In return, the hospitals were required to provide a certain amount of free or below-cost service to poor patients living in the area who needed care. But the law itself included a “separate but equal” provision for segregated health facilities.

“This was a revolutionary piece of legislation, and it raised the level of health care for both whites and Blacks in the South,” Meltsner explained. “But the price of getting it done was a ‘separate but equal’ clause, and there were no federal statutes that I knew of that had a ‘separate but equal’ clause.”

The case reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 1963. The Court held that the separate-but-equal provisions in the Hill-Burton Act were unconstitutional. The Court adopted Meltsner and North Carolina local counsel Conrad Pearson’s arguments. Simkins laid the foundation for Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which would prohibit discrimination based on race, color, or national origin by businesses that receive federal funding.  

In 1967, Meltsner scored another health care victory when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in Cypress v. Newport News General and Non-Sectarian Hospital Association that Riverside Hospital in Newport News, Virginia, which had received funding under Hill-Burton, could not deny staff privileges to Dr. George C. Cypress and Dr. Charles Waldo Scott, two Black physicians who had applied for staff memberships.

“It’s one thing to eliminate the law that says you can discriminate,” Meltsner said of Simkins. “It’s another thing to get a particular doctor on a staff. ... Both [Cypress and Scott] were board-certified [and] highly qualified. ... I had to get expert witnesses, and I was fortunate to get two of the most prominent doctors in America. ... They interviewed the two doctors at length and supported their applications. Again, the District Judge, who was very unfriendly, ruled against us. [But] in the Court of Appeals, Judge [Simon] Sobeloff,” as in Simkins, “again ruled our way. And that was an important precedent that helped Black physicians.” 

Meltsner litigated the majority of his cases in the South. This required the self-professed “terrible flier” to take uncomfortable plane rides to regions with judges who did not often believe racial discrimination was unconstitutional. In his work, he regularly partnered with courageous Black local counsel, for whom he held great admiration. Local counsel often risked the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups to defend their clients. 

“Their whole lives were considerable risks,” Meltsner said of the Black local counsel. And in many rural areas of the South, “By the early ‘60s, they were like community resources. … They were the go-to person for not just civil rights cases, but for your divorce, or your real estate deal, or your conflict with your neighbor.”

Meltsner recalled his first visit to the South, when as a 10-year-old child he took a vacation with his parents to Savannah, Georgia. Walking from the train, he noticed signs reading, “White Waiting Room” and “Colored Waiting Room,” and he asked his mother what they meant. A white man walking nearby who overheard the question “turned and looked at me in a way that suggested I was a piece of dirt.”

That experience stuck with him years later as he prepared to work on cases in the South.

“I knew what I was getting into,” he said. “But it was [still] an education.”

In addition to health care discrimination, Meltsner worked on a variety of other cases. His first capital case, Coleman v. Alabama, involved a young Black man named John Coleman in Greene County, Alabama. An all-white jury tried and convicted Coleman for first-degree murder of John Johnson, a white mechanic. Coleman was sentenced to death.

“He might have been guilty of a lot of things, but this was not the kind of case that—except in Alabama—where you would end up on death row,” Meltsner said of Coleman.

After several rounds of legal skirmishing in the lower courts, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari (meaning they agreed to hear the case) and scheduled oral arguments for March 25, 1964. Meltsner was 26 years old, and one of the youngest lawyers ever to argue a capital case before the Supreme Court. He worked with Greenberg and local counsel Orzell Billingsley Jr. to craft a legal argument that Coleman’s rights under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution were violated because Black people were “arbitrarily and systematically excluded from sitting on the grand jury which indicted him and the petit jury which convicted him.”

“The main issue was jury discrimination,” Meltsner said. “This [conviction] took place in a county where Blacks did not serve on juries, despite being the majority of the population.”

Meltsner’s first Supreme Court appearance did not unnerve him, despite the justices’ intense questioning during oral arguments.

“You didn’t know what was going to happen,” he said. “And then suddenly standing there, I, in a sense, knew more about the case than any human being. And I knew I’d over-prepared, and I felt fine.”

Meltsner reflected that the key to courtroom success across different issue areas was understanding the technical and procedural issues as well as being prepared for what will happen. He said the most important class he took in law school was a course on federal practice. This course “dealt with the procedures and technical issues that arose in litigating in federal courts. And the same thing is true with the Supreme Court practice. You had to know all sorts of inside baseball stuff that had nothing to do with highfalutin’ ethical, moral, or social issues. So, when I got these assignments in these cases, I focused on it.”

