Introduction
Shortly after Jack Warner, cofounder of Warner Bros. Studios, double-crossed his brothers, Harry and my grandfather Major, in May 1956 by secretly arranging to buy back his Warner Bros. stock and take over as president, Harry had a heart attack and then a stroke, from which he never recovered. Harry died on July 25, 1958, in California. His wife, Rea, bitterly said, “Harry didn’t die. Jack killed him.” After Harry’s funeral in Los Angeles, Major and Jack shared a limo. True to his vow, Major didn’t talk to his brother. For me, back in New York, life went on as if nothing had happened. I had seen my granduncle Harry only a few times, once in California when Major and my grandmother Bessie had visited his ranch, where he kept his stable of racehorses, and on another occasion in New York City. I worked that summer as a cub reporter on the weekly newspaper the Riverdale Press, and played tennis at Major’s Westchester country club.
There was little in my life—almost totally detached from the California Warners—that reminded me I was part of a motion picture family. My dad operated a drive-in theater in suburban Westchester County and owned a theater in Jacksonville, Florida, but that was nothing compared to the Warner empire.
Yes, I remained a beneficiary of the wealth spun off by Grandma Bessie. As a result my wife, Kitty, and I moved into our Central Park West apartment in 1966. But when it came to financial backing I had small change compared with two of Harry’s grandchildren, Warner and Linda LeRoy. My cousin Warner married and moved into the fabulous Dakota co-op a few blocks north of us, but in reality a world away. He also purchased an East Side movie house, with the thought that he could turn it into a playhouse where he could produce and direct shows. Instead Warner decided to become a restaurateur and turned the theater into a gorgeous restaurant, Maxwell’s Plum, with a spectacular Tiffany-glass ceiling, that became the talk of the town. When Kitty and I wanted a special dinner, we used our connection to get a prime table. But that was all. Warner was a mover and a shaker, and I was becoming a civil rights lawyer, helping those who moved and shook only when their lives became intolerable. We would also see Linda from time to time at Grandma Bessie’s with her husband, Mort Janklow, who became one of the city’s most-sought-after literary agents. From Linda we would hear a few pieces of gossip, like the time her granduncle Jack, whose eyesight was apparently failing, tried to pick her up at a social event. “Uncle Jack,” Linda had to say, “I’m your niece.” Jack stories, of course, shocked no one. We had heard that he had disinherited his son, Jack Junior, falsely accusing him of making a play for his fading-actress stepmother. Quite an evil man, that Jack Warner, I thought. Fortunately, however, I had nothing to do with him.
But then I did. My brother, John, who kept up some contacts with the Warner family, was happy to inform me after we moved into our apartment that Jack owned an apartment on Fifth Avenue, right across Central Park from us. High up in the tower of an architectural gem, the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, there he was, his picture windows, sparkling in the evening sun, looking down on us. In my imagination Jack was living like royalty, and I was always in his sights. I was sure Jack—who could not even identify his grandniece who had grown up around him—had no idea who I was and couldn’t have cared less if he had. But there he was, in his aerie, looking down on me, reminding me that I was a Warner too, although neither in name nor in family connections. Even when Jack died in 1978, more than ten years after my grandfather Major passed away and eight years after Bessie died, I still saw him there, in my mind’s eye, looking down, a ghostlike presence who had rained evil on his own family, reminding me of the two worlds I lived in—a heritage of upper-class privilege and my current life as a civil rights lawyer, putting all my Warner connections behind me.
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Fifty-three years ago I made the decision to join the legal staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a small band of like-minded lawyers dedicated to the fight for racial equality that was being waged in our nation’s courtrooms. Later, in private practice with progressive—and some would say radical—attorneys, I continued the struggle. The cast of characters sometimes changed from decade to decade. There are too many to name here, but they comprise every combination of race, religion, and gender. Many have since passed away. Some have told their stories; others have not. For those who didn’t, the loss is ours. The stories about what we lawyers tried to accomplish and what we actually achieved are important. Embedded in our efforts, they go a long way toward telling how we got where we are today in a country that is still racially divided. Because so many of these stories are being lost, it has become increasingly urgent for me to tell them as I seek to unravel that age-old question: How did I get involved in the first place?
