Читать книгу CALL ME PHAEDRA - Lise Pearlman - Страница 19

∎ 9 ∎

Unfulfilled

Sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out, one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.¹

— RAINER MARIA RILKE, “SUNSET”

Just a day after the Peacock oral argument, without explanation, a bare majority of the Supreme Court dismissed from its docket another pending civil rights case. The case permitted punitive damages against the NAACP. The four dissenting justices warned that the high court’s action paved the way for “crushing verdicts that may stifle organized dissent.”² Still, Fay retained faith in the judiciary to advance civil rights.

The Vietnam Day Committee had just held another major peace rally in April. This time arrested demonstrators were advised to plead guilty to most of the minor offenses, pay fines and receive no jail time. Charles Garry represented them with Fay’s assistance on one key issue: challenging a city ordinance against the use of a sound truck without advance permission from the local chief of police. Fay had handy her First Amendment research for Cesar Chavez’s case. Unlike in Tulare County, where Alex Hoffmann had warned Fay and Marvin that the local municipal court judge was “a son of a bitch,” the Berkeley judge readily agreed that the Berkeley ordinance was invalid. At least one anti-bullhorn ordinance was now history.

There was no shortage of potential cases for the Council for Justice. They represented grape boycotters arrested for leafletting cars in a Safeway parking lot and for protest “shop-ins” where they abandoned full baskets in the grocery store’s aisles. Francis Heisler handled tax work for pacifist clients like Joan Baez, who sought refunds based on conscientious objection to the Vietnam War. Assisting Heisler, Fay added to the celebrities among her growing list of contacts. Meanwhile, as legal costs mounted, the CFJ Executive Committee orchestrated a series of fund-raisers, including a brunch Fay and Marvin held at their home for Cesar Chavez.

On June 20, 1966, the Supreme Court issued several rulings from its spring session, including Peacock. By a five-to-four vote, the Supreme Court ordered the Peacock case sent back to the Mississippi state courts — ensuring years of delay before federal courts ever took a look at the claimed wholesale violations of the defendants’ civil rights. The dissent penned by Justice Douglas captured the frustration of Fay and her co-counsel at this defeat: “[T]o deny relief [is] … to aggravate a wrong.”³ Activists had already turned to Congress to provide more relief through the hotly contested Civil Rights Act of 1965. The direction racial confrontations would take remained to be seen.

One major court battle lost, Fay soldiered on. Back in Tulare County, Cesar Chavez still faced potential conviction for the use of his bullhorn in recruiting union members. When the local judge denied relief in the summer of 1966, Marvin appealed, relying on Fay to write the brief. The following year, Marvin and Peter Franck would fly down to Fresno in Franck’s Cessna to handle oral argument. The pair later received all the public credit for Chavez’s ultimate victory. Still, Fay could take private satisfaction in her key role in persuading the appellate court to repudiate its own prior position: “The Tulare ordinance presents a great opportunity for discrimination, political preference and the type of censorship that is repugnant to the very concept upon which our free form of government is founded.”⁴

This victory was a confidence builder for Fay. By the time the opinion issued, however, the Council for Justice had long ceased to exist. Back in the summer of 1966, it had become clear that the group was but a small band-aid for Cesar Chavez during a time of transition to in-house lawyers with help from a new state legal assistance program. By October of 1966, the CFJ collapsed under mounting debt and closed its doors. In December, Alex Hoffmann turned over his remaining matters in Delano to new counsel and headed home. Ancient Spartan warriors went off to war directed to come back with their shields or on them. Alex Hoffmann, suffering from a slipped disc, came back flat on his back.

* * *

As the CFJ was on its last legs, Fay was preoccupied by her parents’ decision to move permanently overseas. Still conservative in his politics, Sam disliked Fay’s growing recognition in the Berkeley community as a proponent of Leftist causes. When meeting someone new, he bristled at being identified as “Fay Stender’s father,” emphatically telling his wife and close friends that was not why he had come into this world. Sam decided to retire young. He and Ruby had traveled abroad often in recent years whenever Sam was hired to design plants for manufacturing asbestos insulation materials or consulted on existing factories. The couple had grown particularly enamored of life in the Basque city of Bilbao. But the move was not to be.

Sam’s own father had died at sixty-two and Sam had a premonition he would die at that age as well. In September of 1966, Sam fell ill and his doctors scheduled immediate surgery. Sam looked at his watch as he entered the operating room. He checked it again as soon as he awoke. Sam realized from the little time that had passed that the surgeon had found his abdomen filled with tiny asbestos fibers and hopelessly closed the incision again. The diagnosis of terminal mesothelioma came three months before Sam’s sixty-second birthday. Many of his old colleagues from the war days were then dying of cancer as well. Sam grew despondent, lost faith in his religion and refused to see a rabbi as he lay dying.

Meanwhile, Fay’s days grew increasingly hectic — crammed with part-time work, her children’s music lessons, dance classes, sports, and political get-togethers. A young mover-and-shaker then lived behind the Stenders, law student Neal Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt threw frequent parties. Fay relished adding him to her growing network. Ambitious and talented, within little more than a decade Goldschmidt would hold a cabinet position in President Carter’s administration and later be elected Governor of Oregon. Still, Fay missed the electricity of the Council for Justice and Friends of SNCC.

