Conscience of a Lawyer review

Few Americans are familiar with the name, Clifford Durr, and that’s a shame. A tireless advocate for civil liberties, Durr is one of America’s unsung heroes. John A. Salmond’s book, Conscience of a Lawyer, is an excellent starting point for learning about this unusual man who at great risk to his own reputation, fought to defend the constitutional rights of others.

The term, “conscience of a lawyer” sounds oxymoronic, but in Durr’s case it was true. In the interests of upholding the Constitution, he fought for people who could never afford to pay him. Few attorneys would make such sacrifices, but then Durr didn’t hold the profession in high esteem, himself. However, he did have a love for law.

People with a passing knowledge of Durr likely only know him as the white Southern attorney who posted the money for Rosa Parks’ bond after she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Jim Crow era Alabama. That alone is fascinating -- a white man living in the 1950s segregated south standing in favor of racial equality. But by that time, Durr was near the end of his career. His record of fighting for the underdog was long established.

As a young lawyer, he was a New Deal warrior in FDR’s administration. He helped prepare U.S. industry for transition to a wartime economy as entry into World War II loomed closer. While serving as a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) during the 1940s, he fought corporate monopoly of the radio airwaves in favor the public interest. Upon leaving public life in Washington D.C, Durr worked on behalf of unionists and took on cases no other lawyer would touch – of people tarnished by anti-communist witch hunts and African-Americans bullied by racist cops and courts.

Salmond sticks primarily to the public side of Durr’s life. He gives a window into the strains that work, health problems, career and financial setbacks put on his marriage and family, but overall the book is about Durr’s professional life. That is as it should be. He’s not a well-known figure and his public battles against the Establishment of his day are the things Americans should know about. There probably wouldn’t be anything juicy to write about anyway. He was a devoutly religious family man married to the same woman for nearly 50 years and his life was free of scandal, unless one considers what people of the time considered to be his scandalous behavior in treating African-Americans and left-wingers with respect.

The book is insightful in describing how his forward thinking evolved, despite the influence from his family and community. The contradictions between Durr’s career and the culture that formed him make for the most fascinating elements of the book. He was born to Southern gentility, the grandson of affluent slave owners who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, and he retained pride in his Southern heritage throughout his life. As a young man, he subscribed to the paternalistic view of African-Americans he had been enculturated into. Yet, in later adulthood, Durr harbored more enlightened, egalitarian views and tenaciously defended African-Americans who had been wronged by the system. Yet because of the way he was raised, Durr probably never felt comfortable around blacks.

His philosophical views were unique and interesting. Durr never considered himself to be a soldier in the Civil Rights movement. Upholding the rights of African-Americans, to Durr, was a civil liberties issue. He defended them, not because they were black, but because they were American citizens. Durr reasoned that if the constitutional rights of one group could be violated, then the rights of all Americans were vulnerable.

He held unique views about the South. As one born and bred in that region, he took personally the South’s failure to become more tolerant, feeling like he had failed too. Interestingly, while so much of the South seemed backward, he reminded people of its more positive contributions in its history – the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers.

Having worked in the news media, I find his views regarding broadcasting to be amazing and more relevant now than ever. Today, the FCC is nothing more than a rubber stamp for corporations. Durr believed the airwaves belonged to the people, that there should be some restraints on advertising and that space should be reserved for news, educational and cultural programming that served the public interest. As an FCC chair, he constantly challenged corporate mergers and decisions that he felt would take away local autonomy and silence dissenting views, maintaining that the airwaves should be open to a diversity of opinion. His progressive views earned him the umbrage of the broadcast industry, and maybe that’s why there is no one in power fighting for those First Amendment principles today. Few people are going to take on the corporate behometh, and that’s why we have a vapid, hyper-saturated, yet homogenous Media Industrial Complex today. Durr’s take on the media as a public interest would be revolutionary today, but it’s a common sense view in need of revisiting. At least, public TV and radio exists as part of his legacy.

Durr was both Christian and liberal, making his views extremely relevant in 2010. Today, when the Religious Right has hijacked the word, “Christian,” the term seems incompatible with “liberal.” Durr, however, felt that civil liberties and the teachings of Christ went hand-in-hand. His progressive views took him out of good stead with others in his Presbyterian congregation -- people just as prejudiced, judgmental and retrograde as a lot of church members today. After leaving town to defend people branded as communists in a kangaroo court, Durr returned to church and found the Sunday school class he taught to be empty. I’m a churchgoer and Christ follower, myself, and I wonder if I wouldn’t meet the same kind of reaction. It pains me, but I know some people at my church have shared racist chain e-mails about Mexicans and Middle Eastern Muslims. I also know that a member of my church has “Ann Coulter quotes” as a link on her Facebook page. Like Durr, I don’t think Christian love and hatred go together, but apparently churches have been on the wrong side of history for a long time.

As one studying to become a teacher, I want to guide young people toward discovering the lessons of history. Even kindergartners could take something from Durr’s story. The idea of stepping outside your comfort realm, helping people who may be different from you and refusing to stand by when bullies threaten others – that’s a powerful concept. Most adults don’t want to get involved, but hopefully we can counter the mind-numbing effects of an overly saturated media and impart a sense of civic responsibility in the next generation. By exposing students to little known heroes like Durr, we can help raise the level of social consciousness and awareness.

Best line: “Without ever arguing the shame and superstition of institutional religion, he drew sustenance from the Gospel and for him Thomas Jefferson and the First Amendment were the secular equivalents of universal values.” -- Journalist I.F “Izzy” Stone, commenting on Durr after his death in 1975.

Gateway Reading: Outside the Magic Circle by Virginia Durr. Clifford Durr’s wife was even more diehard in her support of social justice and racial equality than he was. More gregarious and outspoken than her somewhat reserved husband, she was also a product of the Old South oligarchy and had to unlearn prejudice just as he did. Her autobiography is thought-provoking and the account of her social activism from the New Deal through the Civil Rights era is riveting.

Bus Ride to Justice by Fred Gray. He is known today as The Civil Rights attorney, a legend who represented Martin Luther King, Jr., the Freedom Riders, Selma-to-Montgomery marchers and victims of the Tuskegee syphilis study. But in 1955, he was a young, wet-behind-the ears attorney fresh out of law school – one of only two African-American lawyers in Montgomery, Alabama. He was the front man in representing Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but behind the scenes he had a lot of help from Clifford Durr.