'The Great Pool Jump'
Celebrates Great Civil Rights Lawyers
-- And The 'Liberation' of Southern Pools
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesse-kornbluth/the-great-pool-jump-celeb_b_526537.html
Jesse Kornbluth
April 6, 2010
Seriously long ago -- in 1970 -- I reviewed "Feelgood: A trip in time
and out" for the Boston Globe. I can't tell what knocked me out more,
this astonishing novel about a young man who dropped out of Harvard
to go South and work in the civil rights movement or the author,
Peter de Lissovoy, who had the guts to drop out of Harvard, go South
and risk his life working for civil rights. A blazing talent, a home
run of a debut --- then de Lissovoy disappeared.
And now he's back. Stephen L. Saltonstall, my college roommate and
literary co-conspirator, sent me his review of a new book that Peter
edited and then self-published in an edition of 500 copies. It sounds
like another stunner --- an important chapter in American history,
lovingly told.
All books are special, shards of a writer's life and times. A Peter
de Lissovoy book set in the South in the 1960s is all that, and
something more --- he seems to be able to write only about big, bold
characters playing for the highest stakes. But let me get out of the
way, so Stephen can present Peter's first book in four decades.
--
Despite our own self-important rhetoric, the dream of criminal law as
the engine of what we once naively referred to as "social change" is
largely dead. Today the craft of criminal defense is at its best a
finger-in-the-dike operation, helping individuals but rarely making a
larger societal dent. At worst, defense lawyers have become mere
systemic conveniences that help the government's trains run on time.
This was not always so. In "The Great Pool Jump", criminal defense
stalwart Dennis Roberts, who now practices in Oakland, California,
tells of his time in the civil rights movement and his internship
with C.B. King, one of America's greatest
lawyers-that-you-have-never-heard-of. In 1963, King was the only
black attorney in southwest Georgia, and one of only three in the
entire state. Roberts, a student at Boalt Hall and an activist in the
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was chosen from a
pool of more than 100 applicants to work for King.
Roberts' arrival at King's office in Albany, Georgia was less than
auspicious. The stairway leading to King's office reeked of urine.
And when King's secretary first laid eyes on Roberts, who had a deep
tan and "Jewfro," she remarked to her boss, "Damn, C.B., I told you
he was a white boy!"
King was the only lawyer around with the inclination and the sheer
guts to defend the civil rights workers who were trying to register
voters and integrate public accommodations. This was dangerous work.
One evening, when King had the temerity to visit a client in a local
jail, the Sheriff hit him over the head with his cane, breaking the
cane and covering King with his own blood. When asked why he had done
this, the Sheriff replied, "Because he is a nigger and I am a white man."
The Georgia legal establishment was predictably hostile to this
"uppity" black lawyer, who had been admitted to practice only because
the bar exam grading was anonymous and the powers-that-be couldn't
tell --- and wouldn't have been able to believe --- that the person
with the highest score in the state was black. The "cracker" judges
went ballistic at the very sight of King entering the courtroom,
dressed to the nines in a silk suit and carrying a fancy leather
legal folder, followed by Roberts, the subservient white law clerk,
weighed down by a mountain of law books.
And yet King managed, through guile, humor, and a superior
intelligence, to be extraordinarily effective. One of King's favorite
ploys was to preface his legal arguments with a solemn but faux
tip-of-the-hat to a make-believe Confederate hero. Roberts quotes a
sample of this inspired double-talk as follows: "As Beauregard
Bucknellington Wellington, III, a famous Confederate who liberated
the City of Dogpatch, Georgia once said: 'No matter how we might
personally feel about Nigras, our constitution requires that all be
treated equally and this, most unfortunately, includes Nigras....'"
He would describe white residents of the deep South as "The Denizens
of that Republic so Dear to the Hearts of Every True Southern
Patriot, the Most Noble Jurisdiction of [plug in the name of a
state]." Professor Irwin Corey couldn't have done better. But
according to Roberts, the white knights of Georgia's apartheid
justice system ate up this kind of stuff, even though it was so hard
for him to refrain from laughing that "There was more than one time
when I left the courtroom, the insides of my cheek or tongue bleeding."
King was also a master of the lost art of exploratory
cross-examination. In a rape case, where the black defendant had
allegedly used a knife to hold his white victim at bay, King asked
the complaining witness what the accused had done with the knife
while he was taking off his clothes. The witness replied, "I held it
for him." Case dismissed. In another case, King was able to establish
during a dramatic and embarrassing (for the prosecution) cross that a
white racist witness was illiterate and had lied when he swore in the
jurat of his affidavit that had read it and that its contents were true.
Roberts, the pupil, went on to defend movement figures like the Black
Panther Party luminaries Angela Davis and Huey P. Newton, and he was
on the defense team of the Chicago Eight, which included Bobby Seale
and Abbie Hoffman, who were charged with conspiracy to violate the
draft laws during the Vietnam war. But Roberts told me that working
with C.B. King was the most rewarding period of his professional
life, and his vivid accounts of his time with C.B. King make clear why.
"The Great Pool Jump"also contains reminiscences by the non-lawyer
foot-soldiers of SNCC, primarily teenagers and college drop-outs,
both black and white. These accounts, by Peter de Lissovoy, who left
Harvard to join the Albany movement, and Randy Battle, who was a gang
member in Albany before joining SNCC, evoke beautifully the panoply
of emotions experienced by those activists of the time. Fear was the
common denominator, because violence against civil rights workers was
always a possibility and often a reality. But there was also
friendship, stirring music, good humor, and the sheer joy of sharing
a righteous cause, even during hunger strikes in filthy Georgia jail cells.
One of the sick tactics used by city fathers in the South was to turn
municipal swimming pools, built with public funds, into private
"clubs," to keep black people out. It seems crazy now, but many
whites truly believed that if the races mixed in this fashion the
whites would catch loathsome diseases or see their pure flowers of
southern womanhood knocked up by black "bucks." So these pools became
battlegrounds for SNCC in the early '60s. The authorities in Cairo,
Illinois, where I was a SNCC volunteer in 1962, ultimately filled the
municipal pool with cement rather than integrate it.
In Albany, Georgia, the city had sold the public pool to a racist
newspaper publisher to keep it segregated. For one shining moment,
though, the Albany facility was integrated. Randy Battle and two
other black kids evaded the cops, climbed the fence, dove into the
pool, swam across it, and ran out the unguarded exit --- the "great
pool jump." According to Battle, the white customers were so anxious
to avoid the "contaminated" water that they "hit the air like
dolphins," jumping out of the pool to safety. The white folks in
charge had the pool drained, and every inch of it scrubbed with
brushes, which took three days. The pool jump was a victory that
electrified the kids in Albany's black community, and they joined the
movement in droves.
-- Guest Butler Stephen L. Saltonstall practices law in Manchester
Center, Vermont.
Five hundred copies of "The Great Pool Jump" have been published to
commemorate SNCC's 50th anniversary. It's available only by mail for
$25.00, plus $4.00 postage, from Peter de Lissovoy at YouArePerfect
Press, 5 Lost Nation Road, Lancaster, N.H. 03584-3434.You can write
Peter at [email protected].
To read more about C.B. King, Dennis Roberts and Peter de Lissovoy,
click here. http://reportingcivilrights.loa.org/perspectives/delissovoy.jsp
.
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