A CIVIL RIGHTS LIFE: NATHANIEL R. JONES. ANSWERING THE CALL: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE MODERN STRUGGLE TO END RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN AMERICA.

AuthorEntin, Jonathan L.
PositionBook review

A CIVIL RIGHTS LIFE NATHANIEL R. JONES. ANSWERING THE CALL: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE MODERN STRUGGLE TO END RACIAL DISCRIMINATION IN AMERICA. New York: The New Press, 2016.

Nathaniel Jones has had an extraordinary career. Highlights include serving as the first African-American Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of Ohio; assistant general counsel of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (informally known as the Kerner Commission); general counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and, for nearly a quarter-century, judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Now, at the age of ninety, Judge Jones has written an engaging, often impassioned memoir. (1) This book should be of great interest to anyone interested in civil rights, especially in the North and West, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (2) and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (3) And it should be of special interest to readers of this journal because Judge Jones has had a long connection with Case Western Reserve University School of Law. He hired several of our graduates as law clerks; one of them, Judge Kathleen McDonald O'Malley of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and formerly of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, gets a specific shout-out (p. 236). So do two former faculty members. (4) Judge Jones also served for several years as a member of the law school's visiting committee, and he was one of the early speakers in the law school's Frank J. Battisti Memorial Lecture series that was endowed by friends and former law clerks of the late chief judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio (p. 242). (5)

I

The title, Answering the Call, has religious overtones, (6) but Judge Jones seems never to have been inclined to the ministry. (7) Rather, "The Call" was the title of a document that played a key role in the formation of the NAACP. Issued on the centennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, this document urged the nation to renew the struggle for racial justice at a time when segregation seemed to be firmly entrenched (pp. 2-3). (8) Invoking the document that catalyzed the founding of the NAACP reflects Judge Jones's long connection with the organization, which dates to his teen years when he came under the wing of J. Maynard Dickerson, a black lawyer and entrepreneur in his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, who headed the local NAACP as well as the Ohio State Conference of Branches (pp. 34-35, 45, 61).

Dickerson got Jones involved in NAACP activities and made sure that the young man met national leaders, including executive secretary Walter White, assistant executive secretary Roy Wilkins (who later succeeded White in the top job), and other important figures (pp. 34, 59). Jones became president of the local NAACP youth council, helping to organize a series of protests against racial discrimination in parks, restaurants, swimming pools, and other establishments (pp. 38-39, 49-50, 54-55). (9) The group even engaged in sit-ins at least a decade before the iconic Greensboro demonstration on February 1, 1960, stimulated hundreds of similar protests (pp. 54-55). (10) All of these efforts achieved at least modest results. And as an undergraduate at what is now Youngstown State University after his service in the Army Air Corps during World War II, Jones organized a campus chapter of the NAACP that successfully challenged institutional discrimination (pp. 49-50). Along the way, he met an Antioch College student named A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., who became a lifelong friend and distinguished judge, first on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and then on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit."

Almost predictably, in light of his close relationship with Dickerson, Jones decided to go to law school. Especially influential in that decision was Culver v. City of Warren, (12) a successful challenge to the segregation of a municipal swimming pool in a community near Youngstown. The city leased the pool in early 1947 to a newly formed veterans group that refused to allow African Americans to use the facility. The Ohio Court of Appeals for the Seventh District concluded that the veterans group was "a mere agent" of the city, so the whites-only policy was unconstitutional. (13) Of particular importance, Jones had the opportunity to sit in on strategy sessions with the lawyers who were handling the case and also with Thurgood Marshall, who was not formally involved in the litigation but offered strategic advice to local counsel (pp. 62-65).

