Читать книгу CALL ME PHAEDRA - Lise Pearlman - Страница 18

∎ 8 ∎

Joining The Movement

There’s a battleOutside and it is ragin’….[T]he present nowWill later be pastThe order isRapidly fadin’

— BOB DYLAN, “THE TIMES THEY ARE A’CHANGIN”

Fay and Marvin’s circle of Leftist friends paid close attention when Dr. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) instigated the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Fay and Marvin joined thirty activists who formed East Bay Friends of SNCC. With mailers, radio pitches, house parties and garage sales, East Bay Friends of SNCC sponsored hundreds of events over several years’ time. In the process, they accumulated a long list of contributors and achieved a reputation for being among SNCC’s most productive financial supporters in the nation. In the fall of 1963, SNCC sent word out to Northern students and lawyers to help reverse seven decades of voter suppression. Dubbed the Mississippi Summer Project and later “Freedom Summer,” the project’s goals were threefold: registering voters, organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as an alternative to the white-controlled Democratic Party of Mississippi and conducting Freedom Schools. Coming out alive from some areas of the state would itself be an achievement. Training would include the Magnolia State’s grim history of race violence and what to do if arrested. The planners were also concerned about how local blacks would react to Northern white volunteers, particularly white women who might be seeking their “summer Negro.”¹

Fay and Marvin joined the growing faction of lawyers lobbying the National Lawyers Guild to endorse the project. Fay had joined the fifty-member San Francisco branch of the Guild shortly after starting at the Garry, Dreyfus firm in 1961, but was rarely active in it while her children were toddlers. In 1962, the FBI duly noted her as a new Guild member. Fay enjoyed the ringside seat Guild membership gave her to the fight among Old Leftists over shifting the entire Guild’s focus to civil rights abuses in the South. Though SNCC welcomed the Guild’s help in launching Freedom Summer, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund threatened to cancel its own participation. Dr. King’s SCLC was also unwelcoming.

Undaunted, Fay’s mentor Barney Dreyfus, the long-time executive director of the San Francisco Guild chapter, had made civil rights work a priority when he assumed leadership of the national association in 1963. Dreyfus then collaborated with Detroit labor lawyer Ernest Goodman, the Guild’s new president, and his partner George Crockett, the Guild’s first black vice president. Crockett proposed to head a new Guild outpost to document abuses in Jackson, Mississippi — “the belly of the beast.”² Fay and Marvin eagerly recruited young blood to support this effort.

Momentous changes were already in the air. Responding to a dire report from the federal Commission on Civil Rights on the situation in Mississippi, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. President Johnson would soon add his signature to abolish all remaining Jim Crow laws, prohibit mandatory racial segregation in schools, housing, or hiring by the government or private sector. Mississippi officials geared up as if they were refighting the Civil War.

Two teenage black civil rights workers, Charles Moore and Henry Dee, had just gone missing in May of 1964. In early June of 1964, Fay joined the other members of her office at a luncheon at the Sheraton Hotel to hear Goodman speak about the Guild’s summer plans in the Cotton Belt. Ironically, three months earlier Fay had gone to the Sheraton to observe picketing and arrests of activists protesting the hotel’s own racist hiring policies.

Goodman sought volunteers to offer legal assistance in Mississippi during the coming summer: one or two weeks each; pay your own way. Fay was inspired to sign up. Marvin agreed to watch Neal and Oriane in her absence. He planned to go to Mississippi on a different week that summer, equally impressed with the historic occasion it presented. In late June, three other civil rights workers were declared missing, two whites and one black student — New Yorker Andrew Goodman and CORE workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney. At George Crockett’s request, the trio had planned to investigate the burning of a church in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The assumption among SNCC staff and volunteers was that all three were dead. The mutilated bodies of Moore and Dee, along with two unknown other bodies, would be found that summer in the Mississippi River while search teams looked for Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney.

The danger did not dissuade Fay from her plans to go to Jackson in August. Before she left, she began volunteer work in her own office library, doing research for the Guild’s Mississippi Project. Under Barney Dreyfus’s direction, Fay helped address the constitutional issues raised in three cases arising from prosecutions of volunteers in the City of Greenwood, including SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, charged with willfully obstructing public streets and a creative array of other charges. To the Guild lawyers, the official’s real purpose was obvious — to intimidate local blacks from registering to vote.

Less than a week before Fay’s departure for Mississippi, searchers found the bodies of the three missing civil rights workers buried in a red clay dam in Neshoba County. When Fay arrived on August 10, 1964, tensions in Jackson remained high. Local newspapers reinforced the hostility that filled the air. The Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News repeatedly referred to the 1964 summer volunteers as “unkempt agitators” and “race mixing invaders.”³ Crockett and his volunteers kept risks down by sleeping on cots in the Guild’s new office.

