Much to Do About Something

 

He sits behind a desk in a sparsely decorated conference room and speaks in a soft and unassuming tone about some of his landmark legal victories. Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education in 1971. Griggs v. Duke Power Co. in 1971. Albemarle Paper Co. v. Moody in 1975. These were cases that helped quash overt forms of racism — not only in North Carolina, but nationally — strengthening laws against school segregation and employment discrimination.

 

“You recognized that many of the cases you were litigating were landmark and that you were really causing people to change their way of life,” he says, looking right through the writer as if he’s trying to focus on some faraway place. “I knew about the opposition in a number of states to efforts to integrate. I knew governors in Mississippi and Alabama and Arkansas, etc., had raised a lot of concern. I knew that whites, generally, were opposed to a lot of things we were trying to do. But I also knew that blacks were insisting on some opportunities themselves that they could not otherwise attain.”

 

There isn’t the slightest hint of bitterness in his voice as he recounts the price he paid. The time his law office was burned down? Or his car was firebombed? Or dynamite was thrown through one of the windows of his home? He addresses those incidents with intellectual detachment.

 

“You realized there would be some hostility,” he says. “You did the best you could to be prepared for it. You knew all along that there was opposition, and you just tried to keep going.”

 

He glances at his watch, leans forward in his chair and then excuses himself to go make a phone call. When he returns to the conference room several minutes later, he is carrying a stack of papers, which he plops onto the desk. With one eye on the writer and the other on his mountain of work, he continues the interview. Time is of the essence. Julius Chambers is 69 years old, and he still has a lot to do.

 

 

“You know about all the times Julius has been bombed and burned,” says George Daly, a semi-retired civil rights lawyer in Charlotte who has known Chambers since the late 1960s. “I mean, he’s got more grievances than most people, but he pays less attention to them than almost anybody. His parents must have been astonishing people.”

 

Astonishing for this reason: They had the audacity to believe that they, too, had a stake in the American Dream, even though they lived in a place and a time, racially segregated Mount Gilead, N.C., of the 1930s and ’40s, when society told them they didn’t. Chambers’ father, William, was an auto mechanic who didn’t make it past the third grade. He wanted something better for his four kids, and he knew education would be their means. William parlayed his limited resources into his own service station, saving all the money he could in order to send his children to private high schools that provided more opportunities for blacks than Montgomery County’s “separate but equal” offerings.

 

The American Dream was in motion, but when Julius’ turn arrived to go to boarding school, it screeched to a halt. “My father had worked on a truck for a white person in Mount Gilead and had about $2,000 worth of bills coming,” Chambers says. “The guy wouldn’t pay. My father went all over trying to find someone to sue this guy to collect his debt. Nobody would represent a black guy suing a white guy. My father came home and met with us to tell us he wasn’t going to be able to send me to boarding school. That was a sad occasion.”

 

Right then, Chambers realized what he was put on this earth to do: “I had to be a lawyer. And I had to help, particularly, black people who had the kinds of problems that my father experienced.”

 

Upon finishing at Montgomery County’s segregated public high school in 1954, Chambers attended North Carolina Central University, where he graduated summa cum laude and was president of the student body; then he attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a master’s degree in history; then he attended law school at the University of North Carolina, where he became the first African-American editor in chief of the school’s law review and graduated first in his class of 100 students; and then he attended Columbia University Law School, where he received his LL.M. In 10 whirlwind years, Chambers rose above the institutional racism of his youth and became a learned man.