[Marxism] Charles Morgan Jr.

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, January 10, 2009
Charles Morgan Jr., 78, Dies; Leading Civil Rights Lawyer
By ROY REED

Charles Morgan Jr., a leading civil rights lawyer who was often vilified 
and threatened by fellow whites during the turbulent 1960s in the South 
but who pressed on to win a landmark lawsuit that helped establish the 
so-called one-person-one-vote rule, giving blacks more equitable 
representation in legislative districts, died Thursday at his home in 
Destin, Fla. He was 78.

The cause was complications of advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, a 
family spokesman said.

In 1962, Mr. Morgan and other young Alabama lawyers filed a lawsuit to 
force the reapportionment of the Alabama Legislature. The rural counties 
of south Alabama had many times the voting strength of the more urban 
north, allowing the old planter elite to control the Legislature. In 
1964 the Supreme Court ruled in the case, Reynolds v. Sims, and ordered 
a more equitable apportionment. Along with similar cases from other 
Southern states, Reynolds established the doctrine known as 
one-person-one-vote, which increased the political power of 
African-Americans and urban voters.

Among his many cases as a civil rights lawyer, Mr. Morgan sued to 
desegregate his alma mater, the University of Alabama; forced a new 
election in Greene County, Ala., that led to the election of six black 
candidates for local offices in 1969; and successfully challenged 
racially segregated juries and prisons.

After the civil rights movement began to subside, Mr. Morgan, as a 
leader of the American Civil Liberties Union, fought three celebrated 
court cases involving protests against the Vietnam War. He represented 
Muhammad Ali in his successful court fight to avoid being drafted. He 
represented the civil rights activist Julian Bond in the early stages of 
an ultimately successful lawsuit after Mr. Bond had been denied a seat 
in the Georgia legislature because of his antiwar views. And he defended 
an officer when he was court-martialed for refusing to help instruct 
Green Berets headed for Vietnam.

Mr. Morgan lost the Green Beret case, but his attack on the military 
judicial system brought international attention to the restrictions on 
the free speech of soldiers.

Mr. Morgan, who was known as Chuck, also led the A.C.L.U. effort to have 
President Richard M. Nixon impeached.

Mr. Morgan, one of the most colorful lawyers in a region known for them, 
first came to public attention because of a speech that got him run out 
of his hometown, Birmingham, Ala. The day after the Ku Klux Klan bombed 
the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killed four black girls at 
Sunday school in 1963, he had taken to a podium and blamed the pillars 
of Birmingham for the killings: politicians who catered to racist votes 
and newspaper editors, church leaders and business leaders who refused 
to take responsibility for the pervasive racial hatred in the city.

“Every person in this community who has in any way contributed during 
the past several years to the popularity of hatred is at least as 
guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb,” Mr. 
Morgan said.

The speech destroyed his budding law practice, which he had already 
damaged by taking on unpopular civil rights cases, and it led to death 
threats against his family. He moved to Atlanta to become the Southern 
director of the A.C.L.U. in 1964, the same year he published a book on 
his Birmingham experience, “A Time to Speak.”

Charles Morgan Jr. was born March 11, 1930, in Cincinnati and reared in 
Kentucky. When he was 15, the family moved to Birmingham. He met and 
married Camille Walpole at the University of Alabama, where he earned a 
law degree. They had a son, Charles Morgan III. Besides his wife and his 
son, Mr. Morgan is survived by four grandchildren.

A bulky man, Mr. Morgan held court every day after work in his smoky, 
whiskey-stained office in Atlanta or, if he were traveling, propped up 
in a hotel bed in some distant town. His visitors were fellow lawyers, 
reporters, civil rights advocates and liberal politicians who hovered at 
the center of the 1960s civil rights movement. He enjoyed performing, 
whether in the company of friends or in the hearing room of the Supreme 
Court.

He moved into the campaign against the Vietnam War in 1967, when he 
represented Capt. Howard Levy at his court-martial at Fort Jackson, S.C. 
Captain Levy had refused an order to teach dermatology to medical aidmen 
in Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, saying he considered them 
“killers of peasants and murderers of women and children.” A military 
court sentenced him to three years in prison; he served more than two 
years and became a cause célèbre in the antiwar movement.

Mr. Morgan’s best-known case after he became head of the Washington 
office of the A.C.L.U. was Mr. Ali’s. Citing his Islamic religious 
beliefs, Mr. Ali had claimed conscientious-objector status in refusing 
to be drafted and had been stripped of his heavyweight boxing title 
because of that stand. After Mr. Ali was convicted of draft evasion in a 
lower court, Mr. Morgan and the A.C.L.U. took over an appeal and argued 
the case before the Supreme Court, which ruled in Mr. Ali’s favor in 1971.

Mr. Morgan’s growing disaffection with the national headquarters of the 
A.C.L.U. came to a boil in early 1976. At a Washington party, a New York 
liberal told him that he opposed Jimmy Carter of Georgia for president 
because, he said, “I could never vote for anybody with a Southern 
accent.” Mr. Morgan replied, “That’s bigotry, and that makes you a bigot.”

When the encounter was reported in The New York Times, Mr. Morgan was 
reprimanded by Aryeh Neier, the executive director of the A.C.L.U., and 
Mr. Morgan resigned.

Mr. Morgan spent the rest of his career in private practice. He earned 
large fees and incurred criticism from old friends when he represented 
large corporations against what he portrayed as government efforts to 
abridge their rights. He once represented the Tobacco Institute in its 
opposition to no-smoking laws. He also won major cases for Sears, 
Roebuck & Company over accusations of race and sex discrimination 
brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

But it was as an effective voice for civil rights and equal treatment 
under the law that Mr. Morgan was most remembered in public statements 
after his death. Less frequently noted was that he also considered 
himself a proud son of the South and an optimistic champion of its 
better nature.

“The civil rights movement is freeing the Negro from the bondage of 
slavery,” he once told a group of Southerners in the 1960s, “and the 
South is being freed from the bondage of the Negro, and the nation will 
be freed from the bondage of the South. And then you know what we’re 
going to do? We’re going to recreate America.”

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