During Fay’s short stay, local toughs beat a voter registration worker over the head with a baseball bat outside his office; others shot at a carload of volunteers. No one saw who set crosses on fire in front of the hotel where many visiting lawyers, doctors, ministers and news correspondents stayed. A city commissioner speculated that blacks had likely burned the crosses themselves to “agitate trouble.”⁴

Five days after Fay’s arrival, on the evening of August 15th, a black man was shot while sitting in a parked car in Greenwood. Segregationists targeted Silas McGee for trying to integrate “whites only” movie theaters. On August 16th, several hundred blacks gathered at a local church to protest McGee’s shooting and were met by Mississippi police in full riot gear. The FBI responded slowly. Its agents preferred to document suspected subversives like Fay, noting the dates of her short visit to Jackson, Mississippi, to work at its newly opened Guild office.

Shortly after Fay returned, Marvin went to Mississippi to take depositions to support suits challenging the way state and local taxes shortchanged black neighborhoods. Nearly half of the state’s black housing units lacked piped water; almost two-thirds had no flush toilets or lacked other municipal and state services routinely provided to white neighborhoods. The pervasive antagonism, the smell of fear and the risk of death in Mississippi left Fay and Marvin with the shared impression of having just been observers in a war zone.

On her return, Fay felt energized. She relished seeing the Berkeley campus develop into a hotbed of Movement fervor. One of her new acquaintances, Mario Savio, a twenty-year-old junior at Cal, had just been named SNCC’s spokesperson on the Berkeley campus. An FBI agent showed up when they both spoke at a Berkeley middle school about Mississippi Freedom Summer and noted their radical affiliations.

When Mario returned to Berkeley in September of 1964 from Mississippi, he became incensed that his own university was banning all political activities, including solicitation of SNCC volunteers and funds to support civil rights efforts. In mid-September Mario helped lead a demonstration and was suspended with five other students. That led to more demonstrations and arrests. Peter Franck, a new Guild Board member recruited by Fay and Marvin, had just set up his first law practice in Berkeley. Franck began representing students in the dispute.

On December 2, 1964, thousands of students amassed at noon on the plaza outside Sproul Hall to protest the threatened suspension of Mario Savio and other student activists. Savio then gave his famous call to action:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop … to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.⁵

When he finished, Savio and singer Joan Baez began singing “We Shall Overcome” as they led more than 1000 students inside the building to occupy all four floors. The students set up study areas, a first aid station, a food station and space for recreation. Some, for inspiration, watched Operation Abolition, a slanted HUAC documentary widely disseminated to sway public opinion against the San Francisco protesters on “Black Friday,” May 13, 1960, that had also involved students from Cal. The FSM demonstrators planned a prolonged protest until the administration heeded their demands.

Over six hundred uniformed police officers showed up that night to reinforce the University and Berkeley Police Departments as they carried out orders from Governor Edmund G. Brown for the largest mass arrest in California history.⁶ Savio had earlier contacted Bob Treuhaft, who arrived just in time to become the first arrestee. Inside Sproul Hall, the police then arrested everyone they saw as they worked their way down from the top floor. By the time the police arrived, Joan Baez was among those who had already left. Men and women were separated, fingerprinted and searched, then loaded into buses and paddy wagons. The men headed for the Berkeley City Jail, the Oakland City Jail or the Santa Rita Rehabilitation Center. No one knew where all the women had been taken. Bob Treuhaft went with the first batch to the Santa Rita jail, as did Mario Savio. A borrowed office in Wheeler Hall was immediately dubbed “Legal Central.”

One of the earliest calls for help went out to Fay. She rushed over. The student in charge, Milton Hare, had no idea who had called this pony-tailed, Leftist attorney. She looked under thirty, dressed like a student in a pale cotton work blouse and pants. Her skin glowed. Fay appeared like a ray of sunshine — beautiful, warm and knowledgeable. Everybody at Legal Central secretly fell in love with her. Milton said, “You couldn’t help it.”

Milton and Fay started making phone calls and got almost forty lawyers to offer free representation to the arrestees. Fay then tracked down the whereabouts of the arrested women being held in an armory south of the Oakland airport. When they got word that Santa Rita was ready to release the arrestees on bail, Milton had been awake for at least forty hours. He and Fay gathered up the paperwork, Milton borrowed a co-worker’s Volkswagen and Fay hung on white-knuckled and silent while Milton drove like a maniac. (Running another errand, later in December, Milton totaled that same car and was sidelined with injuries.)

