The Good Girls Revolt by Lynn Povich Page B

a picket line around Hecht’s department store, creating one of the biggest civil rights campaigns at the time (even entertainer Josephine Baker dropped by). “You could go in there and use your charge-a-plate [a predecessor to credit cards], but you couldn’t use the bathrooms,” Eleanor explained in her biography, Fire in My Soul by Joan Steinau Lester. Terrell sued the store, citing the District’s 1872 and 1873 open accommodation laws, which made segregation in public accommodations illegal. In January 1952, after six months of protests, Hecht’s opened its cafeteria to blacks but without stools, forcing people to eat standing up. On June 8, 1953, the US Supreme Court affirmed the District’s laws and Hecht’s was forced to integrate.
    A proud member of Washington’s black bourgeoisie—and a debutante—Eleanor went to Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she could earn money in a work-study program. In December 1955, just months after Eleanor arrived on campus, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking a city boycott led by the twenty-six-year-old Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Only a freshman but already head of Antioch’s NAACP chapter, Eleanor raised money and conducted local sit-ins for nearly a year. In November 1956, the Supreme Court upheld the Fifth Circuit Court ruling that Montgomery’s segregated-bus law violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process and equal protection clauses. “It was,” Eleanor later said, “the defining experience of my life.”
    After Antioch, Eleanor went to Yale University, where she earned two degrees: a master’s degree in American studies in 1963 and a law degree in 1964. The only other black student at the law school was Marian Wright (Edelman). Mentored by Pauli Murray, a black feminist lawyer who was getting an advanced legal degree, Eleanor started a New Haven chapter of CORE (Congress on Racial Equality). In the summer of 1963, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s voter registration drive in Mississippi, where Medgar Evers drove her to meet key civil rights workers, and later helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. “I grew up black and female at the moment in time in America when barriers would fall if you’d push them,” she told Lester. “I pushed . . . and then just walked on through.”
    When we met her, Eleanor was only thirty-two years old but she was already an extraordinarily accomplished lawyer. After clerking for Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., the first black judge on the US District Court for Pennsylvania’s eastern district, she joined the ACLU in 1965, where she made her mark. She wrote amicus briefs for Julian Bond (who was refused his elected seat in Georgia’s House of Representatives), Muhammad Ali (who refused military conscription based on his Muslim faith), and Adam Clayton Powell (who was expelled from Congress for alleged abuses). Eleanor also represented some prominent racists. In 1968, she successfully defended presidential candidate George Wallace when New York City Mayor John Lindsay initially barred him from speaking at Shea Stadium. But her most famous case was in October 1969, when she represented the National States’ Rights Party before the US Supreme Court. A white supremacist group, the States’ Rights Party had been kept from rallying in Maryland on a prior restraint ruling. “I jumped at the opportunity,” she recalled, “because if there is a constitutional or civil liberties point to be made, you make it most convincingly when you stand up for the right of somebody who disagrees with you. You must obviously be serving a higher cause—and I love that idea.” She won that case.
    Next to those high-profile clients, we felt inconsequential, but according to Eleanor, “no case I handled was more important than Newsweek . Defending George Wallace was nothing but an old-fashion First Amendment case. Same with the white supremacists,