Conversation with Thelton Henderson

Thelton Henderson Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

Photo by S. Beth Atkin

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The Civil Rights Movement (I)

Let's ask you then, how did the Civil Rights Movement begin to affect your consciousness, and when did it begin to affect your consciousness?

Well, it's interesting. Not really until law school. Up until then I wasn't really involved or knowledgeable about it. Indeed, I didn't learn who Marcus Garvey was until I was in law school. There was a fellow a year ahead of me named Donald Warden who had gone to Howard University and was very knowledgeable about black history. He had gone through the black educational system. And he formed an organization called the African American Association, which was sort of far-sighted back then.

At the law school here on campus?

Yes. And we would meet. He had a house in Oakland and we would meet at his house on Sundays and our assignment was to read a book about black history in the intervening week and then someone would give a report on it and we would discuss it. And that was really the start.

And this was what year now?

That was 1960.

So this was a kind of a local manifestation of the consciousness that was emerging.

Exactly. People in the African American Association included Ron Dellums, who's just retired from Congress, and a very young kid who used to hang out there named Huey Newton. So it was interesting.

So, the Bay Area must have been in some ways an exciting place to be in terms of intellectual ferment on these issues.

Absolutely, yes.

In one of your articles that I read on the role of a civil rights lawyer, you talked about the impact of Rosa Parks and how she launched the Civil Rights Movement. Let's talk a little about that, and how that moment of defiance by her on the bus became such an inspiration for so many.

I think it did spark the Civil Rights Movement. As you know the story, she was coming home from work in Birmingham, Alabama (she did ironing for a family), and was told to go to the back of the bus. And there were no seats in the back of the bus, which meant that she would have to stand. And I think at that point she had said -- I doubt if it happened in that one day, she was probably building toward it -- but I think on that one day she just said no and insisted on sitting in an open seat which was reserved for whites. And as you know, she was arrested. And I think that many were indignant about it and were inspired by that act of bravery, because it was an act of bravery to defy segregation laws back then in the early '60s and late '50s. I think that sparked many people that we can resist this and it's worth resisting.

So let's go back to your life now. A B.A. from Cal, law school, and then you have your legal degree; how do you get thrust into this vortex of activity that's occurring in the South? Where was your first job?

My first job was, I was a very lucky guy, I got out of Boalt Hall in 1962 and I have to give you a little background on this. Back then, whites didn't interview black law graduates. I didn't know where I was going to work. A typical lawyer graduating in those days would find a successful black lawyer who had overflow business. You'd rent some space from him and he would give you what were really his dog cases, and you would try to make money and build your own practice. Well that was a prospect for me, and I had the choice of whether I would stay up here or go back to Los Angeles. One day in my last semester at Boalt there was a note on the blackboard, come see the Dean. I thought, uh-oh, maybe I've been missing a few classes this last semester, because I knew I was going to graduate. But it turned out to be a call from John Doar who was second-in-command of the Civil Rights Division.

In the Justice Department in the Kennedy Administration?

Right. And John had been going down south at the instruction of the Kennedys, who had just come into power, and asking people in the federal government, "Do you have any blacks working for you?" Finally one day one of them said, "Do you have any blacks working for you?" And there had never been a black working for the Civil Rights Division. So he thought he'd better remedy that immediately. And luckily enough, his alma mater was Boalt Hall. He called the dean and said, "Do you have any blacks graduating?" And I was one of two, and that's how I got the job. So in fact, when I took the bar and was driving back to Washington, D.C., in late August, I heard, listening on the radio, on national radio, the integration of the University of Mississippi with James Meredith. That was happening then. So when I joined the Justice Department there were a lot of exciting things happening, and I was thrown in the forefront. The Kennedys had decided to emphasize voting rights. Their theory was that if we can get the blacks the vote in the South, they will then vote out the segregationists and right the wrongs of the South. So that was the focus and I started prosecuting voting rights cases in the states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.

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