The Santa Rita jail was surrounded by barbed wire. It had previously been an army installation and appeared quite intimidating. When they arrived at the entrance gate, Fay took charge. She opened her billfold for the guards, reached past Milton, stuck it out the driver’s window and said, “We’re lawyers for the Berkeley arrestees.” They were waved through. This ploy worked at other checkpoints, including the main reception desk. Fay and Milton were permitted to speak for half an hour to a large crowd of unwashed, sleep-deprived students in a sparsely furnished detention room. While Bob Treuhaft remained fuming in a nearby isolation cell, Fay explained the bail bond process and assured the arrestees they would be released promptly. A week after the demonstrations, negotiators reached an agreement with the administration. The university backed down. Political speech would be permitted on campus starting January 4, 1965.

After Fay moved to a larger Berkeley apartment, she decided to hold a Seder for SNCC friends at her home. She incorporated into it references to Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement. Jewish activists had, by then, been in the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement for decades, empathizing with blacks because of shared histories of bigotry, slavery and violent death. That spring of 1965 Fay was more upbeat than she had been in several years. Despite Marvin’s involvement in a serious relationship with another woman, he and Fay maintained strong ties through their political activities and shared parenting of Neal and Oriane. By then, Fay had gotten over Stanley Moore. When Marvin began to talk more seriously about divorce, Fay campaigned hard to win Marvin’s return and prevailed. One spring day, she excitedly burst into Barney Dreyfus’s office to announce that she and Marvin were getting back together.

The Stenders celebrated their reunion by leasing a house on Grant Street in the Berkeley flats that had previously belonged to a friend in the Guild. It was the one Fay would still occupy when she was shot in 1979. Located in an area her parents had always looked down upon, the gray, two-story, five-bedroom house was not stylish and had no central heating. But it stood in a sociable, biracial neighborhood and came with an affordable purchase option. Fay loved the plum tree in the front yard.

The Stenders wasted no time making their new living room a gathering place for Leftist friends, galvanized by the escalating Vietnam War. Holding meetings at home was far easier on Fay. Her kids could simply go in and out. Potluck barbecues at the Stenders were the norm long before most people considered the idea. Fay rarely cooked and felt little urge to clean her cluttered house before inviting friends over.

That summer of 1965, Peter Franck and fellow civil rights activist Aryay Lenske had an idea for a new project they discussed over breakfast with Marvin and Fay and a few other young Turks from the local Guild. Franck had begun handling conscientious objector cases under the tutelage of Frances Heisler, who had been among the first lawyers to take such cases during World War II. Now in semi-retirement, the Austrian-born pacifist resided in the wealthy coastal town of Carmel. Heisler had a rich friend who offered to help bankroll Franck’s proposal to set up an umbrella organization to oversee the defense of draft resisters and other anti-war demonstrators. Fay and Marvin suggested expanding legal assistance from just representing draft resistors to include the Movement’s wide range of social and political causes. Over the Stenders’ breakfast table, the gathered friends gave the proposal the ambitious title “Council for Justice” and considered who else to recruit.

The CFJ would be run by an executive committee. With proper coordination, they could avoid repeating past mistakes in discrimination suits against the Sheraton Palace and Auto Row in San Francisco and the Free Speech Movement (FSM) case in Berkeley. One of their members, Beverly Axelrod, had almost gone bankrupt in aggressively defending the San Francisco protest prosecutions the year before. In the FSM case, Axelrod and lead counsel Mal Burnstein had opted instead for a judge trial, greatly surprising prosecutor Lowell Jensen. Peter Franck had assisted the defense, biting his tongue as a lawyer too green to voice his serious misgivings about the decision to waive a jury. The grueling trial lasted most of the summer of 1965, drew little public attention and resulted in the judge imposing some heavy sentences. The lawyers vowed never to forego a jury again in a political case.

The original aim of the Council for Justice was to provide legal support for the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), formed earlier that year by two anti-war activists. Co-chairs Jerry Rubin and Robert Hurwitt hoped to launch the world’s largest anti-war demonstration, convinced that by dramatically increasing the visibility and numbers of those opposing the war, they might force withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam.

A thirty-six-hour VDC teach-in held in May 1965 had already put Berkeley “on the war-protest map”⁷ with total attendance exceeding 35,000 people. The CFJ executive committee made a detailed plan of action assigning different roles to various lawyer volunteers. Marvin was designated as “bail central” — the source whom lawyers stationed at the jailhouses would consult to arrange for bail money. Fay would play the safer role of dispatcher, along with Guild lawyer Al Brotsky.

On the date of the march, more than ten thousand demonstrators walked without incident until they were attacked by Hell’s Angels near the Oakland border. Jerry Rubin and his fellow planners wanted to mount an even larger parade in late November. Fay and Marvin helped prepare a complaint challenging Oakland’s denial of a permit, which Peter Franck and Barney Dreyfus then successfully pursued in federal court. The resulting late November march from the Berkeley campus to DeFremery Park in North Oakland drew the largest crowd yet to engage in an anti-war rally in the entire Bay Area. Flush with success, VDC planned more protests for 1966.

