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Intellectual Boot Camp

and I lust for justice ……and I invent the mother of courageI require not to quit.¹

— JUNE JORDAN

In September of 1953, Fay joined nine women among over 100 students in the University of Chicago’s entering law school class. The progressive university had admitted women since its founding in 1902, although their attrition rate had always been high. Its first dean concluded coeducation was the wrong approach and, upon returning to Cambridge, experimented with a short-lived female-only law school.

Fay’s parents could take some comfort from the fact that Chicago boasted the third largest concentration of Jews in the world. Prominent Chicago labor lawyer Arthur Goldberg had recently served as President of the American Jewish Congress. (He would later be named a Supreme Court Justice and Ambassador to the United Nations.) Sam Abrahams may have been aware of physicist Enrico Fermi’s war-time nuclear experiments completed at the University of Chicago that permitted America to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki and usher in the atomic age. (Years later, the government revealed the location of Fermi’s makeshift laboratory in an underground squash court a couple of blocks from the law school.)

The city also had a large African-American population, renowned for gospel singing and innovative jazz. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, and Nat King Cole had honed their styles in Chicago. The “King of Swing” bandleader Benny Goodman hailed from the Windy City. He was born to a large Jewish family in a westside slum near the railroad yards. In the 1930s, Goodman introduced audiences at the historic Congress Hotel on Michigan Avenue to the first integrated big bands.

Fay harbored only a vague awareness of Chicago’s persistent racial divide, where tensions had begun mounting during World War I when the “Black Belt” south of the Loop could no longer accommodate newly arriving African-American families. Full scale riots had erupted in July of 1919, causing by far the worst racial violence Chicago ever experienced. Similar incidents of beatings, torture, lynching and arson across the country that summer of 1919 gave rise to the term “Red Summer” –- the most horrific interracial strife that the country endured in the twentieth century.

In the aftermath of Red Summer, many white homeowners put restrictive covenants on their deeds to prevent blacks from moving into their neighborhoods. Fay undoubtedly had an index card in her shoebox file with notes on Hansberry v. Lee, the ground-breaking 1940 United States Supreme Court case challenging Chicago’s restrictive housing covenants. As an avid reader, Fay was struck by Richard Wright’s Native Son, set in the South Side of Chicago in the ’30s. It narrated the powerful story of an angry black man raised in poverty and helplessness, who was then jailed for murder and rape. Fay later became fascinated by the details of her death row client George Jackson’s similar childhood in Chicago’s poor black neighborhoods in the 1940s and early ’50s. When Fay enrolled in law school Jackson was just twelve years old, a frequent truant in nearby city streets, while Fay remained in a world apart and still largely self-absorbed.

Focused on making an impression, Fay cut a striking figure as she entered the University’s Gothic village on the South Side to register for classes. She had abandoned her bangs and let her hair grow long. To new acquaintances, she projected the slender and willowy build of a dancer, though she still perceived herself as clumsy. Reed had exceeded her expectations. Fay had similar high hopes for the University of Chicago, but harsh reality soon dashed her fantasies.

The law school’s distinctive stone towers rose high above dilapidated two- and three-story wood and brick tenements. In the early 1950s, speculation on its precarious future hit Chicago’s newspapers. Without redevelopment of the neighborhood, there was little hope to attract needed funds and sufficient students. World War II had so decimated the law school’s student body that the board of trustees had considered its permanent closure.

Former Chief Judge Mary Schroeder of the Ninth Circuit later recalled that accommodations for women students at the University of Chicago Law School were “not for the faint-hearted.” Schroeder’s mother cried when she saw her daughter’s first apartment in an isolated tenement on 55th and Ellis Streets, which had been officially designated as graduate women’s housing. “The only reason she did not haul me out of there physically was because leaving my roommate there alone was tantamount to reckless endangerment.”²

Fortunately, Ruby Abrahams had no idea that her daughter’s new university sat right in the middle of a neighborhood surrounded by slums. Two years earlier riots had broken out in nearby Cicero when a black veteran and his family tried to move into an apartment. Governor Adlai Stevenson had ordered in the National Guard, marking the first time since the deadly 1919 race riots that troops had been required to end a racial disturbance.