His deep roots in the community prompted Jones to stay in town and enroll in the now-defunct night law school that was started by the local YMCA many years earlier and since had become affiliated with his undergraduate college (p. 58). One of his teachers there was a young lawyer named Frank Battisti (pp. 98, 171). During his first year, the mayor--at Maynard Dickerson's behest--appointed Jones as director of the city's Fair Employment Practices Committee (p. 64). He remained in that position throughout his law school career and for a couple of years after he passed the bar exam, resigning in 1959 to open his own law office (pp. 77-78). After President John F. Kennedy took office, Dickerson began to lobby for Jones to get a job in the federal government. Those efforts paid off, and Jones became the first African American to serve as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Northern District of Ohio (pp. 82-84). (14)

After six years as an AUSA, Jones became an assistant general counsel of the Kerner Commission, which was established in the wake of the 1967 Detroit riots and other urban violence. In that position, he coordinated field teams to go to cities around the nation to obtain information related to the urban violence that had occurred over the previous several years and to coordinate commission hearings (pp. 86-93). (15) The commission ultimately concluded that white racism was primarily responsible for the riots and urged public investment to improve social conditions (pp. 94-95). (16)

Following his time in the U.S. Attorney's office and with the Kerner Commission, Jones left federal service and returned to private law practice in Youngstown. There he resumed his leading role in local and state NAACP activities (p. 97). This period in Youngstown turned out to be a brief interlude.

II

A

In late 1968, Lewis Steel, a staff lawyer in the NAACP's national legal department, published an article in the New York Times Magazine that strongly criticized the Supreme Court's record in civil rights cases. (17) Steel contended that the Court historically had shown little sympathy for racial discrimination claims and continued to rule against such claims. (18) Although the Court had rejected segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, (19) it had remanded the cases to the lower courts to formulate local remedies "with all deliberate speed," (20) which resulted in glacial progress toward desegregation. (21) Steel's boss, NAACP general counsel Robert L. Carter, had reviewed the manuscript and found it "terrific." (22) The board of directors disagreed. The next day, over Carter's strenuous objection, the board fired Steel. (23) The entire legal staff resigned in protest. (24)

Soon afterward, Jones received an offer to succeed Carter as general counsel. This would be challenging for anyone, as Carter was something of a legend: he was a highly respected lawyer who had spent almost a quarter-century with the organization, where he played a major role in devising the legal strategy in the litigation campaign against segregation and argued Brown in the Supreme Court (pp. 99-100). To his surprise, his mentor Dickerson strongly discouraged him from taking the job, but not because of the daunting prospect of replacing Carter (pp. 98-99). Dickerson was concerned that Jones would find it difficult to navigate the complex internal politics of the national organization. Jones says relatively little about those complexities, although he does discuss the controversy surrounding the Steel article (pp. 100-01) and also mentions the long-running tensions between the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund that eventually culminated in litigation between the two organizations (p. 99). (25)

Jones accepted the offer and spent the next ten years as the NAACP's general counsel. The best parts of the book chronicle this period. Some of the stories are offbeat, such as how the NAACP came into possession of the ashes of the writer Dorothy Parker (pp. 114-17); (26) others are moving, such as how Clarence Norris, the last surviving Scottsboro defendant, received a pardon from Alabama Governor George Wallace forty-five years after he and eight other young men were falsely accused of raping two white women and sentenced to death (pp. 117-23). (27)

B

The heart of the discussion emphasizes the NAACP's litigation against segregated schools not just in the South but also in the North and West. Judge Jones succinctly discusses legal strategy and school desegregation cases. This section focuses on strategy; the next section addresses some of the cases, especially those in Boston and Cleveland.

The discussion of strategy effectively reviews how Charles Hamilton Houston and his disciple Thurgood Marshall conducted the legal attack on segregated schools. That discussion might have made explicit that Houston's early emphasis on "the failure to make 'separate' truly 'equal"' (p. 128) focused on southern and border states which provided no graduate or professional programs for African Americans. (28) The issue was not "separate but equal"; instead, it was "separate and nonsexistent." (29) The first victories came in states that operated whites-only law schools and offered to subsidize African...

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