Creating LDF South

This chapter describes Chambers's creation of a black-led and racially integrated law firm, for all intents the first such institution in the United States. In 1967, Chambers recruited two junior attorneys to his office: Adam Stein, a white George Washington University Law School graduate who had interned with Chambers in the summer of 1965, and James Ferguson, an African American from Asheville, North Carolina, who had just graduated from Columbia Law School. The three would form the nucleus of a powerful civil rights law practice for years to come. In 1968, after recruiting a young white Legal Aid attorney, James Lanning, Chambers formally created Chambers, Stein, Ferguson & Lanning. In 1969, African American attorney Robert Belton, a North Carolina native who was LDF's leading Title VII litigator, also joined the firm. So highly reputed was Chambers as a civil rights litigator, and so central was his firm to the wider LDF campaign in these years, that the firm was informally acknowledged as "LDF South."

Changing Charlotte

Chapter 5 focuses on Chambers's impact on his new hometown, Charlotte. Chambers worked easily and well with the city's two leading civil rights figures, state NAACP director Kelly Alexander, Sr., and Rev. Dr. Reginald Hawkins, who was both younger and more convinced of the usefulness of protest and direct confrontation. In a major step, Chambers renewed litigation to desegregate the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County school system. He meanwhile led a successful effort to force desegregation of a popular high school all-star football game held annually in Charlotte. Although Chambers and Charlotte's handful of additional black attorneys were mostly shunned by the city's white lawyers, U.S. District Judge J. Braxton Craven Jr., impressed by Chambers's talent, appointed Chambers to the part-time position of U.S. Commissioner. Press coverage brought Chambers increasingly into the public eye. In November of 1965, Chambers was again the target of racist violence when his home, and those of Alexander, Alexander's brother, and Hawkins, were attacked with dynamite. National media coverage of the bombings threatened the image of Charlotte crafted by white elites as a moderate, business-friendly city largely free of racial conflict.

Julius Chambers Emerges

This chapter recounts Julius Chambers's achievements during college, graduate school, and law school. After graduating summa cum laude from North Carolina College for Negroes and obtaining his masters degree in history at the University of Michigan, Chambers was admitted to the University of North Carolina School of Law, desegregated the prior decade by federal court order over the forceful objections of University and North Carolina officials. Chambers, despite being ranked 112th among the 114 students admitted to the Class of 1962 and notwithstanding a generally unwelcoming, often hostile atmosphere at the Law School and on campus, became editor-in-chief of the Law Review and graduated first in his class. This chapter also details Chambers's marriage to Vivian Giles and the couple's decision to move to New York City when, after no North Carolina law firm would grant Chambers a job interview, Columbia Law School quickly stepped forward with the offer of a one-year fellowship.

Epilogue

The epilogue examines the legacy of the efforts by Julius Chambers and his firm through the mid-1970s. In 1984, Chambers, widely acknowledged as an exceptionally skilled civil rights litigator and legal strategist, succeeded Jack Greenberg as director-counsel of Legal Defense and Education Fund. From that post Chambers coordinated the legal struggle for civil rights for nine years, mostly attempting to fend off the increasingly reactionary policies of the Reagan administration and of the legal positions on race advanced by the Supreme Court under Chief Justice William Rehnquist. In 1993, Chambers resigned as LDF director-counsel and returned to North Carolina, where he was installed as chancellor of his undergraduate alma mater, now North Carolina Central University, in Durham. Chambers retired in 2001and, after an absence of nearly twenty years, returned to Charlotte where he rejoined the firm on a limited basis. He meanwhile served the inaugural director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, housed within the UNC Law School. Chambers, whose efforts advanced federal civil rights law to its apogee in the early to mid-1970s and who thus stands out as the most important African American civil rights attorney in the generation following Thurgood Marshall, died on August 2, 2013.

Securing the Foundation

This chapter describes the growth and consolidation of the Chambers law firm in the first half of the 1970s. As the firm hired new lawyers, it maintained a roughly equal balance of white and black attorneys. Growth gave rise to certain tensions, including those between the all-female staff and the firm’s all-male lawyers as a consequence of the firm's inattention to the issue of gender equity. The firm suffered some financial pressure, the result of diminished reimbursements from the LDF, waning fees as Title VII litigation wound down, and Chambers's continuing reluctance to prioritize financial gain over the firm's core mission of service to the African American community. Racial violence rocked the firm when, in February of 1971, an arsonist largely destroyed the firm's offices. No arrests are made. After the firm relocated to temporary quarters in an aging Charlotte motel, Chambers, several of his partners, black physicians, and other black professionals collaborated to build finance and build East Independence Plaza, a multi-story office building that opened in March of 1973, the first building of its type in North Carolina owned and operated by African Americans.