Over time, Fay would question the university’s ownership of slum property. The city’s failure to plan for the enormous increase in its black population since the turn of the century confronted Fay and her classmates whenever they left the campus. The air in Chicago crackled with racial tension, but Fay did not focus on that at first. Fay’s life instead centered on the internal world of a brick building on the corner of Ellis and 58th Street. Unlike undergraduate courses, classes for the entire law school had been conducted for fifty years in that single imposing structure. A glass case in the lobby showcased Clarence Darrow’s collected works. Most new students shared both Fay’s excitement and fear of failure. Edward Levi, the first “home-grown” dean, was determined to elevate his alma mater to an intellectual rival of Harvard.³

Fay lived in the women’s dormitory at Blake Hall on campus, only a block away from the law school. Women were expected to follow the typical 1950s rules of modesty and decorum. The women in the class appreciated the couch in the ladies’ rest room and the attention of male students willing to help them with their studies. Most had husbands or boyfriends who were law students or lawyers. Only half of the ten women in Fay’s class of 1953 ended up graduating; the others gave in to the pressure to quit and become homemakers.

Even those who earned their degrees had limited expectations. Scholarship recipient Kathleen Bouffe, who also had been a friend of Bob Richter’s at Reed, was one of the few who planned a career in law. Kathleen had received strong encouragement from a successful woman lawyer her grandmother knew. For a long time, no law firms in Chicago accepted women law clerks. Only recently had the individual influence of male relatives begun to extend the old boy network to sisters or daughters.

Soon the enormity of the undertaking overwhelmed Fay. She began to entertain grave doubts about her decision to attend law school. Everything was so structured, with so much required preparation for class that last-minute cramming was not an option. Fay was unused to struggling in school. Here, she could even imagine herself failing. One promising first year woman classmate from Cornell did not even last six weeks. Another classmate, Alice Wirth, only nineteen, found herself smoking three packs of cigarettes a day to deal with the pressure. Alice’s late father had been a highly regarded professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. As a family friend, Dean Levi had admitted Alice without a B.A. Some males were solicitous, others resentful. Sexism had been endemic at the law school from its earliest days.

Fay did not distinguish herself among her peers at the time as being politically outspoken or radical. The rigid structure of law school provided no opportunity for anyone to express any political opinions in class. Students simply were called upon in lectures to answer precise legal questions posed by the professors. Yet Fay did stand out as more passionate about everything — she was always more dramatic than her fellow classmates whether they were discussing the law, politics, recently read works of fiction or music.

The professors used the prevailing and intimidating Socratic method. Dean Edward Levi taught “Elements and Materials of the Law.” Every year he opened the first day by announcing sternly, “This is intellectual boot camp. You will never be the same again.”⁴ Still, Levi was popular with students because he had a sharp wit and played no favorites. In fact, most of the faculty called on men and women equally, unlike a Harvard law professor in that era who never called on women at all except on Ladies’ Day. Adding to students’ anxiety, professors gave them little feedback during their first year. Only two courses gave midterms. Fay and another friend, Suzanne Brussel, persuaded second year student Bob Hamilton to conduct review sessions for them. The future law professor had already developed an extraordinary grasp of complicated issues and a knack for getting to the heart of them.

Professor Karl Llewellyn wanted to impress on all new students that the law did not operate in a vacuum. Oral argument before a judge was like asking a couple if their house was clean. The wife might look at the windows, the husband might have a different focus. Both would then make an assumption about the whole house. His point: students needed to learn how each judge made decisions.

As the fall progressed Fay felt a spiraling loss of self-confidence. With her history of undisciplined study habits and frenzied last-minute all-nighters, she struggled and despaired. Fay found a new friend in Bob Hamilton’s wife, who was in her class. Dag and her husband had to pinch every penny while living in a ghetto neighborhood on $44 per month. They had qualified for prefabricated housing for married students — a two-room unit with no kitchen and only a hotplate to cook on. Fay had trouble imagining living in such a primitive setting. Yet, while offering sympathy to her new friend, Fay provided Dag only a partial glimpse into her own unhappy history and strained family situation. Fay was not about to divulge to Dag a description of her torrid affair with a married Marxist. Throughout her life, Fay followed a pattern of distinguishing among confidantes. She cultivated socially conformist friends as well as radicals and selectively held back key personal information from those she feared might be appalled by the truth.

Everything seemed to conspire to defeat Fay’s high expectations of a glamorous adventure. During her first quarter at law school, Fay repeatedly wondered aloud if she had made a serious mistake and should have pursued a career as a concert pianist after all. Wherever she could find a piano on campus she entertained friends with popular and classical music. Even into the wee hours she could be heard pounding the keys in the social hall of the men’s dormitory. Was she destined to follow her mother’s bidding? Music was a powerful outlet for her emotions, but Fay yearned for something more soul-satisfying.