His preparation paid off: In a decision authored by Justice Tom Clark, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the judgment and remanded the case to the Supreme Court of Alabama. This meant that Coleman would have an opportunity to prove the practice of systematic exclusion of Black people from grand and petit juries. He eventually had a new trial where an all-Black jury acquitted him. 

The Supreme Court victory showed that Alabama’s decades-long, racist practice of excluding Black jurors had tainted Coleman’s case, and perhaps those of countless other Black persons sentenced to death like him. Coleman v. Alabama was among the cases that marked the beginning of LDF’s efforts to abolish the death penalty and eliminate racial discrimination from the courts—efforts that continue to this day. 

In 1967, under the guidance of LDF attorney Leroy Clark, LDF established the National Office for the Rights of the Indigent (NORI) as a dedicated department to litigate on behalf of poor people. Meltsner served as a co-director of NORI, which focused on capital punishment, housing discrimination, and employment cases for people in disadvantaged communities. 

Also that year, boxing heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali was convicted of resisting the draft for the Vietnam War and sentenced to five years in prison. The New York State Athletic Commission stripped Ali of his boxing license for failing to serve. Ali sued, and Meltsner worked with Ali’s lawyer, Chauncey Eskridge, to get his license reinstated in the case Muhammad Ali v. Division of State Athletic Commission. 

The man who had dodged gangs in his youth was now representing one of the world’s most famous and controversial athletes. Since there was precedent for denying a license to a person with a felony conviction, “we raised all the issues we could” in the complaint, Meltsner said. While drafting the complaint, Meltsner recalled a detail from decades earlier, when he and his father used to listen to Friday night fights on the radio. Meltsner had learned from his father that many boxers had criminal records. “And so I thought, ‘Well, you know, how come some of these guys who are famous fighters got licensed, but Ali wasn’t?’ Well, we knew why: He was a Muslim and a prominent Black person. And so, I snuck that into the complaint.” 

Meltsner’s assistant on the case, an indefatigable recent law school graduate named Ann Wagner, researched files at the boxing commission and discovered that 244 people with criminal records, including for serious crimes and military offenses, had been licensed. Meltsner included that information in an amended complaint. 

On September 14, 1970, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York held that the state had violated Ali’s constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause when it unjustly stripped him of his boxing license.  

After working at the organization for nearly a decade, Meltsner left LDF as a full-time attorney in 1970. He then spent nine years as a professor at Columbia Law School while continuing to handle occasional cases for LDF. He wrote part of the brief for the 1972 Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia, in which the Court ruled that the death penalty, as then administered, constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

While at Columbia, Meltsner also discovered a new passion: writing fiction. He authored two novels, Short Takes and Mosaic, that are loosely based on his work at LDF.

“The nice thing about writing fiction is that you don’t have to worry about footnotes, and nobody can tell you that what you just asserted is untrue,” he said.  

He also published nonfiction books, including his memoir and Cruel and Unusual: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment.

Looking back at his career, Meltsner spoke fondly of his time at LDF. Although the Ali case is often considered Meltsner’s most famous, he said he is most proud of the 1968 case Robinson v. Tennessee. Meltsner’s involvement in the case began when Nelson Robinson Jr. wrote a letter to LDF in which he described being convicted of homicide based on information the police surreptitiously gathered. Meltsner and attorney Anthony Amsterdam took the case to the Supreme Court. They argued that Robinson’s conviction violated the 1966 precedent of Miranda v. Arizona, which said that suspects detained by police must be informed of their constitutional right to a lawyer and against self-incrimination. The Supreme Court reversed Robinson’s conviction based on the papers alone, without holding oral arguments.  

“This is the case that I care most about because it was taking something [for] someone who had absolutely nothing, [had] no chances whatsoever. He found people who could help him. There was no money involved. And most important, justice was done,” Meltsner said. “When you have been before a judge in a case, or judges in a case, where there is no bologna, where they cut through the formal crap and they do what you regard as … ‘simple justice,’ boy, you feel good about the world you are in.” 

More than five decades after leaving LDF as a full-time attorney, Meltsner said he is impressed with how the organization has “managed to stay in the game” and that he appreciates the organization’s hard-fought wins and the challenges of litigating them. 

“When you reach my age, you note that people tend not to—today at least—appreciate the victories that took place and the importance of them,” he said. 

For example, he pointed to critiques of the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision. He acknowledged that Brown was imperfect and did not fully achieve the goal of desegregating schools, “but Brown was essential,” he emphasized, by “changing the consciousness and the attitudes of millions of people.”

Some civil rights victories take years to have a tangible impact, he observed, “and of course, the history of desegregation and education gives the truth to that. And yet, all these things somehow have produced a situation which is far better than things were when I got off the train in Savannah, Georgia, as a 10 year old.”