Source: Peter Franck

Fay’s former law partner Peter Franck. (Photo circa 1981.)

As a Cal undergraduate in 1957, Peter Franck helped found SLATE, the first Progressive campus political party to emerge in the Cold War era. SLATE brought the world’s issues to campus, opposing discriminatory housing, the nuclear bomb, the death penalty, and HUAC persecutions. In 1964, as a new attorney, Franck represented leaders of the Free Speech Movement. Then the Stenders invited him to join the San Francisco Lawyers Guild board, where he led young Turks prodding the Guild to become more activist. In 1965, Franck began representing the rock band “Country Joe and the Fish,” launching his long, successful career in entertainment law. That same year, he and Aryay Lenske cofounded the Council for Justice over breakfast at the Stenders.

Meanwhile, a major new opportunity surfaced for the Council for Justice. From 1962 to 1965, labor leader Cesar Chavez had organized farm workers in Tulare County in the Central Valley of California, assembling a large union with the help from outside activists. Through Frances Heisler, Chavez soon approached Peter Franck and the Council for Justice for legal help in support of strikers. Franck sent new Guild member Alex Hoffmann 250 miles south from Berkeley to Delano. The Viennese-born Yale Law School graduate quickly gained the respect of his Latino clients. Soon, a political firestorm enveloped the union. Escalating boycotts had spread to cities across the country and catapulted the farm workers to national attention, gaining support from traditional labor, civil rights and religious groups. New York Senator Bobby Kennedy and California Senator George Murphy scheduled hearings in Sacramento for March of 1966 on the problems of migratory labor, prompting the strikers to plan a three-hundred-mile peregrinación (march) from Delano to the hearings. With help from everyone in the Council for Justice, the pilgrimage proved wildly successful, convincing Senator Kennedy to endorse the union’s objective of a $1.25 minimum wage and a guarantee that farm workers could engage in collective bargaining.

Peter Franck also recruited Marvin to represent Chavez in defense of criminal charges arising from his union organizing. The labor leader was charged with illegally used a bullhorn from a truck on the highway to address farm workers in the fields. Fay worked behind the scenes to research and draft the brief challenging the constitutionality of the anti-bullhorn ordinance.

At the same time, in Washington D.C., the civil rights cases Fay had begun work on in Mississippi in the summer of 1964 had just reached an ominous crossroads: the United States Supreme Court granted state officials a hearing on their request to reverse a partial victory Crockett’s legal team had obtained. Fay likely contributed one unusual argument before the Supreme Court. The high court still had one traditional Jewish seat among the nine old men. It was now occupied by Abe Fortas, her late friend Hammy’s ex-partner. To capture Fortas’s attention, the Peacock brief compared African-Americans’ plight in the United States to Jewish flight from bondage in ancient Egypt, using the same theme as Fay’s Seder for SNCC friends the prior spring.⁸

Fay flew to Washington, D.C. to hear the historic oral argument in the Peacock case the weekend of April 23–24, 1966. It was the best time of year to visit Washington, when the temperature was moderate and the cherry trees were in bloom. The imposing neoclassic temple across the street from the Capitol had only been completed in 1935. It was younger than Fay. Climbing the wide steps of its main entrance, visitors could read the words “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW” carved in the façade.

The immense courtroom was on the first floor, facing a main hall filled with statuary. High on its north and south walls were two forty-foot friezes depicting great lawmakers throughout history. One could easily pick out Moses with the Ten Commandments in Hebrew. A bronze railing separated public seating from the central rows reserved for the Supreme Court Bar, which now included Fay. On Monday, April 25, the Peacock team had an opportunity to observe other oral arguments. In the center sat Chief Justice Earl Warren himself. Fay easily recognized the spry William “Wild Bill” Douglas with his shock of white hair, whom her friend Bob Hamilton had clerked for a decade earlier. Fifty-year-old former athlete “Whizzer” White stood out as well. Fay also recognized Hugo Black, now eighty, whom she had spilled wine on at a reception at the University of Chicago when she was a law student.

On Tuesday morning, Fay could hardly contain her excitement. For the occasion, she had bought a stylish suit accessorized with an orchid, likely bestowed by a chivalrous New Orleanian colleague to adorn the only woman on the Peacock legal team. Another civil rights case was heard first. Fay watched Stanford Professor Tony Amsterdam argue for the integration of Atlanta restaurants. Fay left feeling giddy from the experience. She boarded the plane home still wearing her orchid. It had been fifteen years since Fay informed her good friend Pip, “I want to change things.” Her fervent desire seemed about to come true.