To answer that question, this memoir takes me back to my childhood, when I first began to question the glimmers of racism that intruded upon my life. At the same time, under pressure from African Americans coming home from the battlefields of World War II, where they fought against racist ideologies, and supported by a growing cadre of idealistic white as well as black youth, the Movement—led principally by Martin Luther King, Jr., and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as well as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—confronted the outrages of Jim Crow in the South. Watching on television the killings and assaults they endured pushed the issue of racism into my consciousness. The mix was electric. It led me, right after graduating law school in 1963, straight to the office of the NAACP.
Working under NAACP general counsel Robert L. Carter, who had won twenty-one of twenty-two cases in the Unites States Supreme Court, I learned firsthand what an arduous task it was to use the legal system to enforce the Movement’s hardest-won victories and confront the segregation and discrimination that permeated every aspect of American life, in the North as well as the South. Taking on the hardest of cases, I knew the highs of winning and the lows of losing when courts of law turned their backs on racial inequality. Frustrated and angry, I vented my feelings in an article titled “Nine Men in Black Who Think White,” which was published in the New York Times Magazine in October 1968, after Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. Written with Robert Carter’s approval, it got me fired. In response Carter and the entire legal staff resigned, deeply disturbed that the NAACP, which was dedicated to fighting racism in all its forms, would come to the defense of a Supreme Court that had been called out for retreating from the opening it had helped to create in Chief Justice Earl Warren’s fine 1954 opinion in Brown v. Board of Education. The shock I experienced when the NAACP cast me off, and the fallout with the staff resigning despite our large and important caseload, was indescribable. Aware of the continuing need for Movement lawyers, however, I refused to be sidetracked and have practiced my craft in every conceivable forum from the Supreme Court to the state criminal courts, where I have defended innocent African Americans falsely accused of murdering whites.
* * *
To make sense of my feelings, which have led to my more than fifty years of civil rights work (which continues to this day), I have thought back to the Warner family from which I came, to the advantages being white conferred on me, and to the death of our family butler, William Rutherford, the year before I was fired.
Bill was black, and had worked for my family since I was a little boy on the gentleman’s farm in Hendersonville, North Carolina, that belonged to my grandfather, Albert Warner. Bill was a very special person who had given me love, care, and affection. And while it was not clear back then, that was the relationship that sent me on my path.
My bond to Bob Carter, a relationship that grew and deepened till the day he died in 2012, helped me develop the clarity afforded by distance. He, Kitty, and I spent many hours together, both in New York and on vacation. We talked about everything, and his feelings about race and prejudice were never more than a moment away from any conversation. I learned Bob was angry too. Unlike my anger, however, his sprang from facing the outrages of a hostile white world. As a result Bob felt that very few whites knew anything about the searing pain that racism caused. Our talks helped me better understand how black men often feel in America. I was angry and frustrated that we were not making the progress I’d hoped for when I joined the NAACP. But I was white, fighting an enemy that on a fundamental level included myself. Bob was equally frustrated and angry about how progress in the courts had come to a halt, and about the terrible poverty and lack of educational and job opportunities that afflicted African Americans.
I also saw Bob’s caring side, and how he could learn to trust a white man like me. And that experience of our endless conversations helped me to understand how many whites could be blind to their own prejudice, seeing themselves instead as being fair. Also, over the years, in a son-to-a-father way, I came to love Bob, and that helped illuminate my formative relationship with Bill Rutherford, our family butler.
At this point in my life, I am able to tell the story of why a white man who grew up wealthy might choose to spend most of his life working to advance civil rights law, representing clients and handling cases against the rich and the powerful. Another crucial undertaking here is figuring out what my work has meant and continues to mean within the framework of post-Movement civil rights enforcement. The personal conflicts caused by having so much while representing clients who couldn’t get a fair trial or sought in vain to get the smallest piece of the pie that was my birthright are always there as considerations, but what drove me to write this book is deeper: I wanted to share my experience so that others could see that they can make a difference, no matter where they’re from or what their background.
Copyright © 2016 by Lewis M. Steel