By mid-1966, local support for SNCC had dissipated after SNCC purged its ranks of white activists. A turning point came in early June, following a voter registration “March Against Fear” to Jackson, Mississippi, by James Meredith, the first black student admitted by Ole Miss. On the second day, a sniper wounded Meredith with a shotgun blast. Dr. King and SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael decided to continue the march for Meredith. Carmichael was arrested and decided it was time to announce a new strategy. He then sent shock waves across the country from the Greenwood, Mississippi, jail by making an historic “Black Power” speech in which he repudiated Dr. King’s pacifist approach to civil rights.⁵

Despite their stark differences on domestic strategies, Dr. King later joined forces with Carmichael in openly opposing the Vietnam War. The two helped lead peace marches on April 15, 1967, in New York and San Francisco that, combined, drew over 250,000 supporters, including Fay and Marvin. The FBI kept busy, noting the names of all the professionals who now openly opposed the war.

As more young men publicly burned their draft cards or otherwise resisted the draft, Fay focused her practice on representing them. She wrote a how-to article for Guild lawyers, exploring all the different angles one could pursue if time and money permitted. Yet the results ultimately demoralized Fay. While she delayed or thwarted the 1-A classification of middle class whites, young men of color often took their place on the front lines in Vietnam. “I knew for every one [case] I handled, there were many Third World People who really needed a lawyer and couldn’t get one.”⁶

Fay soon had a confidant at work in Al Brotsky, a transplanted New York Jew who joined the Garry firm in mid-1967, evicting Don Kerson from the office next to Fay’s. Brotsky had already met Fay and Marvin through the Lawyers Guild. The jovial, happily married labor lawyer was then in his forties. With both kids now in elementary school, Fay finally began working at the firm full-time, including frequent Saturday mornings. Al occasionally asked Fay for research on a labor or personal injury case. Fay still found working with Barney Dreyfus on death penalty cases the most thrilling. It also raised her stature among Leftist lawyer friends.

Yet, stretched in two directions, Fay found her situation increasingly unrewarding. Even on weekends, the only offspring welcome at work were Al’s teen-agers, who covered the phones for absent staff. Al noticed Fay’s growing despondence and provided a sympathetic ear. Her home life was miserable. Marvin was absent long hours, uncommunicative and having another affair. That did not surprise Al, who could see how Fay’s intensity might be overwhelming.

Fay also confided to Al her growing frustrations with her role at the firm. She saw no prospects for partnership and felt mired in a rut worn between the library and her typewriter. Other women in their small Leftist community had already made substantial impact on the world, though most were a generation older than Fay. Decca Mitford and Elsa Knight Thompson, the former BBC announcer who became KPFA’s Public Affairs Director, were internationally renowned. Ann Ginger had just founded the Meiklejohn Institute for civil rights research. Dobby Walker was a name partner in the Treuhaft firm. Like Ann Ginger, Walker had garnered national recognition for her Guild work.

Fay most envied the achievements of Beverly Axelrod, who was eight years her senior. Axelrod, recently divorced, had raised two sons while practicing law and achieving extraordinary accomplishments for the Movement. She had risked jail in Louisiana for the Congress of Racial Equality, coordinated the 1964 Sheraton Palace and Auto Row employment discrimination lawsuits in San Francisco, defended Free Speech Movement protesters at Cal, and championed farm workers through the Council for Justice. Axelrod also traveled to North Viet Nam in 1965, where she met with Foreign Minister Madame Binh of the provisional revolutionary government, and followed up by organizing the first American anti-war protest to include women and children.

KPFA Public Affairs Director Elsa Knight Thompson (1906–1983). (Photo circa 1964.)

Source: Chris Koch, “Who Stole My Country,” https://chriskochmedia.com/2016/03/11/who-stole-my-country-48-huac/

Source: Elijah and Deborah Wald http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2009-11-05/article/34033

Alex shared a two-bedroom apartment in Berkeley with Elsa. She, like other close friends and family, called him by his nickname, “Sasha.” Alex later became a close confidant of Huey Newton. On Newton’s release from prison in August 1970, Elsa and Alex’s apartment was the first place he stayed.

The following year, Beverly Axelrod was once again in the spotlight after she signed up a serial rapist at Folsom as one of her new clients. Inspired by Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver had begun writing in prison about his fixation on white women, which Cleaver viewed in retrospect as politically motivated. Cleaver was aware that convicted Lover’s Lane rapist Caryl Chessman, the infamous “Red Light Bandit,” had written four best-selling books while on death row in the 1950s. Cleaver believed his own work had similar potential. He wrote to every criminal lawyer listed in a directory, offering an interest in his manuscript as compensation for helping him win his freedom. Axelrod read his powerful essays and began corresponding with Cleaver. As she worked to gain his release, Axelrod fell in love with Cleaver. This new romance was spurred in part by Cleaver’s resemblance to Beverly’s recent lover Reggie Majors, a prominent black journalist who had refused to leave his wife to marry Beverly.

Axelrod sent best-selling author Norman Mailer parts of Cleaver’s manuscript and letters. With Mailer’s strong endorsement, she got the essays published in Ramparts magazine. By the time Axelrod obtained Cleaver’s release from Folsom in December of 1966, his essays had won him a national following and a job offer from Ramparts. Within months, Beverly’s friends in the Lawyers Guild gathered to celebrate publication of Cleaver’s essays in the book, Soul On Ice, dedicated to Beverly — his new love. As Fay joined friends toasting the happy couple, she hungered for more meaning in her own career. Fay had no idea her chance for similar glory lay just around the corner.