Fighting the Uneven Battle

This chapter describes Chambers's efforts to enforce Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in restaurants, motels, and other places of public accommodation, against attempts to circumvent the new law's broad reach, confirmed by an earlier U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The Charlotte YMCA argued for a "private club" exemption under Title II, but quickly abandoned that claim and agreed to desegregate when Chambers filed suit. Chambers also sued the Raleigh YMCA, which sought to prevent desegregation of its exercise facilities on a similar claim notwithstanding that the YMCA's officers had desegregated their cafeteria and rental lodging. After a loss at trial before an unsympathetic U.S. District Court judge, Chambers and LDF won an unqualified victory on appeal before the Fourth Circuit. Chambers also prevailed in a suit to open Moore's Barbecue Restaurant in New Bern to black customers despite Moore's claim to have arranged his business affairs so as to be free of any connection to "interstate commerce," a key element of the Supreme Court's basis for upholding Title II. Here, Chambers overcame a hostile federal judge who willingly ignored a fundamental judicial canon by repeatedly communicating privately about the case with Moore's attorney.

Opening Up the Workplace

This chapter describes the contributions of Julius Chambers and his partners, most particularly Robert Belton, to the LDF's national litigation campaign to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which new law outlawed racial discrimination in the workplace effective July 1965. In October 1965, Chambers filed the nation's first-ever Title VII suit, and soon after filed three additional cases which, when ultimately decided years later, substantially ended overt racial discrimination in American workplaces. These critical victories included Supreme Court triumphs in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971) and Albermarle Paper Co. v. Moody (1975), and the Fourth Circuit's Robinson v. Lorillard Corp. (1971). Griggs, recognized as the era's landmark employment ruling, established the "disparate impact" standard for adjudicating employers' use of "intelligence" tests and other pre-employment screening mechanisms. Together, Griggs, Moody, and Robinson did much to define the federal courts' interpretations of Title VII in a fashion that both opened workplaces to black job seekers and offered some compensatory remedy to those who had suffered under racially discriminatory workplace schemes. By these efforts, Chambers, his partners, and the LDF would leave the American workplace forever changed.

Launching the North Carolina Campaign, 1964–1965

This chapter describes Chambers's return to North Carolina in July 1964, and his success in quickly elevating North Carolina to the forefront of the LDF's national litigation campaign to translate provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to overcome racial segregation in public accommodation, schools, and employment. Chambers, who opened his small office in Charlotte the same week that Lyndon Johnson signed the new Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, quickly assumed leadership of the Legal Redress Committee of the North Carolina NAACP, which had long spearheaded civil rights litigation in the state. Chambers barnstormed North Carolina to inform black citizens of their rights and prospective new remedies afforded by the Civil Rights Act and soon launched a spate of new legal actions targeting the state's largest school district and employers. In January of 1965, as Chambers addressed a rally at a black church in New Bern, his car was dynamited; local legal authorities showed little enthusiasm to prosecute the Klan-affiliated assailants.

Child of the Jim Crow South

This chapter tells the story of the Depression-era, Jim Crow world from which Julius LeVonne Chambers emerged, recounting his childhood, family, and formative experiences. LeVonne Chambers (Julius Chambers's birth name) was born in October 1936, in the tiny crossroads town of Mt. Gilead, in rural Montgomery County, North Carolina. No black child born to such a time and place easily escaped the fetters imposed by the South's rigid racial segregation. Not one black child in ten in Montgomery County completed high school in those years; not one in one hundred graduated from college. Yet, by some combination of ability, effort, and good fortune, and with the unstinting support of his parents and community, Chambers set himself on a path that would lead to, at age thirty-four, to the appellant's lectern at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Julius Chambers in New York

Chapter 3 describes Chambers's two years in New York 1962-1964, the first at Columbia Law School and the second as the first-ever civil rights intern at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund ("LDF"). Earlier the LDF, under the leadership of Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, pioneered systematic strategic litigation for social change and led the legal campaign that culminated in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which signalled the beginning of the end of state-sponsored apartheid in the American South. In 1963 LDF director-counsel Jack Greenberg selected Chambers as the first intern for a new program designed to offer prospective civil rights attorneys front-line experience at LDF headquarters in New York City plus three years of subsequent modest funding to support the establishment of new Southern law practices as allies in civil rights litigation. Chambers found the year at LDF exhilarating. Working with LDF's highly-motivated and exceptionally talented staff attorneys, Chambers traveled the South to assist with LDF cases, gaining experience and a clear vision of his professional future.